"I shall go," said the Lord Sto Odin, "down into the Gebiet."
"The Gebiet—oh, no!" cried several. And one voice added, "You're immune."
"I shall waive immunity and I shall go," said the Lord Sto Odin. "Who can do anything to a man who is already almost a thousand years old and who has chosen only seventy-seven more days to live?"
"But you can't!" said Mmona. "Some criminal might capture you and duplicate you, and then we would all of us be in peril."
"When did you last hear of a criminal among mankind?" said Sto Odin.
"There are plenty of them, here and there in the offworlds."
"But on Old Earth itself?" asked Sto Odin.
She stammered. "I don't know. There must have been a criminal once." She looked around the room. "Don't any of the rest of you know?"
There was silence.
The Lord Sto Odin stared at them all. In his eyes was the brightness and fierceness which had made whole generations of lords plead with him to live just a few more years, so that he could help them with their work. He had agreed, but within the last quarter-year he had overridden them all and had picked his day of death. He had lost none of his powers in doing this. They shrank from his stare while they waited with respect for his decision.
The Lord Sto Odin looked at the Lord Nuru-or and said, "I think you have guessed what I am going to do in the Gebiet and why I have to go there."
"The Gebiet is a preserve where no rules apply and no punishments are inflicted. Ordinary people can do what they want down there, not what we think they should want. From all I hear, it is pretty nasty and pointless, the things that they find out. But you, perhaps, may sense the inwardness of these things. You may find a cure for the weary happiness of mankind."
"That is right," said Sto Odin. "And that is why I am going, after I make the appropriate official preparations."
3
Go he did. He used one of the most peculiar conveyances ever seen on Earth, since his own legs were too weak to carry him far. With only two-ninths of a year to live, he did not want to waste time getting his legs regrafted.
He rode in an open sedan-chair carried by two Roman legionaries.
The legionaries were actually robots, without a trace of blood or living tissue in them. They were the most compact and difficult kind to create, since their brains had to be located in their chests—several million sheets of incredibly fine laminations, imprinted with the whole life experience of an important, useful, and long-dead person. They were clothed as legionaries, down to cuirasses, swords, kilts, greaves, sandals, and shields, merely because it was the whim of the Lord Sto Odin to go behind the rim of history for his companions. Their bodies, all metal, were very strong. They could batter walls, jump chasms, crush any man or underperson with their mere fingers, or throw their swords with the accuracy of guided projectiles.
The forward legionary, Flavius, had been head of Fourteen-B in the Instrumentality—an espionage division so secret that even among Lords, few knew exactly of its location or its function. He was (or had been, till he was imprinted on a robot-mind as he lay dying) the director of historical research for the whole human race. Now he was a dull, pleasant machine carrying two poles until his master chose to bring his powerful mind into bright, furious alert by speaking the simple Latin phrase, understood by no other person living, Summa nulla est.
The rear legionary, Livius, had been a psychiatrist who turned into a general. He had won many battles until he chose to die, somewhat before his time, because he perceived that battle itself was a struggle for the defeat of himself.
Together, and added to the immense brainpower of the Lord Sto Odin himself, they represented an unsurpassable team.
"The Gebiet," commanded the Lord Sto Odin.
"The Gebiet," said both of them heavily, picking up the chair with its supporting poles.
"And then the Bezirk," he added.
"The Bezirk," they chimed in toneless voices.
Sto Odin felt his chair tilt back as Livius put his two ends of the poles carefully on the ground, came up beside Sto Odin, and saluted with open palm.
"May I awaken?" said Livius in an even, mechanical voice.
"Summa nulla est," said the Lord Sto Odin.
Livius's face sprang into full animation. "You must not go there, my Lord! You would have to waive immunity and meet all dangers. There is nothing there yet. Not yet. Some day they will come pouring out of that underground Hades and give you men a real fight. Now, no. They are just miserable beings, cooking away in their weird unhappiness, making love in manners which you never thought of—"
"Never mind what you think I've thought. What's your objection in real terms?"
"It's pointless, my Lord! You have only bits of a year to live. Do something noble and great for man before you die. They may turn us off. We would like to share your work before you go away."
"Is that all?" said Sto Odin.
"My Lord," said Flavius, "you have awakened me too. I say, go forward. History is being respun down there. Things are loose which you great ones of the Instrumentality have never even suspected. Go now and look, before you die. You may do nothing, but I disagree with my companion. It is as dangerous as Space3 might be, if we ever were to find it, but it is interesting. And in this world where all things have been done, where all thoughts have been thought, it is hard to find things which still prompt the human mind with raw curiosity. I'm dead, as you perfectly well know, but even I, inside this machine brain, feel the tug of adventure, the pull of danger, the magnetism of the unknown. For one thing, they are committing crimes down there. And you Lords are overlooking them."
"We chose to overlook them. We are not stupid. We wanted to see what might happen," said the Lord Sto Odin, "and we have to give those people time before we find out just how far they might go if they are cut off from controls."
"They are having babies!" said Flavius excitedly.
"I know that."
"They have hooked in two illegal instant-message machines," shouted Flavius.
Sto Odin was calm. "So that's why the Earth's credit structure has appeared to be leaking in its balance of trade."
"They have a piece of the congohelium!" shouted Flavius.
"The congohelium!" shouted the Lord Sto Odin. "Impossible! It's unstable. They could kill themselves. They could hurt Earth! What are they doing with it?"
"Making music," said Flavius, more quietly.
"Making what?"
"Music. Songs. Nice noise to dance to."
The Lord Sto Odin sputtered. "Take me there right now. This is ridiculous. Having a piece of the congohelium down there is as bad as wiping out inhabited planets to play checkers."
"My Lord," said Livius.
"Yes?" said Sto Odin.
"I withdraw my objections," said Livius.
Sto Odin said, very dryly, "Thank you."
"They have something else down there. When I did not want you to go, I did not mention it. It might have aroused your curiosity. They have a god."
The Lord Sto Odin said, "If this is going to be a historical lecture, save it for another time. Go back to sleep and carry me down."
Livius did not move. "I mean what I said."
"A god? What do you call a god?"
"A person or an idea capable of starting wholly new cultural patterns in motion."
The Lord Sto Odin leaned forward. "You know this?"
"We both do," said Flavius and Livius.
"We saw him," said Livius. "You told us, a tenth-year ago, to walk around freely for thirty hours, so we put on ordinary robot bodies and happened to get into the Gebiet. When we sensed the congohelium operating, we had to go on down to find out what it was doing. Usually, it is employed to keep the stars in their place—"
"Don't tell me that. I know it. Was it a man?"
"A man," said Flavius, "who is re-living the life of Akhnaton."
"Who's that?" said the Lord Sto Odin, who knew history, but wanted to see how much h
is robots knew.
"A king, tall, long-faced, thick-lipped, who ruled the human world of Egypt long, long before atomic power. Akhnaton invented the best of the early gods. This man is re-enacting Akhnaton's life step by step. He has already made a religion out of the sun. He mocks at happiness. People listen to him. They joke about the Instrumentality."
Livius added, "We saw the girl who loves him. She herself was young, but beautiful. And I think she has powers which will make the Instrumentality promote her or destroy her some day in the future."
"They both made music," said Flavius, "with that piece of the congohelium. And this man or god—this new kind of Akhnaton, whatever you may want to call him, my Lord—he was dancing a strange kind of dance. It was like a corpse being tied with rope and dancing like a marionette. The effect on the people around him was as good as the best hypnotism you ever saw. I'm a robot now, but it bothered even me."
"Did the dance have a name?" said Sto Odin.
"I don't know the name," said Flavius, "but I memorized the song, since I have total recall. Do you wish to hear it?"
"Certainly," said the Lord Sto Odin.
Flavius stood on one leg, threw his arms out at weird, improbable angles, and began to sing in a high, insulting tenor voice which was both fascinating and repugnant:
Jump, dear people, and I'll howl for you.
Jump and howl and I'll weep for you.
I weep because I'm a weeping man.
I'm a weeping man because I weep.
I weep because the day is done,
Sun is gone,
Home is lost,
Time killed dad.
I killed time.
World is round.
Day is run,
Clouds are shot,
Stars are out,
Mountain's fire,
Rain is hot,
Hot is blue.
I am done.
So are you.
Jump, dear people, for the howling man.
Leap, dear people, for the weeping man.
I'm a weeping man because I weep for you!
"Enough," said the Lord Sto Odin.
Flavius saluted. His face went back to amiable stolidity. Just before he took the front ends of the shaft he glanced back and brought forth one last comment:
"The verse is skeltonic."
"Tell me nothing more of your history. Take me there."
The robots obeyed. Soon the chair was jogging comfortably down the ramps of the ancient left-over city which sprawled beneath Earthport, that miraculous tower which seemed to touch the stratocumulus clouds in the blue, clear nothingness above mankind. Sto Odin went to sleep in his strange vehicle and did not notice that the human passers-by often stared at him.
The Lord Sto Odin woke fitfully in strange places as the legionaries carried him further and further into the depths below the city, where sweet pressures and warm, sick smells made the air itself feel dirty to his nose.
"Stop!" whispered the Lord Sto Odin, and the robots stopped.
"Who am I?" he said to them.
"You have announced your will to die, my Lord," said Flavius, "seventy-seven days from now, but so far your name is still the Lord Sto Odin."
"I am alive?" the Lord asked.
"Yes," said both the robots.
"You are dead?"
"We are not dead. We are machines, printed with the minds off men who once lived. Do you wish to turn back, my Lord?"
"No. No. Now I remember. You are the robots. Livius, the psychiatrist and general Flavius, the secret historian. You have the minds of men, and are not men?"
"That is right, my Lord," said Flavius.
"Then how can I be alive—I, Sto Odin?"
"You should feel it yourself, sir," said Livius, "though the mind of the old is sometimes very strange."
"How can I be alive?" asked Sto Odin, staring around the city. "How can I be alive when the people who knew me are dead? They have whipped through the corridors like wraiths of smoke, like traces of cloud; they were here, and they loved me, and they knew me, and now they are dead. Take my wife, Eileen. She was a pretty thing, a brown-eyed child who came out of her learning chamber all perfect and all young. Time touched her and she danced to the cadence of time. Her body grew full, grew old. We repaired it. But at last she cramped in death and she went to that place to which I am going. If you are dead, you ought to be able to tell me what death is like, where the bodies and minds and voices and music of men and women whip past these enormous corridors, these hardy pavements, and are then gone. How can passing ghosts like me and my kind, each with just a few dozen or a few hundred years to go before the great blind winds of time whip us away—how can phantoms like me have built this solid city, these wonderful engines, these brilliant lights which never go dim? How did we do it, when we pass so swiftly, each of us, all of us? Do you know?"
The robots did not answer. Pity had not been programmed into their systems. The Lord Sto Odin harangued them nonetheless:
"You are taking me to a wild place, a free place, an evil place, perhaps. They are dying there too, as all men die, as I shall die, so soon, so brightly and simply. I should have died a long time ago. I was the people who knew me, I was the brothers and comrades who trusted me, I was the women who comforted me, I was the children whom I loved so bitterly and so sweetly many ages ago. Now they are gone. Time touched them, and they were not. I can see everyone that I ever knew racing through these corridors, see them young as toddlers, see them proud and wise and full with business and maturity, see them old and contorted as time reached out for them and they passed hastily away. Why did they do it? How can I live on? When I am dead, will I know that I once lived? I know that some of my friends have cheated and lie in the icy sleep, hoping for something which they do not know. I've had life, and I know it. What is life? A bit of play, a bit of learning, some words well-chosen, some love, a trace of pain, more work, memories, and then dirt rushing up to meet sunlight. That's all we've made of it—we, who have conquered the stars! Where are my friends? Where is my me that I once was so sure of, when the people who knew me were time-swept like storm-driven rags toward darkness and oblivion? You tell me. You ought to know! You are machines and you were given the minds of men. You ought to know what we amount to, from the outside in."
"We were built," said Livius, "by men and we have whatever men put into us, nothing more. How can we answer talk like yours? It is rejected by our minds, good though our minds may be. We have no grief, no fear, no fury. We know the names of these feelings but not the feelings themselves. We hear your words but we do not know what you are talking about. Are you trying to tell us what life feels like? If so, we already know. Not much. Nothing special. Birds have life too, and so do fishes. It is you people who can talk and who can knot life into spasms and puzzles. You muss things up. Screaming never made the truth truthful, at least, not to us."
"Take me down," said Sto Odin. "Take me down to the Gebiet, where no well-mannered man has gone in many years. I am going to judge that place before I die."
They lifted the sedan-chair and resumed their gentle dog-trot down the immense ramps down toward the warm steaming secrets of the Earth itself. The human pedestrians became more scarce, but undermen—most often of gorilla or ape origin—passed them, toiling their way upward while dragging shrouded treasures which they had filched from the uncatalogued storehouses of man's most ancient past. At other times there was a wild whirl of metal wheels on stone roadway; the undermen, having offloaded their treasures at some intermediate point high above, sat on their wagons and rolled back downhill, like grotesque enlargements of the ancient human children who were once reported to have played with wagons in this way.
A command, scarcely a whisper, stopped the two legionaries again. Flavius turned. Sto Odin was indeed calling both of them. They stepped out of the shafts and came around to him, one on each side.
"I may be dying right now," he whispered, "and that would be most inconvenient at this tim
e. Get out my manikin meee!"
"My Lord," said Flavius, "it is strictly forbidden for us robots to touch any human manikin, and if we do touch one, we are commanded to destroy ourselves immediately thereafter! Do you wish us to try, nevertheless? If so, which one of us? You have the command, my Lord."
4
He waited so long that even the robots began to wonder if he died amid the thick wet air and the nearby stench of steam and oil.
The Lord Sto Odin finally roused himself and said: "I need no help. Just put the bag with my manikin meee on my lap."
"This one?" asked Flavius, lifting a small brown suitcase and handling it with a very gingerly touch indeed.
We the Underpeople Page 12