"Crawlie?"
"Why?" said the child. "Why? Is she hurt too? Where is she?"
"Not as hurt as she is going to be," said the goat-man, Charley-is-my-darling. "If she lives, we'll fix her up and try her and put her to death."
"No, you won't," said Joan. "You're going to love her. You must."
The goat-man looked bewildered.
He turned in his perplexity to Elaine. "Better have a look at Crawlie," said he. "Maybe Orson killed her with that slap. He's a bear, you know."
"So I saw," said Elaine, drily. What did the man think that thing looked like, a hummingbird?
She walked over to the body of Crawlie. As soon as she touched the shoulders, she knew that she was in for trouble. The outer appearances were human, but the musculature beneath was not. She suspected that the laboratories had left Crawlie terribly strong, keeping the buffalo strength and obstinacy for some remote industrial reason of their own. She took out a brainlink, a close-range telepathic hookup which worked only briefly and slightly, to see if the mind still functioned. As she reached for Crawlie's head to attach it, the unconscious girl sprang suddenly to life, jumped to her feet, and said:
"No, you don't! You don't peep me, you dirty human!"
"Crawlie, stand still."
"Don't boss me, you monster!"
"Crawlie, that's a bad thing to say." It was eerie to hear such a commanding voice coming from the throat and mouth of a small child. Small she might have been, but Joan commanded the scene.
"I don't care what I say. You all hate me."
"That's not true, Crawlie."
"You're a dog and now you're a person. You're born a traitor. Dogs have always sided with people. You hated me even before you went into that room and changed into something else. Now you are going to kill us all."
"We may die, Crawlie, but I won't do it."
"Well, you hate me, anyhow. You've always hated me."
"You may not believe it," said Joan, "but I've always loved you. You were the prettiest woman in our whole corridor."
Crawlie laughed. The sound gave Elaine gooseflesh. "Suppose I believed it. How could I live if I thought that people loved me? If I believed you, I would have to tear myself to pieces, to break my brains on the wall, to do—" The laughter changed to sobs, but Crawlie managed to resume talking: "You things are so stupid that you don't even know that you're monsters. You're not people. You never will be people. I'm one of you myself. I'm honest enough to admit what I am. We're dirt, we're nothing, we're things that are less than machines. We hide in the earth like dirt and when people kill us they do not weep. At least we were hiding. Now you come along, you and your tame human woman"—Crawlie glared briefly at Elaine—" and you try to change even that. I'll kill you again if I can, you dirt, you slut, you dog! What are you doing with that child's body? We don't even know who you are now. Can you tell us?"
The bear-man had moved up close to Crawlie, unnoticed by her, and was ready to slap her down again if she moved against little Joan.
Joan looked straight at him and with a mere movement of her eyes she commanded him not to strike.
"I'm tired," she said, "I'm tired, Crawlie. I'm a thousand years old when I am not even five. And I am Elaine now, and I am Hunter too, and I am the Lady Panc Ashash, and I know a great many more things than I thought I would ever know. I have work to do, Crawlie, because I love you, and I think I will die soon. But please, good people, first let me rest."
The bear-man was on Crawlie's right. On her left, there had moved up a snake-woman. The face was pretty and human, except for the thin forked tongue which ran in and out of the mouth like a dying flame. She had good shoulders and hips but no breasts at all. She wore empty golden brassiere cups which swung against her chest. Her hands looked as though they might be stronger than steel. Crawlie started to move toward Joan, and the snake-woman hissed.
It was the snake hiss of Old Earth.
For a second, every animal-person in the corridor stopped breathing. They all stared at the snake-woman. She hissed again, looking straight at Crawlie. The sound was an abomination in that narrow space. Elaine saw that Joan tightened up like a little dog, Charley-is-my-darling looked as though he was ready to leap twenty meters in one jump, and Elaine herself felt an impulse to strike, to kill, to destroy. The hiss was a challenge to them all.
The snake-woman looked around calmly, fully aware of the attention she had obtained.
"Don't worry, dear people. See, I'm using Joan's name for all of us. I'm not going to hurt Crawlie, not unless she hurts Joan. But if she hurts Joan, if anybody hurts Joan, they will have me to deal with. You have a good idea who I am. We S-people have great strength, high intelligence, and no fear at all. You know we cannot breed. People have to make us one by one, out of ordinary snakes. Do not cross me, dear people. I want to learn about this new love which Joan is bringing, and nobody is going to hurt Joan while I am here. Do you hear me, people? Nobody. Try it, and you die. I think I could kill almost all of you before I died, even if you all attacked me at once. Do you hear me, people? Leave Joan alone. That goes for you, too, you soft human woman. I am not afraid of you either. You there," said she to the bear-man, "pick little Joan up and carry her to a quiet bed. She must rest. She must be quiet for a while. You be quiet too, all you people, or you will meet me. Me." Her black eyes roved across their faces. The snake-woman moved forward and they parted in front of her, as though she were the only solid being in a throng of ghosts.
Her eyes rested a moment on Elaine. Elaine met the gaze, but it was an uncomfortable thing to do. The black eyes with neither eyebrows nor lashes seemed full of intelligence and devoid of emotion. Orson, the bear-man, followed obediently behind. He carried little Joan.
As the child passed Elaine she tried to stay awake. She murmured, "Make me bigger. Please make me bigger. Right away."
"I don't know how . . ." said Elaine.
The child struggled to full awakening. "I'll have work to do. Work . . . and maybe my death to die. It will all be wasted if I am this little. Make me bigger."
"But—" protested Elaine again.
"If you don't know, ask the lady."
"What lady?"
The S-woman had paused, listening to the conversation. She cut in.
"The Lady Panc Ashash, of course. The dead one. Do you think that a living Lady of the Instrumentality would do anything but kill us all?"
As the snake-woman and Orson carried Joan away, Charley-is-my-darling came up to Elaine and said, "Do you want to go?"
"Where?"
"To the Lady Panc Ashash, of course."
"Me?" said Elaine. "Now?" said Elaine, even more emphatically. "Of course not," said Elaine, pronouncing each word as though it were a law. "What do you think I am? A few hours ago I did not even know that you existed. I wasn't sure about the word 'death.' I just assumed that everything terminated at four hundred years, the way it should. It's been hours of danger, and everybody has been threatening everybody else for all that time. I'm tired and I'm sleepy and I'm dirty, and I've got to take care of myself, and besides—"
She stopped suddenly and bit her lip. She had started to say, and besides, my body is all worn out with that dreamlike love-making which the Hunter and I had together. That was not the business of Charley-is-my-darling: he was goat enough as he was. His mind was goatish and would not see the dignity of it all.
The goat-man said, very gently, "You are making history, Elaine, and when you make history you cannot always take care of all the little things too. Are you happier and more important than you ever were before? Yes? Aren't you a different you from the person who met Balthasar just a few hours ago?"
Elaine was taken aback by the seriousness. She nodded.
"Stay hungry and tired. Stay dirty. Just a little longer. Time must not be wasted. You can talk to the Lady Panc Ashash. Find out what we must do about little Joan. When you come back with further instructions, I will take care of you myself. This tunnel is not as bad a town
as it looks. We will have everything you could need, in the Room of Englok. Englok himself built it, long ago. Work just a little longer, and then you can eat and rest. We have everything here. 'I am the citizen of no mean city.' But first you must help Joan. You love Joan, don't you?"
"Oh, yes, I do," she said.
"Then help us just a little bit more."
With death? she thought. With murder? With violation of law? But—but it was all for Joan.
It was thus that Elaine went to the camouflaged door, went out under the open sky again, saw the great saucer of Upper Kalma reaching out over the Old Lower City. She talked to the voice of the Lady Panc Ashash, and obtained certain instructions, together with other messages. Later, she was able to repeat them, but she was too tired to make out their real sense.
She staggered back to the place in the wall where she thought the door to be, leaned against it, and nothing happened.
"Further down, Elaine, further down. Hurry! When I used to be me, I too got tired," came the strong whisper of the Lady Panc Ashash, "but do hurry!"
Elaine stepped away from the wall, looking at it.
A beam of light struck her.
The Instrumentality had found her.
She rushed wildly at the wall.
The door gaped briefly. The strong welcome hand of Charley-is-my-darling helped her in.
"The light! The light!" cried Elaine. "I've killed us all. They saw me."
"Not yet," smiled the goat-man, with his quick crooked intelligent smile. "I may not be educated, but I am pretty smart."
He reached toward the inner gate, glanced back at Elaine appraisingly, and then shoved a man-sized robot through the door.
"There it goes, a sweeper about your size. No memory bank. A worn-out brain. Just simple motivations. If they come down to see what they thought they saw, they will see this instead. We keep a bunch of these at the door. We don't go out much, but when we do, it's handy to have these to cover up with."
He took her by the arm. "While you eat, you can tell me. Can we make her bigger . . . ?"
"Who?"
"Joan, of course. Our Joan. That's what you went to find out for us."
Elaine had to inventory her own mind to see what the Lady Panc Ashash had said on that subject. In a moment she remembered.
"You need a pod. And a jelly bath. And narcotics, because it will hurt. Four hours."
"Wonderful," said Charley-is-my-darling, leading her deeper and deeper into the tunnel.
"But what's the use of it," said Elaine, "if I've ruined us all? The Instrumentality saw me coming in. They will follow. They will kill all of you, even Joan. Where is the Hunter? Shouldn't I sleep first?" She felt her lips go thick with fatigue; she had not rested or eaten since she took that chance on the strange little door between Waterrocky Road and the Shopping Bar.
"You're safe, Elaine, you're safe," said Charley-is-my-darling, his sly smile very warm and his smooth voice carrying the ring of sincere conviction. For himself, he did not believe a word of it. He thought they were all in danger, but there was no point in terrifying Elaine. Elaine was the only real person on their side, except for the Hunter, who was a strange one, almost like an animal himself, and for the Lady Panc Ashash, who was very benign, but who was, after all, a dead person. He was frightened himself, but he was afraid of fear. Perhaps they were all doomed.
In a way, he was right.
7
The Lady Arabella Underwood had called the Lady Goroke.
"Something has tampered with my mind."
The Lady Goroke felt very shocked. She threw back the inquiry. Put a probe on it.
"I did. Nothing."
Nothing?
More shock for the Lady Goroke. Sound the alert, then.
"Oh, no. Oh, no, no. It was a friendly, nice tampering." The Lady Arabella Underwood, being an Old North Australian, was rather formal: she always thought full words at her friends, even in telepathic contact. She never sent mere raw ideas.
But that's utterly unlawful. You're part of the Instrumentality. It's a crime! thought the Lady Goroke.
She got a giggle for reply.
You laugh . . . ? she inquired.
"I just thought a new Lord might be here. From the Instrumentality. Having a look at me."
The Lady Goroke was very proper and easily shocked. We wouldn't do that!
The Lady Arabella thought to herself but did not transmit, "Not to you, my dear. You're a blooming prude." To the other she transmitted, "Forget it then."
Puzzled and worried, the Lady Goroke thought: Well, all right. Break?
"Right-ho. Break."
The Lady Goroke frowned to herself. She slapped her wall. Planet Central, she thought at it.
A mere man sat at a desk.
"I am the Lady Goroke," she said.
"Of course, my Lady," he replied.
"Police fever, one degree. One degree only. Till rescinded. Clear?"
"Clear, my Lady. The entire planet?"
"Yes," she said.
"Do you wish to give a reason?" His voice was respectful and routine.
"Must I?"
"Of course not, my Lady."
"None given, then. Close."
He saluted and his image faded from the wall.
She raised her mind to the level of a light clear call. Instrumentality Only—Instrumentality Only. I have raised the police fever level one degree by command. Reason, personal disquiet. You know my voice. You know me. Goroke.
Far across the city—a police ornithopter flapped slowly down the street.
The police robot was photographing a sweeper, the most elaborately malfunctioning sweeper he had ever seen.
The sweeper raced down the road at unlawful speeds, approaching three hundred kilometers an hour, stopped with a sizzle of plastic on stone, and began picking dust-motes off the pavement.
When the ornithopter reached it, the sweeper took off again, rounded two or three corners at tremendous speed, and then settled down to its idiot job.
The third time this happened, the robot in the ornithopter put a disabling slug through it, flew down, and picked it up with the claws of his machine.
He saw it in close view.
"Birdbrain. Old model. Birdbrain. Good they don't use those any more. The thing could have hurt a Man. Now, I'm printed from a mouse, a real mouse with lots and lots of brains."
He flew toward the central junkyard with the wornout sweeper. The sweeper, crippled but still conscious, was trying to pick dust off the iron claws which held it.
Below them, the Old City twisted out of sight with its odd geometrical lights. The New City, bathed in its soft perpetual glow, shone out against the night of Fomalhaut III. Beyond them, the everlasting ocean boiled in its private storms.
On the actual stage the actors cannot do much with the scene of the interlude, where Joan was cooked in a single night from the size of a child five years old to the tallness of a miss of fifteen or sixteen. The biological machine did work well, though at the risk of her life. It made her into a vital, robust young person, without changing her mind at all. This is hard for any actress to portray. The storyboxes have the advantage. They can show the machine with all sorts of improvements—flashing lights, bits of lightning, mysterious rays. Actually, it looked like a bathtub full of boiling brown jelly, completely covering Joan.
Elaine, meanwhile, ate hungrily in the palatial room of Englok himself. The food was very, very old, and she had doubts, as a witch, about its nutritional value, but it stilled her hunger. The denizens of Clown Town had declared this room "off limits" to themselves, for reasons which Charley-is-my-darling could not make plain. He stood in the doorway and told her what to do to find food, to activate the bed out of the floor, to open the bathroom. Everything was very old-fashioned and nothing responded to a simple thought or to a mere slap.
A curious thing happened.
Elaine had washed her hands, had eaten, and was preparing for her bath. She had taken most of her clo
thes off, thinking only that Charley-is-my-darling was an animal, not a man, so that it did not matter.
Suddenly she knew it did matter.
He might be an underperson but he was a man to her. Blushing deeply all the way down to her neck, she ran into the bathroom and called back to him:
"Go away. I will bathe and then sleep. Wake me when you have to, not before."
"Yes, Elaine."
"And—and—"
"Yes?"
"Thank you," she said. "Thank you very much. Do you know, I never said 'thank you' to an underperson before."
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