He turned toward Slop Chute and breathed in deep and Casey was on him again. Casey wrapped his arms and legs around him and chewed at his mask with those big yellow teeth. Casey’s hair bristled and his eyes were red as the flames of hell.
Uncle Death staggered back across the ward and fetched up against Carnahan’s bunk. The other masks were scared spitless, looking all around, kind of knowing.
Casey pulled away, and Uncle Death said maybe he was wrong, schedule it for tomorrow. All the masks left in a hurry except Mary. She went back to Slop Chute and took his hand.
“I’m sorry, Slop Chute,” she whispered.
“Bless you, Connie,” he said, and grinned. It was the last thing I ever heard him say.
* * *
Slop Chute went to sleep, and Casey sat beside his bunk. He motioned me off when I wanted to help Slop Chute to the head after lights out. I turned in and went to sleep.
I don’t know what woke me. Casey was moving around fidgety-like, but of course not making a sound. I could hear the others stirring and whispering in the dark too.
Then I heard a muffled noise – the bubbling cough again, and spitting. Slop Chute was having another hemorrhage and he had his head under the blankets to hide the sound. Carnahan started to get up. Casey waved him down.
I saw a deeper shadow high in the dark over Slop Chute’s bunk. It came down ever so gently and Casey would push it back up again. The muffled coughing went on.
Casey had a harder time pushing back the shadow. Finally he climbed on the bunk straddle of Slop Chute and kept a steady push against it.
The blackness came down anyway, little by little. Casey strained and shifted his footing. I could hear him grunt and hear his joints crack.
I was breathing forced draft with my heart like to pull off its bed bolts. I heard other bedsprings creaking. Somebody across from me whimpered low, but it was sure never Slop Chute that done it.
Casey went to his knees, his hands forced almost level with his head. He swung his head back and forth and I saw his lips curled back from the big teeth clenched tight together.… Then he had the blackness on his shoulders like the weight of the whole world.
Casey went down on hands and knees with his back arched like a bridge. Almost I thought I heard him grunt … and he gained a little.
Then the blackness settled heavier, and I heard Casey’s tendons pull out and his bones snap. Casey and Slop Chute disappeared under the blackness, and it overflowed from there over the whole bed … and more … and it seemed to fill the whole ward.
It wasn’t like going to sleep, but I don’t know anything it was like.
The masks must’ve towed off Slop Chute’s hulk in the night, because it was gone when I woke up.
So was Casey.
Casey didn’t show up for sick call and I knew then how much he meant to me. With him around to fight back I didn’t feel as dead as they wanted me to. Without him I felt deader than ever. I even almost liked Mama Death when she charlesed me.
Mary came on duty that morning with a diamond on her third finger and a brighter sparkle in her eye. It was a little diamond, but it was Curly Waldo’s and it kind of made up for Slop Chute.
I wished Casey was there to see it. He would’ve danced all around her and kissed her nice, the way he often did. Casey loved Mary.
It was Saturday, I know, because Mama Death come in and told some of us we could be wheeled to a special church hooraw before breakfast next morning if we wanted. We said no thanks. But it was a hell of a Saturday without Casey. Sharkey Brown said it for all of us – “With Casey gone, this place is like a morgue again.”
Not even Carnahan could call him up.
“Sometimes I think I feel him stir, and then again I ain’t sure,” he said. “It beats hell where he’s went to.”
Going to sleep that night was as much like dying as it could be for men already dead.
* * *
Music from far off woke me up when it was just getting light. I was going to try to cork off again, when I saw Carnahan was awake.
“Casey’s around somewhere,” he whispered.
“Where?” I asked, looking around. “I don’t see him.”
“I feel him,” Carnahan said. “He’s around.”
The others began to wake up and look around. It was like the night Casey and Slop Chute went under. Then something moved in the solarium …
It was Casey.
He come in the ward slow and bashful-like, jerking his head all around, with his eyes open wide, and looking scared we was going to throw something at him. He stopped in the middle of the ward.
“Yea, Casey!” Carnahan said in a low, clear voice.
Casey looked at him sharp.
“Yea, Casey!” we all said. “Come aboard, you hairy old bastard!”
Casey shook hands with himself over his head and went into his dance. He grinned … and I swear to God it was Slop Chute’s big, lopsided grin he had on.
For the first time in my whole damn life I wanted to cry.
CORDWAINER SMITH
Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons
If, when I was a young would-be writer, struggling for a glimpse of the Light from out of the stifling provincial darkness of teenage life in a small New England factory town in the early 1960s, some supernatural agency had given me the chance to put on the saffron robe of an acolyte and sit at the feet of the writer of my choice, learning all that I could learn, I would have, without any hesitation, picked Cordwainer Smith as the Master at whose feet I would sit.
The late Cordwainer Smith – in “real” life Dr Paul M. A. Linebarger, scholar, statesman, and author of the definitive text (still taught from today) on the art of psychological warfare – was a writer of enormous talents who, from 1948 until his untimely death in 1966, produced a double-handful of some of the best short fiction this genre has ever seen – “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” “A Planet Named Shayol,” “On the Storm Planet,” “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell,” “The Dead Lady of Clown Town,” “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” “Drunkboat,” “The Lady Who Sailed The Soul,” “Under Old Earth,” “Scanners Live in Vain” – as well as a large number of lesser, but still fascinating, stories, all twisted and blended and woven into an interrelated tapestry of incredible lushness and intricacy. Smith created a baroque cosmology unrivaled even today for its scope and complexity: a millennia-spanning Future History, logically outlandish and elegantly strange, set against a vivid, richly colored, mythically intense universe where animals assume the shape of men, vast planoform ships whisper through multi-dimensional space, immense sick sheep are the most valuable objects in the universe, immortality can be bought, and the mysterious Lords of the Instrumentality rule a hunted Earth too old for history …
It is a cosmology that looks as evocative and bizarre today in the 1990s as it did in the 1960s – certainly for sheer sweep and daring of conceptualization, in its vision of how different and strange the future will be, it rivals any contemporary vision conjured up by Young Turks such as Bruce Sterling and Greg Bear, and I suspect that it is timeless.
Here Smith takes us along on a thief’s desperate quest to steal eternal life, with all the money in the world for forfeit, and only the childish-sounding “littul kittons” to bar the way …
Cordwainer Smith’s books include the novel Norstrilia and the collections Space Lords – one of the landmark collections of the genre – The Best of Cordwainer Smith, Quest of the Three Worlds, Stardreamer, You Will Never Be the Same, and The Instrumentality of Mankind.
Poor communications deter theft;
good communications promote theft;
perfect communications stop theft.
Van Braam
1
The moon spun. The woman watched. Twenty-one facets had been polished at the moon’s equator. Her function was to arm it. She was Mother Hitton, the Weapons Mistress of Old North Australia.
She was a ruddy-faced, cheerful blonde of indeterminate age. Her eyes were bl
ue, her bosom heavy, her arms strong. She looked like a mother, but the only child she had ever had died many generations ago. Now she acted as mother to a planet, not to a person; the Norstrilians slept well because they knew she was watching. The weapons slept their long, sick sleep.
This night she glanced for the two-hundredth time at the warning bank. The bank was quiet. No danger lights shone. Yet she felt an enemy out somewhere in the universe – an enemy waiting to strike at her and her world, to snatch at the immeasurable wealth of the Norstrilians – and she snorted with impatience. Come along, little man, she thought. Come along, little man, and die. Don’t keep me waiting.
She smiled when she recognized the absurdity of her own thought.
She waited for him.
And he did not know it.
He, the robber, was relaxed enough. He was Benjacomin Bozart, and was highly trained in the arts of relaxation.
No one at Sunvale, here on Ttiollé, could suspect that he was a Senior Warden of the Guild of Thieves, reared under the light of the starry-violet star. No one could smell the odor of Viola Siderea upon him. “Viola Siderea,” the Lady Ru had said, “was once the most beautiful of worlds and it is now the most rotten. Its people were once models for mankind, and now they are thieves, liars and killers. You can smell their souls in the open day.” The Lady Ru had died a long time ago. She was much respected, but she was wrong. The robber did not smell to others at all. He knew it. He was no more “wrong” than a shark approaching a school of cod. Life’s nature is to live, and he had been nurtured to live as he had to live – by seeking prey.
How else could he live? Viola Siderea had gone bankrupt a long time ago, when the photonic sails had disappeared from space and the planoforming ships began to whisper their way between the stars. His ancestors had been left to die on an off-trail planet. They refused to die. Their ecology shifted and they became predators upon man, adapted by time and genetics to their deadly tasks. And he, the robber, was champion of all his people – the best of their best.
He was Benjacomin Bozart.
He had sworn to rob Old North Australia or to die in the attempt, and he had no intention of dying.
The beach at Sunvale was warm and lovely. Ttiollé was a free and casual transit planet. His weapons were luck and himself: he planned to play both well.
The Norstrilians could kill.
So could he.
At this moment, in this place, he was a happy tourist at a lovely beach. Elsewhere, elsewhen, he could become a ferret among conies, a hawk among doves.
Benjacomin Bozart, Thief and Warden. He did not know that someone was waiting for him. Someone who did not know his name was prepared to waken death, just for him. He was still serene.
Mother Hitton was not serene. She sensed him dimly but could not yet spot him.
One of her weapons snored. She turned it over.
A thousand stars away, Benjacomin Bozart smiled as he walked toward the beach.
2
Benjacomin felt like a tourist. His tanned face was tranquil. His proud, hooded eyes were calm. His handsome mouth, even without its charming smile, kept a suggestion of pleasantness at its corners. He looked attractive without seeming odd in the least. He looked much younger than he actually was. He walked with springy, happy steps along the beach of Sunvale.
The waves rolled in, white-crested, like the breakers of Mother Earth. The Sunvale people were proud of the way their world resembled Manhome itself. Few of them had even seen Manhome, but they had all heard a bit of history and most of them had a passing anxiety when they thought of the ancient government still wielding political power across the depth of space. They did not like the old Instrumentality of Earth, but they respected and feared it. The waves might remind them of the pretty side of Earth; they did not want to remember the not-so-pretty side.
This man was like the pretty side of old Earth. They could not sense the power within him. The Sunvale people smiled absently at him as he walked past them along the shoreline.
The atmosphere was quiet and everything around him serene. He turned his face to the sun. He closed his eyes. He let the warm sunlight beat through his eyelids, illuminating him with its comfort and its reassuring touch.
Benjacomin dreamed of the greatest theft that any man had ever planned. He dreamed of stealing a huge load of the wealth from the richest world that mankind had ever built. He thought of what would happen when he would finally bring riches back to the planet of Viola Siderea where he had been reared. Benjacomin turned his face away from the sun and languidly looked over the other people on the beach.
There were no Norstrilians in sight yet. They were easy enough to recognize. Big people with red complexions; superb athletes and yet, in their own way, innocent, young, and very tough. He had trained for this theft for two hundred years, his life prolonged for the purpose by the Guild of Thieves on Viola Siderea. He himself embodied the dreams of his own planet, a poor planet once a crossroads of commerce, now sunken to being a minor outpost for spoliation and pilferage.
He saw a Norstrilian woman come out from the hotel and go down to the beach. He waited, and he looked, and he dreamed. He had a question to ask and no adult Australian would answer it.
“Funny,” thought he, “that I call them ‘Australians’ even now. That’s the old, old Earth name for them – rich, brave, tough people. Fighting children standing on half the world … and now they are the tyrants of all mankind. They hold the wealth. They have the santaclara, and other people live or die depending upon the commerce they have with the Norstrilians. But I won’t. And my people won’t. We’re men who are wolves to man.”
Benjacomin waited gracefully. Tanned by the light of many suns, he looked forty though he was two hundred. He dressed casually, by the standards of a vacationer. He might have been an intercultural salesman, a senior gambler, an assistant starport manager. He might even have been a detective working along the commerce lanes. He wasn’t. He was a thief. And he was so good a thief that people turned to him and put their property in his hands because he was reassuring, calm, gray-eyed, blond-haired. Benjacomin waited. The woman glanced at him, a quick glance full of open suspicion.
What she saw must have calmed her. She went on past. She called back over the dune, “Come on, Johnny, we can swim out here.” A little boy, who looked eight or ten years old, came over the dune top, running toward his mother.
Benjacomin tensed like a cobra. His eyes became sharp, his eyelids narrowed.
This was the prey. Not too young, not too old. If the victim had been too young he wouldn’t know the answer; if the victim were too old it was no use taking him on. Norstrilians were famed in combat; adults were mentally and physically too strong to warrant attack.
Benjacomin knew that every thief who had approached the planet of the Norstrilians – who had tried to raid the dream world of Old North Australia – had gotten out of contact with his people and had died. There was no word of any of them.
And yet he knew that hundreds of thousands of Norstrilians must know the secret. They now and then made jokes about it. He had heard these jokes when he was a young man, and now he was more than an old man without once coming near the answer. Life was expensive. He was well into his third lifetime and the lifetimes had been purchased honestly by his people. Good thieves all of them, paying out hard-stolen money to obtain the medicine to let their greatest thief remain living. Benjacomin didn’t like violence. But when violence prepared the way to the greatest theft of all time, he was willing to use it.
The woman looked at him again. The mask of evil which had flashed across his face faded into benignity; he calmed. She caught him in that moment of relaxation. She liked him.
She smiled and, with that awkward hesitation so characteristic of the Norstrilians, she said, “Could you mind my boy a bit while I go in the water? I think we’ve seen each other here at the hotel.”
“I don’t mind,” said he. “I’d be glad to. Come here, son.”
&nb
sp; Johnny walked across the sunlight dunes to his own death. He came within reach of his mother’s enemy.
But the mother had already turned.
The trained hand of Benjacomin Bozart reached out. He seized the child by the shoulder. He turned the boy toward him, forcing him down. Before the child could cry out, Benjacomin had the needle into him with the truth drug.
All Johnny reacted to was pain, and then a hammerblow inside his own skull as the powerful drug took force.
Benjacomin looked out over the water. The mother was swimming. She seemed to be looking back at them. She was obviously unworried. To her, the child seemed to be looking at something the stranger was showing him in a relaxed, easy way.
“Now, sonny,” said Benjacomin, “tell me, what’s the outside defense?”
The boy didn’t answer.
“What is the outer defense, sonny? What is the outer defense?” repeated Benjacomin. The boy still didn’t answer.
Something close to horror ran over the skin of Benjacomin Bozart as he realized that he had gambled his safety on this planet, gambled the plans themselves for a chance to break the secret of the Norstrilians.
He had been stopped by simple, easy devices. The child had already been conditioned against attack. Any attempt to force knowledge out of the child brought on a conditioned reflex of total muteness. The boy was literally unable to talk.
Sunlight gleaming on her wet hair, the mother turned around and called back, “Are you all right, Johnny?”
Benjacomin waved to her instead. “I’m showing him my pictures, ma’am. He likes ’em. Take your time.” The mother hesitated and then turned back to the water and swam slowly away.
Johnny, taken by the drug, sat lightly, like an invalid, on Benjacomin’s lap.
Benjacomin said, “Johnny, you’re going to die now and you will hurt terribly if you don’t tell me what I want to know.” The boy struggled weakly against his grasp. Benjacomin repeated. “I’m going to hurt you if you don’t tell me what I want to know. What are the outer defenses? What are the outer defenses?”
Modern Classics of Science Fiction Page 11