"If we keep going," said Flavius, "may we sing the underpeople song? It might keep some of that terrible music out of our brains. The music has all feelings and we have none. Nevertheless it disturbs us. I do not know why."
"My radio contact with the surface has lapsed," said Livius irrelevantly. "I need to sing too."
"Go ahead, both of you," said the Lord Sto Odin. "But keep on going, or you die."
The robots lifted their voice in song:
I eat my rage.
I swallow my grief.
There's no relief
From pain or age.
Our time comes.
I work my life.
I breathe my breath.
I face my death
Without a wife.
Our time comes.
We undermen
Shove, crush, and crash.
There'll be a clash
And thunder when
Our time comes.
Though the song had the barbarous, ancient thrill of bagpipes in it, the melody could not counter or cancel the sane, wild rhythm of the congohelium beating at them, now, from all directions at once.
"Nice piece of sedition, that," said the Lord Sto Odin dryly, "but I like it better as music than I do this noise which is tearing its way through the depths of the world. Keep going. Keep going. I must meet this mystery before I die."
"We find it hard to endure that music coming at us through the rock," said Livius.
"It seems to us that it is much stronger than it was when we came here some months ago. Could it have changed?" asked Flavius.
"That is the mystery. We let them have the Gebiet, beyond our own jurisdiction. We gave them the Bezirk, to do with as they please. But these ordinary people have created or encountered some extraordinary power. They have brought new things into the Earth. It may be necessary for all three of us to die before we settle the matter."
"We can't die the way you do," said Livius. "We're already robots, and the people from whom we were imprinted have been dead a long time. Do you mean you would turn us off?"
"I would, perhaps, or else some other force. Would you mind?"
"Mind? You mean, have emotions about it? I don't know," said Flavius. "I used to think that I had real, full experience when you used the phrase Summa nulla est and brought us up to full capacity, but that music which we have been hearing has the effect of a thousand passwords all said at once. I am beginning to care about my life and I think that I am becoming what your reference explained by the word 'afraid.'"
"I too feel it," said Livius. "This is not a power which we knew to exist on Earth before. When I was a strategist someone told me about the really indescribable dangers connected with the Douglas-Ouyang planets, and it seems to me now that a danger of that kind is already with us, here inside the tunnel. Something which Earth never made. Something which man never developed. Something which no robot could out-compute. Something wild and very strong brought into being by the use of the congohelium. Look around us."
He did not need to say that. The corridor itself had become a living, pulsing rainbow.
They turned one last loop in the corridor and they were there—
The very last limit of the realm of distress.
The source of evil music.
The end of the Bezirk.
They knew it because the music blinded them, the lights deafened them, their senses ran into one another and became confused. This was the immediate presence of the congohelium.
There was a door, immensely large, carved with elaborate Gothic ornament. It was much too big for any human man to have had need of it. In the door a single figure stood, her breasts accented into vivid brights and darks by the brilliant light which poured from one side of the door only, the right.
They could see through the door, into an immense hall wherein the floor was covered by hundreds of limp bundles of ragged clothing. These were the people, unconscious. Above them and between them there danced the high figure of a male, holding a glittering something in his hands. He prowled and leaped and twisted and turned to the pulsation of the music which he himself produced.
"Summa nulla est," said the Lord Sto Odin. "I want you two robots to be keyed to maximum. Are you now to top alert?"
"We are, sir," chorused Livius and Flavius.
"You have your weapons?"
"We cannot use them," said Livius, "since it is contrary to our programming, but you can use them, sir."
"I'm not sure," said Flavius. "I'm not at all sure. We are equipped with surface weapons. This music, these hypnotics, these lights—who knows what they may have done to us and to our weapons, which were never designed to operate this far underground?"
"No fear," said Sto Odin. "I'll take care of all of it."
He took out a small knife.
When the knife gleamed under the dancing lights, the girl in the doorway finally took notice of the Lord Sto Odin and his strange companions.
She spoke to him, and her voice rode through the heavy air with the accents of clarity and death.
7
"Who are you," she said, "that you should bring weapons to the last uttermost limits of the Bezirk?"
"This is just a small knife, lady," said the Lord Sto Odin, "and with this I can do no harm to anyone. I am an old man and I am setting my own vitality button higher."
She watched incuriously as he brought the point of the knife to the nape of his own neck and then gave it three full, deliberate turns.
Then she stared and said, "You are strange, my Lord. Perhaps you are dangerous to my friends and me."
"I am dangerous to no one." The robots looked at him, surprised, because of the fullness and the richness of his voice. He had set his vitality very high indeed, giving himself, at that rate, perhaps no more than an hour or two of life, but he had regained the physical power and the emotional force of his own prime years. They looked at the girl. She had taken Sto Odin's statement at full face value, almost as though it were an incontrovertible canon of faith.
"I wear," Sto Odin went on, "these feathers. Do you know what they signify?"
"I can see," she said, "that you are a Lord of the Instrumentality, but I do not know what the feathers mean . . ."
"Waiver of immunity. Anyone who can manage it is allowed to kill me or to hurt me without danger of punishment." He smiled, a little grimly. "Of course, I have the right to fight back, and I do know how to fight. My name is the Lord Sto Odin. Why are you here, girl?"
"I love that man in there—if he is a man any more."
She stopped and pursed her lips in bewilderment. It was strange to see those girlish lips compressed in a momentary stammer of the soul. She stood there, more nude than a newborn infant, her face covered with provocative, off-beat cosmetics. She lived for a mission of love in the depths of the nothing and nowhere: yet she remained a girl, a person, a human being capable, as she was now, of an immediate relationship to another human being.
"He was a man, my Lord, even when he came back from the surface with that piece of congohelium. Only a few weeks ago, those people were dancing too. Now they just lie on the ground. They do not even die. I myself held the congohelium too, and I made music with it. Now the power of the music is eating him up and he dances without resting. He won't come out to me and I do not dare go into that place with him. Perhaps I too would end up as one more heap on the floor."
A crescendo of the intolerable music made speech intolerable for her. She waited for it to pass while the room beyond blazed a pulsing violet at them.
When the music of the congohelium subsided a little, Sto Odin spoke: "How long has it been that he has danced alone with this strange power coursing through him?"
"One year. Two years. Who can tell? I came down here and lost time when I arrived. You Lords don't even let us have clocks and calendars up on the surface."
"We ourselves saw you dancing just a tenth-year ago," said Livius, interrupting.
She glanced at them, quickly, incu
riously. "Are you the same two robots who were here a while back? You look very different now. You look like ancient soldiers. I can't imagine why . . . All right, maybe it was a week, maybe it was a year."
"What were you doing down here?" asked Sto Odin, gently.
"What do you think?" she said. "Why do all the other people come down here? I was running away from the timeless time, the lifeless life, the hopeless hope that you Lords apply to all mankind on the surface. You let the robots and the underpeople work, but you freeze the real people in a happiness which has no hope and no escape."
"I'm right," cried Sto Odin. "I'm right, though I die for it!"
"I don't understand you," said the girl. "Do you mean that you too, a Lord, have come down here to escape from the useless hope that wraps up all of us?"
"No, no, no," he said, as the shifting lights of the congohelium music made improbable traceries across his features. "I just meant that I told the other Lords that something like this was happening to you ordinary people on the surface. Now you are telling me exactly what I told them. Who were you, anyhow?"
The girl glanced down at her unclothed body as though she were aware, for the first time, of her nakedness. Sto Odin could see the blush pour from her face down across her neck and chest. She said, very quietly: "Don't you know? We never answer that question down here."
"You have rules?" he said. "You people have rules, even here in the Bezirk?"
She brightened up when she realized that he had not meant the indecent question as an impropriety. Eagerly she explained. "There aren't any rules. They are just understandings. Somebody told me when I left the ordinary world and crossed the line of the Gebiet. I suppose they did not tell you because you were a Lord, or because they hid from your strange war-robots."
"I met no one, coming down."
"Then they were hiding from you, my Lord."
Sto Odin looked around at his legionaries to see if they would confirm that statement but neither Flavius nor Livius said anything at all.
He turned back to the girl. "I didn't mean to pry. Can you tell me what kind of person you are? I don't need the particulars."
"When I was alive, I was a once-born," she said. "I did not live long enough to be renewed. The robots and a Subcommissioner of the Instrumentality took a look at me to see if I could be trained for the Instrumentality. More than enough brains, they said, but no character at all. I thought about that a long time. 'No character at all.' I knew I couldn't kill myself, and I didn't want to live, so I looked happy every time I thought a monitor might be scanning me and I found my way to the Gebiet. It wasn't death, and it wasn't life, but it was an escape from endless fun. I hadn't been down here long"—she pointed at the Gebiet above them—"before I met him. We loved each other very soon and he said that the Gebiet was not much improvement on the surface. He said he had already been down here, in the Bezirk, looking for a fun-death."
"A what?" said Sto Odin, as if he could not believe the words.
"A fun-death. Those were his words and his idea. I followed him around and we loved each other. I waited for him when he went to the surface to get the congohelium. I thought that his love for me would put the fun-death out of his mind."
"Are you telling me the whole truth?" said Sto Odin. "Or is this just your part of the story?"
She stammered protests but he did not ask again.
The Lord Sto Odin said nothing but he looked heavily at her.
She winced, bit her lip, and finally said, through all the music and the lights, very clearly indeed, "Stop it. You are hurting me."
The Lord Sto Odin stared at her, said innocently, "I am doing nothing," and stared on. There was much to stare at. She was a girl the color of honey. Even through these lights and shadows he could see that she had no clothing at all. Nor did she have a single hair left on her body—no head of hair, no eyebrows, probably no eyelashes, though he could not tell at that distance. She had traced golden eyebrows far up on her forehead, giving her the look of endless mocking inquiry. She had painted her mouth gold, so that when she spoke, her words cascaded from a golden source. She had painted her upper eyelids golden too, but the lower were black as carbon itself. The total effect was alien to all the previous experiences of mankind: it was lascivious grief to the thousandth power, dry wantonness perpetually unfulfilled, femaleness in the service of remote purposes, humanity enraptured by strange planets.
He stood and stared. If she were still human at all, this would sooner or later force her to take the initiative. It did.
She spoke again, "Who are you? You are living too fast, too fiercely. Why don't you go in and dance, like all the others?" She gestured past the open door, where the ragged unconscious shapes of all the people lay strewn about the floor.
"You call that dancing?" said the Lord Sto Odin. "I do not. There is one man who dances. Those others lie on the floor. Let me ask you the same question. Why don't you dance yourself?"
"I want him, not the dance. I am Santuna and he seized me once in human, mortal, ordinary love. But he becomes Sun-boy, more so every day, and he dances with those people who lie on the floor—"
"You call that dancing?" snapped the Lord Sto Odin. He shook his head and added grimly, "I see no dance."
"You don't see it? You really don't see it?" she cried.
He shook his head obstinately and grimly.
She turned so that she looked into the room beyond her and she brought her high, clear penetrating wail which even cut through the five-beat pulse of the congohelium. She cried:
"Sun-boy, Sun-boy, hear me!"
There was no break in the quick escape of the feet which pattered in the figure eight, no slowing down the fingers which beat against the shimmering non-focus of the metal which was carried in the dancer's arms.
"My lover, my beloved, my man!" she cried again, her voice even more shrill and demanding than before.
There was a break in the cadence of the music and the dance. The dancer sheered toward them with a perceptible slowing down of his cadence. The lights of the inner room, the great door, and the outer hall all became more steady. Sto Odin could see the girl more clearly; she really didn't have a single hair on her body. He could see the dancer too; the young man was tall, thin beyond the ordinary suffering of man, and the metal which he carried shimmered like water reflecting a thousand lights. The dancer spoke, quickly and angrily:
"You called me. You have called me thousands of times. Come on in, if you wish. But don't call me."
As he spoke, the music faded out completely, the bundles on the floor began to stir and to groan and to awaken.
Santuna stammered hastily, "This time it wasn't me. It was these people. One of them is very strong. He cannot see the dancers."
Sun-boy turned to the Lord Sto Odin. "Come in and dance then, if you wish. You are already here. You might as well. Those machines of yours"—he nodded at the robot-legionaries—"they couldn't dance anyhow. Turn them off." The dancer started to turn away.
"I shall not dance, but I would like to see it," said Sto Odin, with enforced mildness. He did not like this young man at all—not the phosphorescence of his skin, the dangerous metal cradled in his arm, the suicidal recklessness of his prancing walk. Anyhow, there was too much light this far underground and too few explanations of what was being done.
"Man, you're a peeper. That's real nasty, for an old man like you. Or do you just want to be a man!"
The Lord Sto Odin felt his temper flare up. "Who are you, man, that you should call man man in such a tone? Aren't you still human, yourself?"
"Who knows? Who cares? I have tapped the music of the universe. I have piped all imaginable happiness into this room. I am generous. I share it with these friends of mine." Sun-boy gestured at the ragged heaps on the floor, who had begun to squirm in their misery without the music. As Sto Odin saw into the room more clearly, he could see that the bundles on the floor were young people, mostly young men, though there were a few girls among them. They all
of them looked sick and weak and pale.
Sto Odin retorted, "I don't like the looks of this. I have half a mind to seize you and to take that metal."
The dancer spun on the ball of his right foot, as though to leap away in a wild prance.
The Lord Sto Odin stepped into the room after Sun-boy.
Sun-boy turned full circle, so that he faced Sto Odin once again. He pushed the Lord out of the door, marching him firmly but irresistibly three steps backward.
"Flavius, seize the metal. Livius, take the man," spat Sto Odin.
Neither robot moved.
Sto Odin, his senses and his strength set high by the severe twist upward which he had given his vitality button, stepped forward to seize the congohelium himself. Made one step and no more: he froze in the doorway, immobile.
We the Underpeople Page 14