Casher followed her into the house but he put his worry into words. “You mean I am your prisoner.”
“Not my prisoner, Casher. Yours. How could you cross that ground which you traveled in the groundcar? You could get to the ends of my estate all right, but then the storms would pick you up and whirl you away to a death which nobody would even see.”
She turned into a big old room, bright with light-colored wooden furniture.
Casher stood there awkwardly. He had returned his knife to its bootsheath when they left the vestibule. Now he felt very odd, sitting with his victim on a sun porch.
T’ruth was untroubled. She rang a brass bell which stood on an old-fashioned round table. Feminine footsteps clattered in the hall. A female servant entered the room, dressed in a black dress with a white apron. Casher had seen such servants in the old drama cubes, but he had never expected to meet one in the flesh.
“We’ll have high tea,” said T’ruth. “Which do you prefer, tea or coffee, Casher? Or I have beer and wines. Even two bottles of whiskey brought all the way from Earth.”
“Coffee would be fine for me,” said Casher.
“And you know what I want, Eunice,” said T’ruth to the servant.
“Yes, ma’am,” said the maid, disappearing.
Casher leaned forward.
“That servant—is she human?”
“Certainly,” said T’ruth.
“Then why is she working for an underperson like you? I mean—I don’t mean to be unpleasant or anything—but I mean—that’s against all laws.”
“Not here, on Henriada, it isn’t.”
“And why not?” persisted Casher.
“Because, on Henriada, I am myself the law.”
“But the government?”
“It’s gone.”
“The Instrumentality?”
T’ruth frowned. She looked like a wise, puzzled child. “Maybe you know that part better than I do. They leave an Administrator here, probably because they do not have any other place to put him and because he needs some kind of work to keep him alive. Yet they do not give him enough real power to arrest my master or to kill me. They ignore me. It seems to me that if I do not challenge them, they leave me alone.”
“But their rules?” insisted Casher.
“They don’t enforce them, neither here in Beauregard nor over in the town of Ambiloxi. They leave it up to me to keep these places going. I do the best I can.”
“That servant, then? Did they lease her to you?”
“Oh, no,” laughed the girl-woman. “She came to kill me twenty years ago, but she was a forgetty and she had no place else to go, so I trained her as a maid. She has a contract with my master, and her wages are paid every month into the satellite above the planet. She can leave if she ever wants to. I don’t think she will.”
Casher sighed. “This is all too hard to believe. You are a child but you are almost a thousand years old. You’re an underperson, but you command a whole planet—“
“Only when I need to!” she interrupted him.
“You are wiser than most of the people I have ever known and yet you look young. How old do you feel?”
“I feel like a child,” she said, “a child one thousand years old. And I have had the education and the memory and the experience of a wise lady stamped right into my brain.”
“Who was the lady?” asked Casher.
“The Owner and Citizen Agatha Madigan. The wife of my master. As she was dying they transcribed her brain on mine. That’s why I speak so well and know so much.”
“But that’s illegal!” cried Casher.
“I suppose it was,” said T’ruth, “but my master had it done, anyhow.”
Casher leaned forward in his chair. He looked earnestly at the person. One part of him still loved her for the wonderful little girl whom he had thought she was, but another part was in awe of a being more powerful than anyone he had seen before. She returned his gaze with that composed half smile which was wholly feminine and completely self-possessed; she looked tenderly upon him as their faces were reflected by the yellow morning light of Henriada. “I begin to understand,” he said, “that you are what you have to be. It is very strange, here in this forgotten world.”
“Henriada is strange,” she said, “and I suppose that I must seem strange to you. You are right, though, about each-of us being what she has to be. Isn’t that liberty itself? If we each one must be something, isn’t liberty the business of finding it out and then doing it—that one job, that uttermost mission compatible with our natures? How terrible it would be, to be something and never know what!”
“Like who?” said Casher.
“Like Gosigo, perhaps. He was a great king and he was a good king, on some faraway world where they still need kings. But he committed an intolerable mistake and the Instrumentality made him into a forgetty and sent him here.”
“So that’s the mystery!” said Casher. “And what am I?”
She looked at him calmly and steadfastly before she answered. “You are a killer too. It must make your life very hard in many ways. You keep having to justify yourself.”
This was so close to the truth—so close to Casher’s long worries as to whether justice might not just be a cover name for revenge—that it was his turn to gasp and be silent.
“And I have work for you,” added the amazing child. “Work? Here?”
“Yes. Something much worse than killing. And you must do it, Casher, if you want to go away from here before I die, eighty-nine thousand years from now.” She looked around. “Hush!” she added. “Eunice is coming and I do not want to frighten her by letting her know the terrible things that you are going to have to do.”
“Here?” he whispered urgently. “Right here, in this house?”
“Right here in this house,” she said in a normal voice, as Eunice entered the room bearing a huge tray covered with plates of food and two pots of beverage.
Casher stared at the human woman who worked so cheerfully for an animal; but neither Eunice, who was busy setting things out on the table, nor T’ruth, who, turtle and woman that she was, could not help rearranging the dishes with gentle peremptories, paid the least attention to him.
The words rang in his head. “In this house . . . something worse than killing.” They made no sense. Neither did it make sense to have high tea before five hours, decimal time.
He sighed and they both glanced at him, Eunice with amused curiosity, T’ruth with affectionate concern.
“He’s taking it better than most of them do, ma’am,” said Eunice. “Most of them who come here to kill you are very upset when they find out that they cannot do it.”
“He’s a killer, Eunice, a real killer, so I think he wasn’t too bothered.”
Eunice turned to him very pleasantly and said, “A killer, sir. It’s a pleasure to have you here. Most of them are terrible amateurs and then the lady has to heal them before we can find something for them to do.”
Casher couldn’t resist a spot inquiry. “Are all the other would-be killers still here?”
“Most of them, sir. The ones that nothing happened to. Like me. Where else would we go? Back to the Administrator, Rankin Meiklejohn?” She said the last with heavy scorn indeed, curtsied to him, bowed deeply to the woman-girl T’ruth and left the room.
T’ruth looked friendlily at Casher O’Neill. “I can tell that you will not digest your food if you sit here waiting for bad news. When I said you had to do something worse than killing, I suppose I was speaking from a woman’s point of view. We have a homicidal maniac in the house: He is a house guest and he is covered by Old North Australian law. That means we cannot kill him or expel him, though he is almost as immortal as I am. I hope that you and I can frighten him away from molesting my master. I cannot cure him or love him. He is too crazy to be reached through his emotions. Pure, utter, awful fright might do it, and it takes a man for that job. If you do this, I will reward you richly.”
“And
if I don’t?” said Casher.
Again she stared at him as though she were trying to see through his eyes all the way down to the bottom of his soul; again he felt for her that tremor of compassion, ever so slightly tinged with male desire, which he had experienced when he first met her in the doorway of Beauregard.
Their locked glances broke apart.
T’ruth looked at the floor. “I cannot lie,” she said, as though it were a handicap. “If you do not help me I shall have to do the things which it is in my power to do. The chief thing is nothing. To let you live here, to let you sleep and eat in this house until you get bored and ask me for some kind of routine work around the estate. I could make you work,” she went on, looking up at him and blushing all the way to the top of her bodice, “by having you fall in love with me, but that would not be kind. I will not do it that way. Either you make a deal with me or you do not. It’s up to you. Anyhow, let’s eat first. I’ve been up since dawn, expecting one more killer. I even wondered if you might be the one who would succeed. That would be terrible, to leave my master all alone!”
“But you—wouldn’t you yourself mind being killed!”
“Me? When I’ve already lived a thousand years and have eighty-nine thousand more to go! It couldn’t matter less to me. Have some coffee.”
And she poured his coffee.
VIII
Two or three times Casher tried to get the conversation back to the work at hand, but T’ruth diverted him with trivialities. She even made him walk to the enormous window, where they could see far across the marshes and the bay. The sky in the remote distance was dark and full of worms. Those were tornadoes, beyond the reach of her weather machines, which coursed around the rest of Henriada but stopped short at the boundaries of Ambiloxi and Beauregard. She made him admire the weird coral castles which had built themselves up from the bay bottom, hundreds of feet into the air. She tried to make him see a family of wild wind people who were slyly and gently stealing apples from her orchard, but either his eyes were not used to the landscape or T’ruth could see much farther than he could.
This was a world rich in water. If it had not been located within a series of bad pockets of space, the water itself could have become an export. Mankind had done the best it could, raising kelp to provide the iron and phosphorus so often lacking in off-world diets, controlling the weather at great expense. Finally the Instrumentality recommended that they give up. The exports of Henriada never quite balanced the imports. The subsidies had gone far beyond the usual times. The earth life had adapted with a vigor which was much too great. Ordinary forms rapidly found new shapes, challenged by the winds, the rains, the novel chemistry and the odd radiation patterns of Henriada. Killer whales became airborne, -coral took to the air, human babies lost in the wind sometimes survived to become subhuman and wild, jellyfish became sky sweepers. The former inhabitants of Henriada had chosen a planet at a reasonable price——not cheap, but reasonable—from the owner who had in turn bought it from a post-Soviet settling cooperative. They had leased the new planet, had worked out an ecology, had emigrated and were now doing well.
Henriada kept the wild weather, the lost hopes, and the ruins.
And of these ruins, the greatest was Murray Madigan.
Once a prime landholder and host, a gentleman among gentlemen, the richest man on the whole world, Madigan had become old, senile, weak. He faced death or catalepsis. The death of his wife made him fear his own death and with his turtle-girl, T’ruth, he had chosen catalepsis. Most of the time he was frozen in a trance, his heartbeat imperceptible, his metabolism very slow. Then, for a few hours or days, he was normal. Sometimes the sleeps were for weeks, sometimes for years. The Instrumentality doctors had looked him over—more out of scientific curiosity than from any judicial right—and had decided that though this was an odd way to live, it was a legal one. They went away and left him alone. He had had the whole personality of his dying wife, Agatha Madigan, impressed on the turtle-child, though this was illegal; the doctor had, quite simply, been bribed.
All this was told by T’ruth to Casher as they ate and drank their way slowly through an immense repast.
An archaic wood fire roared in a real fireplace.
While she talked, Casher watched the gentle movement of her shoulder blades when she moved forward, the loose movement of her light dress as she moved, the childish face which was so tender, so appealing and yet so wise.
Knowing as little as he did about the planet of Henriada, Casher tried desperately to fit his own thinking together and to make sense out of the predicament in which he found himself. Even if the girl was attractive, this told him nothing of the real challenges which he still faced inside this very house. No longer was his preoccupation with getting the power cruiser his main job on Henriada; no evidence was at hand to show that the drunken, deranged Administrator, Rankin Meiklejohn, would give him anything at all unless he, Casher, killed the girl.
Even that had become a forgotten mission. Despite the fact that he had come to the estate of Beauregard for the purpose of killing her, he was now on a journey without a destination. Years of sad experience had taught him that when a project went completely to pieces, he still had the mission of personal survival, if his life was to mean anything to his home planet, Mizzer, and if his return, in any way or any fashion, could bring real liberty back to the Twelve Niles.
So he looked at the girl with a new kind of unconcern. How could she help his plans? Or hinder them? The promises she made were too vague to be of any real use in the sad, complicated world of politics.
He just tried to enjoy her company and the strange place in which he found himself.
The Gulf of Esperanza lay just within his vision. At the far horizon he could see the helpless tornadoes trying to writhe their way past the weather machines which still functioned, at the expense of Beauregard, all along the coast from Ambiloxi to Mottile. He could see the shoreline choked with kelp, which had once been a cash crop and was now a nuisance. Ruined buildings in the distance were probably the leftovers of processing plants; the artificial-looking coral castles obscured his view of them.
And this house—how much sense did this house make?
An undergirl, eerily wise, who herself admitted that she had obtained an unlawful amount of conditioning; a master who was a living corpse; a threat which could not even be mentioned freely within the house; a household which seemed to have displaced the planetary government; a planetary government which the Instrumentality, for unfathomable reasons of its own, had let fall into ruin. Why? Why? And why again?
The turtle-girl was looking at him. If he had been an art student, he would have said that she was giving him the tender, feminine and irrecoverably remote smile of a Madonna, but he did not know the motifs of the ancient pictures; he just knew that it was a smile characteristic of T’ruth herself.
“You are wondering . . . ?” she said.
He nodded, suddenly feeling miserable that mere words had come between them.
“You are wondering why the Instrumentality let you come here?”
He nodded again.
“I don’t know either,” she said, reaching out and taking his right hand. His hand felt and looked like the hairy paw of a giant as she held it with her two pretty, well-kept little-girl hands; but the strength of her eyes and the steadfastness of her voice showed that it was she who was giving the reassurance, not he.
The child was helping him!
The idea was outrageous, impossible, true.
It was enough to alarm him, to make him begin to pull back his hand. She clutched him with tender softness, with weak strength, and he could not resist her. Again he had the feeling, which had. gripped him so strongly when he first met her at the door of Beauregard and failed to kill her, that he had always known her and had always loved her. (Was there not some planet on which eccentric people believed a weird cult, thinking that human beings were endlessly reborn with fragmentary recollections of their own previo
us human lives? It was almost like that. Here. Now. He did not know the girl but he had always known her. He did not love the girl and yet he had loved her from the beginning of time.)
She said, so softly that it was almost a whisper, “Wait. . . . Wait. . . . Your death may come through that door pretty soon and I will tell you how to meet it. But before that, even, I have to show you the most beautiful thing in the world.”
Despite her little hand lying tenderly and firmly on his, Casher spoke irritably: “I’m tired of talking riddles here on Henriada. The Administrator gives me the mission of killing you and I fail in it. Then you promise me a battle and give me a good meal instead. Now you talk about the battle and start off with some other irrelevance. You’re going to make me angry if you keep on and—and—and—” He stammered out at last: “I get pretty useless if I’m angry. If you want me to do a fight for you, let me know the fight and let me go do it now. I’m willing enough.”
Her remote, kind half smile did not waver. “Casher,” she said, “what I am going to show you is your most important weapon in the fight.”
With her free left hand she tugged at the fine chain of a thin gold necklace. A piece of jewelry came out of the top of her shift dress, under which she had kept it hidden. It was the image of two pieces of wood with a man nailed to them.
Casher stared and then he burst into hysterical laughter.
“Now you’ve done it, ma’am,” he cried. “I’m no use to you or to anybody else. I know what that is, and up to now I’ve just suspected it. It’s what the robot, rat and Copt agreed on when they went exploring back in Space three. It’s the Old Strong Religion. You’ve put it in my mind and now the next person who meets me will peep it and will wipe it out. Me too, probably, along with it. That’s no weapon. That’s a defeat. You’ve done me in. I knew the sign of the Fish a long time ago, but I had a chance of getting away with just that little bit.”
“Casher!” she cried. “Casher! Get hold of yourself. You will know nothing about this before you leave Beauregard. You will forget. You will be safe.”
A Day in the Life Page 25