Norstrilia - Illustrated

by Cordwainer Smith

  Rod hesitated. He had paid no attention to the news himself, but he did not want to discredit his home planet by making it seem more ignorant than it really was. “Something about language, wasn’t it? And length of life, too? I never paid much attention to offplanet news, unless it was technical inventions or big battles. I think some people in Old North Australia have a keen interest in Old Earth itself. What was it, anyhow?”

  “The Instrumentality finally took on a big plan. Earth had no dangers, no hopes, no rewards, no future except endlessness. Everybody stood a thousand-to-one chance of living the four hundred years which was allotted for persons who earned the full period by keeping busy—”

  “Why didn’t everybody do it?” interrupted Rod.

  “The instrumentality took care of the shorties in a very fair way. It offered them wonderfully delicious and exciting vices when they got to be about seventy. Things that combined electronics, drugs and sex in the subjective mind. Anybody who didn’t have a lot of work to do ended up getting ‘the blissfuls’ and eventually died of sheer fun. Who wants to take time for mere hundred-years’ renewals when they can have five or six thousand years of orgies and adventures every single night?”

  “Sounds horrible to me,” said Rod. “We have our Giggle Rooms, but people die in them right away. They don’t mess around, dying among their neighbors. Think of the awful interaction you must get with the normals.”

  Doctor Vomact’s face clouded over with anger and grief. He turned away and looked over the endless Martian plains. Dear blue Earth hung friendlily in the sky. He looked up at the star of Earth as though he hated it and he said to Rod, his face still turned away,

  “You may have a point there, Mister McBan. My mother was a shortie and after she gave up, my father went too. And I’m a normal. I don’t suppose I’ll get over what it did to me. They weren’t my real parents, of course—there was nothing that dirty in my family—but they were my final adopters. I’ve always thought that you Old North Australians were crazy, rich barbarians for killing off your teen-agers if they didn’t jump enough or something crude like that, but I’ll admit that you’re clean barbarians. You don’t make yourselves live with the sweet sick stink of death inside your own apartments…”

  “What’s an apartment?”

  “What we live in.”

  “You mean a house,” said Rod.

  “No, an apartment is part of a house. Two hundred thousand of them sometimes make up one big house.”

  “You mean,” said Rod, “there are two hundred thousand families all in one enormous living room? The room must be kilometers long.”

  “No, no, no!” said the doctor, laughing a little. “Each apartment has a separate living room with sleep sections that come out of the walls, an eating section, a washroom for yourself and your visitors that might come to have a bath with you, a garden room, a study room, and a personality room.”

  “What’s a personality room?”

  “That,” said the doctor, “is a little room where we do things that we don’t want our own families to watch.”

  “We call that a bathroom,” said Rod.

  The doctor stopped in their walk. “That’s what makes it so hard to explain to you what Earth is doing. You’re fossils, that’s what you are. You’ve had the old language of Inglish, you keep your family system and your names, you’ve had unlimited life—”

  “Not unlimited,” said Rod, “just long. We have to work for it and pay for it with tests.”

  The doctor looked sorry. “I didn’t mean to criticize you. You’re different. Very different from what Earth has been. You would have found Earth inhuman. Those apartments we were talking about, for example. Two-thirds of them empty. Underpeople moving into the basements. Records lost; jobs forgotten. If we didn’t make such good robots, everything would have fallen to pieces at the same time.” He looked at Rod’s face. “I can see you don’t understand me. Let’s take a practical case. Can you imagine killing me?”

  “No,” said Rod. “I like you.”

  “I don’t mean that. Not the real us. Suppose you didn’t know who I was and you found me intruding on your sheep or stealing your stroon.”

  “You couldn’t steal my stroon. My government processes it for me and you couldn’t get near it.”

  “All right, all right, not stroon. Just suppose I came from off your planet without a permit. How would you kill me?”

  “I wouldn’t kill you. I’d report it to the police.”

  “Suppose I drew a weapon on you?”

  “Then,” said Rod, “you’d get your neck broken. Or a knife in your heart. Or a minibomb somewhere near you.”

  “There!” said the doctor, with a broad grin.

  “There what?” said Rod.

  “You know how to kill people, should the need arise.”

  “All citizens know how,” said Rod, “but that doesn’t mean they do it. We’re not bushwhacking each other all the time, the way I heard some Earth people thought we did.”

  “Precisely,” said Vomact. “And that’s what the Instrumentality is trying to do for all mankind today. To make life dangerous enough and interesting enough to be real again. We have diseases, dangers, fights, chances. It’s been wonderful.”

  Rod looked back at the group of sheds they had left. “I don’t see any signs of it here on Mars.”

  “This is a military establishment. It’s been left out of the Rediscovery of Man until the effects have been studied better. We’re still living perfect lives of four hundred years here on Mars. No danger, no change, no risk.”

  “How do you have a name, then?”

  “My father gave it to me. He was an official Hero of the Frontier Worlds who came home and died a shortie. The Instrumentality let people like that have names before they gave the privilege to everybody.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Working.” The doctor started to resume their walk. Rod did not feel much awe of him. He was such a shamelessly talkative person, the way most Earth men seemed to be, that it was hard not to be at ease with him.

  Rod took Vomact’s arm, gently. “There’s more to it—”

  “You know it,” said Vomact. “You have good perceptions. Should I tell you?”

  “Why not?” said Rod.

  “You’re my patient. It might not be fair to you.”

  “Go ahead,” said Rod. “You ought to know I’m tough.”

  “I’m a criminal,” said the doctor.

  “But you’re alive,” said Rod. “In my world we kill criminals or we send them offplanet.”

  “I’m offplanet,” said Vomact. “This isn’t my world. For most of us here on Mars, this is a prison, not a home.”

  “What did you do?”

  “It’s too awful…” said the doctor. “I’m ashamed of it myself. They have sentenced me to conditional conditional.”

  Rod looked at him quickly. Momentarily he wondered whether he might be the victim of some outrageous deadpan joke. The doctor was serious; his face expressed bewilderment and grief.

  “I revolted,” said the doctor, “without knowing it. People can say anything they want on Earth, and they can print up to twenty copies of anything they need to print, but beyond that it’s mass communications. Against the law. When the Rediscovery of Man came, they gave me the Spanish language to work on. I used a lot of research to get out La Prensa. Jokes, dialogues, imaginary advertisements, reports of what had happened in the ancient world. But then I got a bright idea. I went down to Earthport and got the news from incoming ships. What was happening here. What was happening there. You have no idea, Rod, how interesting mankind is! And the things we do…so strange, so comical, so pitiable. The news even comes in on machines, all marked ‘official use only.’ I disregarded that and I printed up one issue with nothing but truth in it—a real issue, all facts.

  “I printed real news.

  “Rod, the roof fell in. All persons who had been reconditioned for Spanish were given stabilit
y tests. I was asked, did I know the law? Certainly, said I, I knew the law. No mass communications except within government. News is the mother of opinion, opinion the cause of mass delusion, delusion the source of war. The law was plain and I thought it did not matter. I thought it was just an old law.

  “I was wrong, Rod, wrong. They did not charge me with violating the news laws. They charged me with revolt—against the Instrumentality. They sentenced me to death, immediately. Then they made it conditional, conditional on my going offplanet and behaving well. When I got here, they made it double conditional. If my act has no bad results. But I can’t find out. I can go back to Earth any time. That part is no trouble. If they think my misdeed still has effect, they will give me the dream punishments or send me off to that awful planet somewhere. If they think it doesn’t matter, they will restore my citizenship with a laugh. But they don’t know the worst of it. My underman learned Spanish and the underpeople are keeping the newspaper going very secretly. I can’t even imagine what they will do to me if they ever find out what has gone wrong and know that it was me who started it all. Do you think I’m wrong, Rod?”

  Rod stared at him. He was not used to judging adults, particularly not at their own request. In Old North Australia, people kept their distance. There were fitting ways for doing everything, and one of the most fitting things was to deal only with people of your own age group.

  He tried to be fair, to think in an adult way, and he said, “Of course I think you’re wrong, Mister and Doctor Vomact. But you’re not very wrong. None of us should trifle with war.”

  Vomact seized Rod’s arm. The gesture was hysterical, almost ugly. “Rod,” he whispered, very urgently, “you’re rich. You come from an important family. Could you get me into Old North Australia?”

  “Why not?” said Rod. “I can pay for all the visitors I want.”

  “No, Rod, I don’t mean that. As an immigrant.”

  It was Rod’s turn to become tense. “Immigrant?” he said. “The penalty for immigration is death. We’re killing our own people right now, just to keep the population down. How do you think we could let outsiders settle with us? And the stroon. What about that?”

  “Never mind, Rod,” said Vomact. “I won’t bother you again. I won’t mention it again. It’s a weary thing, to live many years with death ready to open the next door, ring the next bell, be on the next page of the message file. I haven’t married. How could I?” With a whimsical turn of his vivacious mind and face, he was off on a cheerful track. “I have a medicine, Rod, a medicine for doctors, even for rebels. Do you know what it is?”

  “A tranquilizer?” Rod was still shocked at the indecency of anyone mentioning immigration to a Norstrilian. He could not think straight.

  “Work,” said the little doctor. “That’s my medicine.”

  “Work is always good,” said Rod, feeling pompous at the generalization. The magic had gone out of the afternoon.

  The doctor felt it too. He sighed. “I’ll show you the old sheds which men from Earth first built. And then I’ll go to work. Do you know what my main work is?”

  “No,” said Rod, politely.

  “You,” said Doctor Vomact, with one of his sad gay mischievous smiles. “You’re well, but I’ve got to make you more than well. I’ve got to make you kill-proof.”

  They had reached the sheds.

  The ruins might be old but they were not very impressive. They looked something like the homes on the more modest stations back on Norstrilia.

  On their way back Rod said, very casually,

  “What are you going to do to me, Sir and Doctor?”

  “Anything you want,” said Vomact lightly.

  “Really, now. What?”

  “Well,” said Vomact, “the Lord Redlady sent along a whole cube of suggestions. Keep your personality. Keep your retinal and brain images. Change your appearance. Change your workwoman into a young man who looks just like your description.”

  “You can’t do that to Eleanor. She’s a citizen.”

  “Not here, not on Mars, she isn’t. She’s your baggage.”

  “But her legal rights!”

  “This is Mars, Rod, but it’s Earth territory. Under Earth law. Under the direct control of the Instrumentality. We can do these things all right. The hard thing is this: Would you consent to passing for an underman?”

  “I never saw one. How would I know?” said Rod.

  “Could you stand the shame of it?”

  Rod laughed, by way of an answer.

  Vomact sighed. “You’re funny people, you Norstrilians. I’d rather die than be mistaken for an underman. The disgrace of it, the contempt! But the Lord Redlady said that you could walk into Earth as free as a breeze if we made you pass for a cat-man. I might as well tell you, Rod. Your wife is already here.”

  Rod stopped walking. “My wife? I have no wife.”

  “Your cat-wife,” said the doctor. “Of course it isn’t real marriage. Underpeople aren’t allowed to have it. But they have a companionship which looks something like marriage and we sometimes slip and call them husband and wife. The Instrumentality has already sent a cat-girl out to be your ‘wife.’ She’ll travel back to Earth with you from Mars. You’ll just be a pair of lucky cats who’ve been doing dances and acrobatics for the bored station personnel here.”

  “And Eleanor?”

  “I suppose somebody will kill her, thinking it’s you. That’s what you brought her for, isn’t it? Aren’t you rich enough?”

  “No, no, no,” said Rod, “nobody is that rich. We have to think of something else.”

  They spent the entire walk making new plans which would protect Eleanor and Rod both.

  As they entered the shedport and took off their helmets. Rod said,

  “This wife of mine, when can I see her?”

  “You won’t overlook her,” said Vomact. “She’s as wild as fire and twice as beautiful,”

  “Does she have a name?”

  “Of course she does,” said the doctor. “They all do.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “C’mell.”

  HOSPITALITY AND ENTRAPMENT

  People waited, here and there. If there had been worldwide news coverage, the population would have converged on Earthport with curiosity, passion, or greed. But news had been forbidden long before; people could know only the things which concerned them personally; the centers of Earth remained undisturbed. Here and there, as Rod made his trip from Mars to Earth, there were anticipations of the event. Overall, the world of Old Old Earth remained quiet, except for the perennial bubble of its inward problems.

  On Earth, The Day of Rod’s Flight, Within Earthport Itself

  “They shut me out of the meeting this morning, when I’m in charge of visitors. That means that something is in the air,” said Commissioner Teadrinker to his underman, B’dank.

  B’dank, expecting a dull day, had been chewing his cud while sitting on his stool in the corner. He knew far more about the case than did his master, and he had learned his additional information from the secret sources of the underpeople, but he was resolved to betray nothing, to express nothing. Hastily he swallowed his cud and said, in his reassuring, calm bull voice:

  “There might be some other reason, Sir and Master. If they were considering a promotion for you, they would leave you out of the meeting. You certainly deserve a promotion, Sir and Master.”

  “Are the spiders ready?” asked Teadrinker crossly.

  “Who can tell the mind of a giant spider?” said B’dank calmly. “I talked to the foreman-spider for three hours yesterday with sign language. He wants twelve cases of beer. I told him I would give him more—he could have ten. The poor devil can’t count, though he thinks he can, so he was pleased at having outbargained me. They will take the person you designate to the steeple of Earthport and they will hide that person so that the human being cannot be found for many hours. When I appear with the cases of beer, they will give me the person. I will then j
ump out of a window, holding the person in my arms. There are so few people who go down the outside of Earthport that they may not notice me at all. I will take the person to the ruined palace directly under Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, the one which you showed me, Sir and Master, and there I will keep the person in good order until you come and do the things which you have to do.”

  Teadrinker looked across the room. The big, florid, handsome face was so exasperatingly calm that it annoyed him. Teadrinker had heard that bull-men, because of their cattle origin, were sometimes subject to fits of uncontrollable frantic rage, but he had never seen the least sign of any such phenomenon in B’dank. He snapped,

  “Aren’t you worried?”

  “Why should I worry, Sir and Master? You are doing the worrying for both of us.”

  “Go fry yourself!”

  “That is not an operational instruction,” said B’dank. “I suggest that the master eat something. That will calm his nerves. Nothing at all will happen today, and it is very hard for true men to wait for nothing at all. I have seen many of them get upset.”

  Teadrinker gritted his teeth at this extreme reasonableness. Nevertheless, he took a dehydrated banana out of his desk drawer and began chewing on it.

  He looked sharply across at B’dank. “Do you want one of these things?”

  B’dank slid off his chair with surprisingly smooth agility; he was at the desk, his enormous ham-sized hand held out, before he said,

  “Yes, indeed, sir. I love bananas.”

  Teadrinker gave him one and then said, fretfully,

  “Are you sure of the fact you never met the Lord Redlady?”

  “Sure as any underman can be,” said B’dank, munching the banana. “We never really know what has been put into our original conditioning, or who put it there. We’re inferior and we’re not supposed to know. It is forbidden even to inquire.”

  “So you admit that you might be a spy or agent of the Lord Redlady?”

  “I might be, sir, but I do not feel like it.”

  “Do you know who Redlady is?”

  “You have told me, sir, that he is the most dangerous human being in the whole galaxy.”