We the Underpeople

by Cordwainer Smith

  "You want C'mell." The bland wise white face showed no embarrassment, no anger, no condescension. "You shall have her, in a linked dream, her mind to yours, for a happy subjective time of about a thousand years. You will live through all the happy things that you might have done together if you had stayed here and become a c'man. You will see your kitten-children flourish, grow old, and die. That will take about one half-hour."

  "It's just a dreamy," said Rod. "You want to take megacredits from me and give me a dreamy!"

  "With two minds? Two living, accelerated minds, thinking into each other? Have you ever heard of that?"

  "No," said Rod.

  "Do you trust me?" said the E'telekeli.

  Rod stared at the man-bird inquisitively and a great weight fell from him. He did trust this creature more than he had ever trusted the father who did not want him, the mother who gave him up, the neighbors who looked at him and were kind. He sighed, "I trust you."

  "I also," added the E'telekeli, "will take care of all the little incidentals through my own network and I will leave the memory of them in your mind. If you trust me that should be enough. You get home, safe. You are protected, off Norstrilia, into which I rarely reach, for as long as you live. You have a separate life right now with C'mell and you will remember most of it. In return, you go to the wall and transfer your fortune, minus one-half foe megacredit, to the Foundation of Rod McBan."

  Rod did not see that the underpeople thronged around him like worshippers. He had to stop when a very pale, tall girl took his hand and held it to her cheek. "You may not be the Promised One, but you are a great and good man. We can take nothing from you. We can only ask. That is the teaching of Joan. And you have given."

  "Who are you?" said Rod in a frightened voice, thinking that she might be some lost human girl whom the underpeople had abducted to the guts of the Earth.

  "E'lamelanie, daughter of the E'telekeli."

  Rod stared at her and went to the wall. He pushed a routine sort of button. What a place to find it! "The Lord Jestocost," he called. "McBan speaking. No, you fool, I own this system."

  A handsome, polished plumpish man appeared on the screen. "If I guess right," said the strange man, "you are the first human being ever to get into the depths. Can I serve you, Mister and Owner McBan?"

  "Take a note—" said the E'telekeli, out of sight of the machine, beside Rod.

  Rod repeated it.

  The Lord Jestocost called witnesses at his end.

  It was a long dictation, but at last the conveyance was finished. Only at one point did Rod balk. When they tried to call it the McBan Foundation, he said, "Just call it the One Hundred and Fifty Fund."

  "One Hundred and Fifty?" asked Jestocost.

  "For my father. It's his number in our family. I'm to-the-hundred-and-fifty-first. He was before me. Don't explain the number. Just use it."

  "All clear," said Jestocost. "Now we have to get notaries and official witnesses to veridicate our imprints of your eyes, hands and brain. Ask the Person with you to give you a mask, so that the cat-man face will not upset the witnesses. Where is this machine you are using supposed to be located? I know perfectly well where I think it is."

  "At the foot of Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, in a forgotten market," said the E'telekeli. "Your servicemen will find it there tomorrow when they come to check the authenticity of the machine." He still stood out of line of sight of the machine, so that Jestocost could hear him but not see him.

  "I know the voice," said Jestocost. "It comes to me as in a great dream. But I shall not ask to see the face."

  "Your friend down here has gone where only underpeople go," said the E'telekeli, "and we are disposing of his fate in more ways than one, my Lord, subject to your gracious approval."

  "My approval does not seem to have been needed much," snorted Jestocost, with a little laugh.

  "I would like to talk to you. Do you have any intelligent underperson near you?"

  "I can call C'mell. She's always somewhere around."

  "This time, my lord, you cannot. She's here."

  "There, with you? I never knew she went there." The amazement showed on the face of the Lord Jestocost.

  "She is here, nevertheless. Do you have some other underperson?"

  Rod felt like a dummy, standing in the visiphone while the two voices, unseen by one another, talked past him. But he felt, very truly, that they both wished him well. He was almost nervous in anticipation of the strange happiness which had been offered to him and C'mell, but he was a respectful enough young man to wait until the great ones got through their business.

  "Wait a moment," said Jestocost.

  On the screen, in the depths, Rod could see the Lord of the Instrumentality work the controls of other, secondary screens. A moment later Jestocost answered:

  "B'dank is here. He will enter the room in a few minutes."

  "Twenty minutes from now, my Sir and Lord, will you hold hands with your servant B'dank as you once did with C'mell? I have the problem of this young man and his return. There are things which you do not know, and I would rather not put them on the wires."

  Jestocost hesitated only for the slightest of moments. "Good, then," he laughed. "I might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb."

  The E'telekeli stood aside. Someone handed Rod a mask which hid his cat-man features and still left his eyes and hands exposed. The brain print was gotten through the eyes.

  The recordings were made.

  Rod went back to the bench and table. He helped himself to another drink of water from the carafe. Someone threw a wreath of fresh flowers around his shoulders. Fresh flowers! In such a place . . . He wondered. Three rather pretty undergirls, two of them of cat origin and one of them derived from dogs, were leading a freshly dressed C'mell toward him. She wore the simplest and most modest of all possible white dresses. Her waist was cinched by a broad golden belt. She laughed, stopped laughing, and then blushed as they led her to Rod.

  Two seats were arranged on the bench. Cushions were disposed so that both of them would be comfortable. Silky metallic caps, like the pleasure caps used in surgeries, were fitted on their heads. Rod felt his sense of smell explode within his brain; it came alive richly and suddenly. He took C'mell by the hand and began walking through an immemorial Earth forest, with a temple older than time shining in the clear soft light cast by Earth's old moon. He knew that he was already dreaming. C'mell caught his thought and said,

  "Rod, my master and lover, this is a dream. But I am in it with you . . ."

  Who can measure a thousand years of happy dreaming—the travels, the hunts, the picnics, the visits to forgotten and empty cities, the discovery of beautiful views and strange places? And the love, and the sharing, and the re-reflection of everything wonderful and strange by two separate, distinct and utterly harmonious personalities. C'mell the c'girl and C'roderick the c'man: they seemed happily doomed to be with one another. Who can live whole centuries of real bliss and then report it in minutes? Who can tell the full tale of such real lives—happiness, quarrels, reconciliations, problems, solutions and always sharing, happiness, and more sharing . . . ?

  When they awakened Rod very gently, they let C'mell sleep on. He looked down at himself and expected to find himself old. But he was a young man still, in the deep forgotten underground of the E'telekeli, and he could not even smell. He reached for the thousand wonderful years as he watched C'mell, young again, lying on the bench, but the dream-years had started fading even as he reached for them.

  Rod stumbled on his feet. They led him to a chair. The E'telekeli sat in an adjacent chair, at the same table. He seemed weary.

  "My Mister and Owner McBan, I monitored your dreamsharing, just to make sure it stayed in the right general direction. I hope you are satisfied."

  Rod nodded, very slowly, and reached for the carafe of water, which someone had refilled while he slept.

  "While you slept, Mister McBan," said the great E'man, "I had a telepathic confere
nce with the Lord Jestocost, who has been your friend, even though you do not know him. You have heard of the new automatic planoform ships."

  "They are experimental," said Rod.

  "So they are," said the E'telekeli, "but perfectly safe. And the best 'automatic' ones are not automatic at all. They have snake-men pilots. My pilots. They can outperform any pilots of the Instrumentality."

  "Of course," said Rod, "because they are dead."

  "No more dead than I," laughed the white calm bird of the underground. "I put them in cataleptic trances, with the help of my son the doctor E'ikasus, whom you first knew as the monkey-doctor A'gentur. On the ships they wake up. One of them can take you to Norstrilia in a single long fast jump. And my son can work on you right here. We have a good medical workshop in one of those rooms. After all, it was he who restored you under the supervision of Doctor Vomact on Mars. It will seem like a single night to you, though it will be several days in objective time. If you say goodbye to me now, and if you are ready to go, you will wake up in orbit just outside the Old North Australian subspace net. I have no wish for one of my underpeople to tear himself to pieces if he meets Mother Hitton's dreadful little kittens, whatever they may be. Do you happen to know?"

  "I don't," said Rod quickly, "and if I did, I couldn't tell you. It's the Queen's secret."

  "The Queen?"

  "The Absent Queen. We use it to mean the Commonwealth government. Anyhow, Mister Bird, I can't go now. I've got to go back up to the surface of Earth. I want to say goodbye to the Catmaster. And I'm not going to leave this planet and abandon Eleanor. And I want my stamp that the Catmaster gave me. And the books. And maybe I should report about the death of Tostig Amaral."

  "Do you trust me, Mister and Owner McBan?" The white giant rose to his feet; his eyes shone like fire.

  The underpeople spontaneously chorused, "Put your trust in the joyful lawful, put your trust in the loyal-awful bright blank power of the under-bird!"

  "I've trusted you with my life and my fortune, so far," said Rod, a little sullenly, "but you're not going to make me leave Eleanor. No matter how much I want to get home. And I have an old enemy at home that I want to help. Houghton Syme the Hon. Sec. There might be something on Old Earth which I could take back to him."

  "I think you can trust me a little further," said the E'telekeli. "Would it solve the problem of the Hon. Sec. if you gave him a dreamshare with someone he loved, to make up for his having a short life?"

  "I don't know. Maybe."

  "I can," said the master of the underpeople, "have his prescription made up. It will have to be mixed with plasma from his blood before he takes it. It would be good for about three thousand years of subjective life. We have never let this out of our own undercity before, but you are the Friend of Earth, and you shall have it."

  Rod tried to stammer his thanks, but he mumbled something about Eleanor instead: he just couldn't leave her.

  The white giant took Rod by the arm and led him back to the visiphone, still oddly out of place in this forgotten room, so far underground.

  "You know," said the white giant, "that I will not trick you with false messages or anything like that?"

  One look at the strong, calm, relaxed face—face so purposeful that it had no fretful or immediate purpose—convinced Rod that there was nothing to fear.

  "Tune it, then," said the E'telekeli. "If Eleanor wants to go home we will arrange with the Instrumentality for her passage. As for you, my son E'ikasus will change you back as he changed you over. There is only one detail. Do you want the face you originally had or do you want it to reflect the wisdom and experience I have seen you gain?"

  "I'm not posh," said Rod. "The same old face will do. If I am any wiser, my people will find it out soon enough."

  "Good. He will get ready. Meanwhile, turn on the visiphone. It is already set to search for your fellow-citizen."

  Rod flicked it on. There was a bewildering series of flashes and a kaleidoscopic dazzlement of scenes before the machine seemed to race along the beach at Meeya Meefla and searched out Eleanor. This was a very strange screen indeed: it had no visiphone at the other end. He could see Eleanor, looking exactly like his Norstrilian self, but she could not observe that she was being seen.

  The machine focused on Eleanor/Rod McBan's face. She/he was talking to a very pretty woman, oddly mixed Norstrilian and Earthlike in appearance.

  "Ruth Not-from-here," murmured the E'telekeli, "the daughter of the Lord William Not-from-here, a Chief of the Instrumentality. He wanted his daughter to marry 'you' so that they could return to Norstrilia. Look at the daughter. She is annoyed at 'you' right now."

  Ruth was sitting on the bench, twisting away at her fingers in nervousness and worry, but her fingers and face showed more anger than despair. She was speaking to Eleanor, the "Rod McBan."

  "My father just told me!" Ruth cried out. "Why, oh why did you give all your money for a Foundation of some kind? The Instrumentality just told him. I just don't understand. There's no point in us getting married now—"

  "Suits me," said Eleanor/Rod McBan.

  "Suits you, does it!" shrieked Ruth. "After the advantages you've taken of me!"

  The false Rod McBan merely smiled at her friendlily and knowledgeably. The real Rod, watching the picture ten kilometers below, thought that Eleanor seemed to have learned a great deal about how to be a young rich man on Earth.

  Ruth's face changed suddenly. She broke from anger to laughter. She showed her bewilderment. "I must admit," she said honestly, "that I didn't really want to go back to the old family home in Old North Australia. The simple, honest life, a little on the stupid side. No oceans. No cities. Just sick, giant sheep and worlds full of money with nothing to spend it on. I like Earth and I suppose I'm decadent . . ."

  Rod/Eleanor smiled right back at her. "Maybe I'm decadent too. I'm not poor. I can't help liking you. I don't want to marry anybody. But I have big credits here, and I enjoy being a young man—"

  "I should say you do!" said Ruth. "What an odd thing for you to say!"

  The false "Rod McBan" gave no sign that he/she noted the interruption. "I've just about decided to stay here and enjoy things. Everybody's rich in Norstrilia, but what good does it do? It had gotten pretty dull for me, I can tell you, or I wouldn't have taken the risk of coming here. Yes, I think I'll stay. I know that Rod—" He/she gasped. "Rod MacArthur, I mean, a sort of relative of mine. Rod can get the tax taken off my personal fortune so that I can stay right here."

  ("I will, too," said the real Rod McBan, far below the surface of the Earth.)

  "You're welcome here, my dear," said Ruth Not-from-here to the false Rod McBan.

  Down below, the E'telekeli gestured at the screen. "Seen enough?" he said to Rod.

  "Enough," said Rod, "but make sure that she knows I am all right and that I am trying to take care of her. Can you get in touch with the Lord Jestocost or somebody and arrange for Eleanor to stay here and keep her fortune? Tell her to use the name of Roderick Henry McBan the first. I can't let her have the name of the Owners of the Station of Doom, but I don't think Earthpeople will notice the difference anyhow. She'll know it's all right with me, and that's all that matters. If she really likes it here in a copy of my body, may the great sheep sit on her!"

  "An odd blessing," said the E'telekeli, "but it can all be arranged."

  Rod made no move to leave. He had turned off the screen but he just stood there.

  "Something else?" said the E'telekeli.

  "C'mell," said Rod.

  "She's all right," said the lord of the underworld. "She expects nothing from you. She's a good underperson."

  "I want to do something for her."

  "There is nothing she wants. She is happy. You do not need to meddle."

  "She won't be a girlygirl forever," Rod insisted. "You underpeople get old. I don't know how you manage without stroon."

  "Neither do I," said the E'telekeli. "I just happen to have long life. But you're right abo
ut her. She will age soon enough, by your kind of time."

  "I'd like to buy the restaurant for her, the one the bear-man has, and let it become a sort of meeting place open to people and underpeople. She could give it the romantic and interesting touch so that it could be a success."

  "A wonderful idea. A perfect project for your Foundation," smiled the E'telekeli. "It shall be done."

  "And the Catmaster?" asked Rod. "Is there anything I can do for him?"

  "No, do not concern yourself with C'william," said the E'telekeli. "He is under the protection of the Instrumentality and he knows the sign of the Fish." The great underman paused to give Rod a chance to inquire what that sign might be, but Rod did not note the significance of the pause, so the birdlike giant went on. "C'william has already received his reward in the good change which he has made in your life. Now, if you are ready, we will put you to sleep, my son E'ikasus will change you out of your cat-body, and you will wake in orbit around your home."