We the Underpeople

by Cordwainer Smith

  "Can you tell me what that is—now?"

  She laughed. "This place is safe. It's the Holy Insurgency. The secret government of the underpeople. This is a silly place to talk about it, Rod. You're going to meet the head of it, right now."

  "All of them?" Rod was thinking of the Chiefs of the Instrumentality.

  "It's not a them, it's a him. The E'telekeli. The bird beneath the ground. E'ikasus is one of His sons."

  "If there's only one, how did you choose him? Is he like the British Queen, whom we lost so long ago?"

  C'mell laughed. "We did not choose Him. He grew and now He leads us. You people took an eagle's egg and tried to make it into a Daimoni man. When the experiment failed, you threw the fetus out. It lived. It's He. It'll be the strongest mind you've ever met. Come on. This is no place to talk, and we're still talking."

  She started crawling down the horizontal shaft, waving at Rod to follow her.

  He followed.

  As they crawled, he called to her,

  "C'mell, stop a minute."

  She stopped until he caught up with her. She thought he might ask for a kiss, so worried and lonely did he look. She was ready to be kissed. He surprised her by saying, instead,

  "I can't smell, C'mell. Please, I'm so used to smelling that I miss it. What does this place smell like?"

  Her eyes widened and then she laughed: "It smells like underground. Electricity burning the air. Animals somewhere far away, a lot of different smells of them. The old, old smell of man, almost gone. Engine oil and bad exhaust. It smells like a headache. It smells like silence, like things untouched. There, is that it?"

  He nodded and they went on.

  At the end of the horizontal C'mell turned and said:

  "All men die here. Come on!"

  Rod started to follow and then stopped. "C'mell, are you discoordinated? Why should I die? There's no reason to."

  Her laughter was pure happiness. "Silly C'rod! You are a cat, cat enough to come where no man has passed for centuries. Come on. Watch out for those skeletons. There're a lot of them around here. We hate to kill real people, but there are some that we can't warn off in time."

  They emerged on a balcony, overlooking an even more enormous storeroom than the one before. This had thousands more boxes in it. C'mell paid no attention to it. She went to the end of the balcony and raced down a slender steel ladder.

  "More junk from the past!" she said, anticipating Rod's comment. "People have forgotten it up above; we mess around in it."

  Though he could not smell the air, at this depth it felt thick, heavy, immobile.

  C'mell did not slow down. She threaded her way through the junk and treasures on the floor as though she were an acrobat. On the far side of the old room she stopped. "Take one of these," she commanded.

  They looked like enormous umbrellas. He had seen umbrellas in the pictures which his computer had showed him. These seemed oddly large, compared to the ones in the pictures. He looked around for rain. After his memories of Tostig Amaral, he wanted no more indoor rain. C'mell did not understand his suspicions.

  "The shaft," she said, "has no magnetic controls, no updraft of air. It's just a shaft twelve meters in diameter. These are parachutes. We jump into the shaft with them and then we float down. Straight down. Four kilometers. It's close to the Moho."

  Since he did not pick up one of the big umbrellas, she handed him one. It was surprisingly light.

  He blinked at her. "How will we ever get out?"

  "One of the bird-men will fly us up the shaft. It's hard work but they can do it. Be sure to hook that thing to your belt. It's a long slow time falling, and we won't be able to talk. And it's terribly dark, too."

  He complied.

  She opened a big door, beyond which there was the feel of nothing. She gave him a wave, partially opened her "umbrella," stepped over the edge of the door and vanished. He looked over the edge himself. There was nothing to be seen. Nothing of C'mell, no sound except for the slippage of air and an occasional mechanical whisper of metal against metal. He supposed that must be the rib-tips of the umbrella touching the edge of the shaft as she fell.

  He sighed. Norstrilia was safe and quiet compared to this.

  He opened his umbrella too.

  Acting on an odd premonition, he took his little hiering-spieking shell out of his ear and put it carefully in his coverall pocket.

  That act saved his life.

  His Own Strange Altar

  Rod McBan remembered falling and falling. He shouted into the wet adhesive darkness, but there was no reply. He thought of cutting himself loose from his big umbrella and letting himself drop to the death below him, but then he thought of C'mell and he knew that his body would drop upon her like a bomb. He wondered about his desperation, but could not understand it. (Only later did he find out that he was passing telepathic suicide screens which the underpeople had set up, screens fitted to the human mind, designed to dredge filth and despair from the paleocortex, the smell-bite-mate sequence of the nose-guided animals who first walked Earth; but Rod was cat enough, just barely cat enough, and he was also telepathically subnormal, so that the screens did not do to him what they would have done to any normal man of Earth—delivered a twisted dead body at the bottom. No man had ever gotten that far, but the underpeople resolved that none ever should.) Rod twisted in his harness and at last he fainted.

  He awakened in a relatively small room, enormous by Earth standards but still much smaller than the storerooms which he had passed through on the way down.

  The lights were bright.

  He suspected that the room stank but he could not prove it with his smell gone.

  A man was speaking: "The Forbidden Word is never given unless the man who does not know it plainly asks for it."

  There was a chorus of voices sighing, "We remember. We remember. We remember what we remember."

  The speaker was almost a giant, thin and pale. His face was the face of a dead saint, pale, white as alabaster, with glowing eyes. His body was that of man and bird both, man from the hips up, except that human hands grew out of the elbows of enormous clean white wings. From the hips down his legs were bird-legs, ending in horny, almost translucent bird-feet which stood steadily on the ground.

  "I am sorry, Mister and Owner McBan, that you took that risk. I was misinformed. You are a good cat on the outside but still completely a human man on the inside. Our safety devices bruised your mind and they might have killed you."

  Rod stared at the man as he stumbled to his feet. He saw that C'mell was one of the people helping him. When he was erect, someone handed him a beaker of very cold water. He drank it thirstily. It was hot down here—hot, stuffy, and with the feel of big engines nearby.

  "I," said the great bird-man, "am the E'telekeli." He pronounced it Ee-telly-kelly. "You are the first human being to see me in the flesh."

  "Blessed, blessed, blessed, fourfold blessed is the name of our leader, our father, our brother, our son the E'telekeli!" chorused the underpeople.

  Rod looked around. There was every kind of underperson imaginable here, including several that he had never even thought of. One was a head on a shelf, with no apparent body. When he looked, somewhat shocked, directly at the head, its face smiled and one eye closed in a deliberate wink. The E'telekeli followed his glance. "Do not let us shock you. Some of us are normal, but many of us down here are the discards of men's laboratories. You know my son."

  A tall, very pale young man with no feathers stood up at this point. He was stark naked and completely unembarrassed. He held out a friendly hand to Rod. Rod was sure he had never seen the young man before. The young man sensed Rod's hesitation.

  "You knew me as A'gentur. I am the E'ikasus."

  "Blessed, blessed, threefold blessed is the name of our leader-to-be, the Yeekasoose!" chanted the underpeople.

  Something about the scene caught Rod's rough Norstrilian humor. He spoke to the great underman as he would have spoken to another Miste
r and Owner back home, friendlily but bluntly.

  "Glad you welcome me, Sir!"

  "Glad, glad, glad is the stranger from beyond the stars!" sang the chorus.

  "Can't you make them shut up?" asked Rod.

  "'Shut up, shut up, shut up,' says the stranger from the stars!" chorused the group.

  The E'telekeli did not exactly laugh, but his smile was not pure benevolence.

  "We can disregard them and talk, or I can blank out your mind every time they repeat what we say. This is a sort of court ceremony."

  Rod glanced around. "I'm in your power already," said he, "so it won't matter if you mess around a little with my mind. Blank them out."

  The E'telekeli stirred the air in front of him as though he were writing a mathematical equation with his finger; Rod's eyes followed the finger and he suddenly felt the room hush.

  "Come over here and sit down," said the E'telekeli.

  Rod followed.

  "What do you want?" he asked as he followed.

  The E'telekeli did not even turn around to answer. He merely spoke while walking ahead.

  "Your money, Mister and Owner McBan. Almost all of your money."

  Rod stopped walking. He heard himself laughing wildly. "Money? You? Here? What could you possibly do with it?"

  "That," said the E'telekeli, "is why you should sit down."

  "Do sit," said C'mell, who had followed.

  Rod sat down.

  "We are afraid that Man himself will die and leave us alone in the universe. We need Man, and there is still an immensity of time before we all pour into a common destiny. People have always assumed that the end of things is around the corner, and we have the promise of the First Forbidden One that this will be soon. But it could be hundreds of thousands of years, maybe millions. People are scattered, Mister McBan, so that no weapon will ever kill them all on all planets, but no matter how scattered they are, they are still haunted by themselves. They reach a point of development and then they stop."

  "Yes," said Rod, reaching for a carafe of water and helping himself to another drink, "but it's a long way from the philosophy of the universe down to my money. We have plenty of barmy swarmy talk in Old North Australia, but I never heard of anybody asking for another citizen's money, right off the bat."

  The eyes of the E'telekeli glowed like cold fire but Rod knew that this was no hypnosis, no trick being played upon himself. It was the sheer force of the personality burning outward from the bird-man.

  "Listen carefully, Mister McBan. We are the creatures of Man. You are gods to us. You have made us into people who talk, who worry, who think, who love, who die. Most of our races were the friends of Man before we became underpeople. Like C'mell. How many cats have served and loved Man, and for how long? How many cattle have worked for men, been eaten by men, been milked by men across the ages, and have still followed where men went, even to the stars? And dogs. I do not have to tell you about the love of dogs for men. We call ourselves the Holy Insurgency because we are rebels. We are a government. We are a power almost as big as the Instrumentality. Why do you think Teadrinker did not catch you when you arrived?"

  "Who is Teadrinker?"

  "An official who wanted to kidnap you. He failed because his underman reported to me, because my son E'ikasus, who joined you in Norstrilia, suggested the remedies to the Doctor Vomact who is on Mars. We love you, Rod, not because you are a rich Norstrilian, but because it is our faith to love the Mankind which created us."

  "This is a long slow wicket for my money," said Rod. "Come to the point, sir."

  The E'telekeli smiled with sweetness and sadness. Rod immediately knew that it was his own denseness which made the bird-man sad and patient. For the very first time he began to accept the feeling that this person might actually be the superior of any human being he had ever met.

  "I'm sorry," said Rod. "I haven't had a minute to enjoy my money since I got it. People have been telling me that everybody is after it. I'm beginning to think that I shall do nothing but run the rest of my life . . ."

  The E'telekeli smiled happily, the way a teacher smiles when a student has suddenly turned in a spectacular performance. "Correct. You have learned a lot from the Catmaster, and from your own self. I am offering you something more—the chance to do enormous good. Have you ever heard of Foundations?"

  Rod frowned. "The bottoms of buildings?"

  "No. Institutions. From the very ancient past."

  Rod shook his head. He hadn't.

  "If a gift was big enough, it endured and kept on giving, until the culture in which it was set had fallen. If you took most of your money and gave it to some good, wise men, it could be spent over and over again to improve the race of Man. We need that. Better men will give us better lives. Do you think that we don't know how pilots and pinlighters have sometimes died, saving their cats in space?"

  "Or how people kill underpeople without a thought?" countered Rod. "Or humiliate them without noticing that they do it? It seems to me that you must have some self-interest, sir."

  "I do. Some. But not as much as you think. Men are evil when they are frightened or bored. They are good when they are happy and busy. I want you to give your money to provide games, sports, competitions, shows, music, and a chance for honest hatred."

  "Hatred?" said Rod. "I was beginning to think that I had found a Believer bird . . . somebody who mouthed old magic."

  "We're not ending time," said the great man-bird. "We are just altering the material conditions of Man's situation for the present historical period. We want to steer mankind away from tragedy and self-defeat. Though the cliffs crumble, we want Man to remain. Do you know Swinburne?"

  "Where is it?" said Rod.

  "It's not a place. It's a poet, before the age of space. He wrote this. Listen.

  Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,

  Till the terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,

  Till the strength of the waves of the high tides crumble

  The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,

  Here now in his triumph where all things falter,

  Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,

  As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,

  Death lies dead.

  Do you agree with that?"

  "It sounds nice, but I don't understand it," said Rod. "Please sir, I'm tireder than I thought. And I have only this one day with C'mell. Can I finish the business with you and have a little time with her?"

  The great underman lifted his arms. His wings spread like a canopy over Rod.

  "So be it!" he said, and the words rang out like a great song.

  Rod could see the lips of the underpeople chorusing, but he did not notice the sound.

  "I offer you a tangible bargain. Tell me if you find I read your mind correctly."

  Rod nodded, somewhat in awe.

  "You want your money, but you don't want it. You will keep five hundred thousand credits, foe money, which will leave you the richest man in Old North Australia for the rest of a very long life. The rest you will give to a foundation which will teach men to hate easily and lightly, as in a game, not sickly and wearily, as in habit. The trustees will be Lords of the Instrumentality whom I know, such as Jestocost, Crudelta, the Lady Johanna Gnade."

  "And what do I get?"

  "Your heart's desire." The beautiful wise pale face stared down at Rod like a father seeking to fathom the puzzlement of his own child. Rod was a little afraid of the face, but he confided in it, too.

  "I want too much. I can't have it all."

  "I'll tell you what you want.

  "You want to be home right now, and all the trouble done with. I can set you down at the Station of Doom in a single long jump. Look at the floor—I have your books and your postage stamp which you left in Amaral's room. They go too."

  "But I want to see Earth!"

  "Come back, when you are older and wiser. Some day. See what your money has done."
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br />   "Well—" said Rod.