When the People Fell

by Cordwainer Smith

  Gloomily he said, "If I can free my home planet of Mizzer, it will be worth it. Whatever it is."

  "You're not going to turn into a woman!" She laughed. "Nothing that easy. But you are going to get wisdom. And I will tell you the whole story of the Sign of the Fish before you leave here."

  "Not that, please," he begged. "That's a religion and the Instrumentality would never let me travel again."

  "I'm going to have you scrambled, Casher, so that nobody can read you for a year or two. And the Instrumentality is not going to send you back. I am. Through space-three."

  "It'll cost you a fine, big ship to do it."

  "My master will approve when I tell him, Casher. Now give me that kiss you have been wanting to give me. Perhaps you will remember something of it when you come out of scramble."

  She stood there. He did nothing.

  "Kiss me!" she commanded.

  He put his arm around her. She felt like a big little girl. She lifted her face. She thrust her lips up toward his. She stood on tiptoe.

  He kissed her the way a man might kiss a picture or a religious object. The heat and fierceness had gone out of his hopes. He had not kissed a girl, but power—tremendous power and wisdom put into a single slight form.

  "Is that the way your master kisses you?"

  She gave him a quick smile. "How clever of you! Yes, sometimes. Come along now. We have to shoot some children before the technicians are ready. It will give you a good last chance of seeing what you can do, when you have become what I am. Come along, the guns are in the hall."

  XIII

  They went down an enormous light-oak staircase to a floor which Casher had never seen before. It must have been the entertainment and hospitality center of Beauregard long ago, when the mister and owner Murray Madigan was himself young.

  The robots did a good job of keeping away the dust and the mildew. Casher saw inconspicuous little air-driers placed at strategic places, so that the rich tooled leather on the walls would not spoil, so that the velvet bar-stools would not become slimy with mold, so that the pool tables would not warp nor the golf clubs go out of shape with age and damp. By the Bell, he thought, that man Madigan could have entertained a thousand people at one time in a place this size.

  The gun-cabinet, now, that was functional. The glass shone. The velvet of oil showed on the steel and walnut of the guns. They were old Earth models, very rare and very special. For actual fighting, people used the cheap artillery of the present time or wirepoints for close work. Only the richest and rarest of connoisseurs had the old Earth weapons or could use them.

  T'ruth touched the guard-robot and waked him. The robot saluted, looked at her face, and without further inquiry, opened the cabinet.

  "Do you know guns?" said T'ruth to Casher.

  "Wirepoints," he said. "Never touched a gun in my life."

  "Do you mind using a learning-helmet, then? I could teach you hypnotically with the special rules of the Hechizera, but they might give you a headache or upset you emotionally. The helmet is neuro-electric and it has filters."

  Casher nodded and saw his reflection nodding in the polished glass doors of the gun-cabinet. He was surprised to see how helpless and lugubrious he looked.

  But it was true. Never before in his life had he felt that a situation swept over him, washed him along like a great wave, left him with no choice and no responsibility. Things were her choice now, not his, and yet he felt that her power was benign, self-limited, restricted by factors at which he could no more than guess. He had come for one weapon—the cruiser which he had hoped to get from the Administrator Rankin Meiklejohn. She was offering him something else—psychological weapons in which he had neither experience nor confidence.

  She watched him attentively for a long moment and then turned to the gun-watching robot.

  "You're little Harry Hadrian, aren't you? The gun-watcher."

  "Yes, ma'am," said the silver robot brightly, "and I'm owl-brained too. That makes me very bright."

  "Watch this," she said, extending her arms the width of the gun-cabinet and then dropping them after a queer flutter of her hands. "Do you know what that means?"

  "Yes, ma'am," said the little robot quickly, the emotion showing in his toneless voice by the speed with which he spoke, not by the intonation, "it-means-you-have-taken-over-and-I-am-off-duty! Can-I-go-sit-in-the-garden-and-look-at-the-live-things?"

  "Not quite yet, little Harry Hadrian. There are some wind-people out there now and they might hurt you. I have another errand for you first. Do you remember where the teaching helmets are?"

  "Silver hats on the third floor in an open closet with a wire running to each hat. Yes."

  "Bring one of those as fast as you can. Pull it loose very carefully from its electrical connection."

  The little robot disappeared in a sudden, fast, gentle clatter up the stairs.

  T'ruth turned back to Casher. "I have decided what to do with you. I am helping you. You don't have to look so gloomy about it."

  "I'm not gloomy. The Administrator sent me here on a crazy errand, killing an unknown underperson. I find out that the person is really a little girl. Then I find out that she is not an underperson, but a frightening old dead woman, still walking around alive. My life gets turned upside down. All my plans are set aside. You propose to send me home to fulfill my life's work on Mizzer. I've struggled for this, so many years! Now you're making it all come through, even though you are going to cook me through space-three to do it, and throw in a lot of illegal religion and hypnotic tricks, that I'm not sure I can handle. Now you tell me to come along—to shoot children with guns. I've never done anything like that in my life and yet I find myself obeying you. I'm tired out, girl, tired out. If you have put me in your power, I don't even know it. I don't even want to know it."

  "Here you are, Casher, on the ruined wet world of Henriada. In less than a week you will be recovering among the military casualties of Colonel Wedder's army. You will be under the clear sky of Mizzer, and the Seventh Nile will be near you, and you will be ready at long last to do what you have to do. You will have bits and pieces of memories of me—not enough to make you find your way back here or to tell people all the secrets of Beauregard, but enough for you to remember that you have been loved. You may even"—and she smiled very gently, with a tender wry humor on her face—"marry some Mizzer girl because her body or her face or her manner reminds you to me."

  "In a week—?" he gasped.

  "Less than that."

  "Who are you," he cried out, "that you, an underperson, should run real people and should manipulate their lives?"

  "I didn't look for power, Casher. Power doesn't usually work if you look for it. I have eighty-nine thousand years to live, Casher, and as long as my master lives, I shall love him and take care of him. Isn't he handsome? Isn't he wise? Isn't he the most perfect master you ever saw?"

  Casher thought of the old ruined-looking body with the plastic knobs set into it; he thought of the faded pajama bottoms; he said nothing.

  "You don't have to agree," said T'ruth. "I know I have a special way of looking at him. But they took my turtle brain and raised the IQ to above normal human level. They took me when I was a happy little girl, enchanted by the voice and the glance and the touch of my master—they took me to where this real woman lay dying and they put me into a machine and they put her into one, too. When they were through, they picked me up. I had on a pink dress with pastel blue socks and pink shoes. They carried me out into the corridor, on a rug. They had finished with me. They knew that I wouldn't die. I was healthy. Can't you see it, Casher? I cried myself to sleep, nine hundred years ago."

  Casher could not really answer. He nodded sympathetically.

  "I was a girl, Casher. Maybe I was a turtle once, but I don't remember that, any more than you remember your mother's womb or your laboratory bottle. In that one hour I was never to be a girl again. I did not need to go to school. I had her education, and it was a good one. She spok
e twenty or more languages. She was a psychologist and a hypnotist and a strategist. She was also the tyrannical mistress of this house. I cried because my childhood was finished, because I knew what I would have to do. I cried because I knew that I could do it. I loved my master so, but I was no longer to be the pretty little servant who brought him his tablets or his sweetmeats or his beer. Now I saw the truth—as she died I had myself become Henriada. The planet was mine to care for, to manage—to protect my master. If I come along and I protect and help you, is that so much for a woman who will just be growing up when your grandchildren will all be dead of old age?"

  "No, no," stammered Casher O'Neill. "But your own life? A family, perhaps?"

  Anger lashed across her pretty face. Her features were the features of the delicious girl-child T'ruth, but her expression was that of the citizeness Agatha Madigan, perhaps, a worldly woman reborn to the endless worldliness of her own wisdom.

  "Should I order a husband from the turtle bank, perhaps? Should I hire out a piece of my master's estate, to be sold to somebody because I'm an underperson, or perhaps put to work somewhere in an industrial ship? I'm me. I may be an animal, but I have more civilization in me than all the wind-people on this planet. Poor things! What kind of people are they, if they are only happy when they catch a big mutated duck and tear it to pieces, eating it raw? I'm not going to lose, Casher. I'm going to win. My master will live longer than any person has ever lived before. He gave me that mission when he was strong and wise and well in the prime of his life. I'm going to do what I was made for, Casher, and you're going to go back to Mizzer and make it free, whether you like it or not!"

  They both heard a happy scurrying on the staircase.

  The small silver robot, little Harry Hadrian, burst upon them; he carried a teaching helmet.

  T'ruth said, "Resume your post. You are a good boy, little Harry, and you can have time to sit in the garden later on, when it is safe."

  "Can I sit in a tree?" the little robot asked.

  "Yes, if it is safe."

  Little Harry Hadrian resumed his post by the gun-cabinet. He kept the key in his hand. It was a very strange key, sharp at the end and as long as an awl. Casher supposed that it must be one of the straight magnetic keys, cued to its lock by a series of magnetized patterns.

  "Sit on the floor for a minute," said T'ruth to Casher; "you're too tall for me." She slipped the helmet on his head, adjusted the levers on each side so that the helmet sat tight and true upon his skull.

  With a touching gesture of intimacy, for which she gave him a sympathetic apologetic little smile, she moistened the two small electrodes with her own spit, touching her finger to her tongue and then to the electrode. These went to his temples.

  She adjusted the verniered dials on the helmet itself, lifted the rear wire, and applied it to her forehead.

  Casher heard the click of a switch.

  "That did it," he heard T'ruth's voice saying, very far away.

  He was too busy looking into the gun-cabinet. He knew them all and loved some of them. He knew the feel of their stocks on his shoulder, the glimpse of their barrels in front of his eyes, the dance of the target on their various sights, the welcome heavy weight of the gun on his supporting arm, the rewarding thrust of the stock against his shoulder when he fired. He knew all this, and did not know how he knew it.

  "The Hechizera, Agatha herself, was a very accomplished sportswoman," murmured T'ruth to him. "I thought her knowledge would take a second printing when I passed it along to you. Let's take these."

  She gestured to little Harry Hadrian, who unlocked the cabinet and took out two enormous guns, which looked like the long muskets mankind had had on Earth even before the age of space began.

  "If you're going to shoot children," said Casher with his new-found expertness, "these won't do. They'll tear the bodies completely to pieces."

  T'ruth reached into the little bag which hung from her belt. She took out three shotgun shells. "I have three more," she said. "Six children is all we need."

  Casher looked at the slug projecting slightly from the shotgun casing. It did not look like any shell he had ever seen before. The workmanship was unbelievably fine and precise.

  "What are they? I never saw these before."

  "Proximity stunners," she said. "Shoot ten centimeters above the head of any living thing and the stunner knocks it out."

  "You want the children alive?"

  "Alive, of course. And unconscious. They are a part of your final test."

  Two hours later, after an exciting hike to the edge of the weather controls, they had the six children stretched out on the floor of the great hall. Four were little boys, two girls; they were fine-boned, soft-haired people, very thin, but they did not look too far from Earth-normal.

  T'ruth called up a doctor-underman from among her servants. There must have been a crowd of fifty or sixty undermen and robots standing around. Far up the staircase, John Joy Tree stood hidden, half in shadow. Casher suspected that he was as inquisitive as the others but afraid of himself, Casher, "the man of blood."

  T'ruth spoke quietly but firmly to the doctor. "Can you give them a strong euphoric before you waken them? We don't want to have to pluck them out of all the curtains in the house, if they go wild when they wake up."

  "Nothing simpler," said the doctor-underman. He seemed to be of dog origin, but Casher could not tell.

  He took a glass tube and touched it to the nape of each little neck. The necks were all streaked with dirt. These children had never been washed in their lives, except by the rain.

  "Wake them," said T'ruth.

  The doctor stepped back to a rolling table. It gleamed with equipment. He must have pre-set his devices, because all he did was to press a button and the children stirred into life.

  The first reaction was wildness. They got ready to bolt. The biggest of the boys, who by Earth-standards would have been about ten, got three steps before he stopped and began laughing.

  T'ruth spoke the Old Common Tongue to them, very slowly and with long spaces between the words:

  "Wind-children—do—you—know—where—you—are?"

  The biggest girl twittered back to her so fast that Casher could not understand it.

  T'ruth turned to Casher and said, "The girl said that she is in the Dead Place, where the air never moves and where the Old Dead Ones more around on their own business. She means us." To the wind-children she spoke again.

  "What—would—you—like—most?"

  The biggest girl went from child to child. They nodded agreement vigorously. They formed a circle and began a little chant. By the second repetition around, Casher could make it out.

  Shig—shag—shuggery,

  shuck shuck shuck!

  What all of us need is

  an all-around duck.

  Shig—shag—shuggery,

  shuck shuck shuck!

  At the fourth or fifth repetition they all stopped and looked at T'ruth, who was so plainly the mistress of the house.

  She in turn spoke to Casher O'Neill: "They think that they want a tribal feast of raw duck. What they are going to get is inoculations against the worst diseases of this planet, several duck meals, and their freedom again. But they need something else beyond all measure. You know what that is, Casher, if you can only find it."

  The whole crowd turned its eyes on Casher, the human eyes of the people and underpeople, the milky lenses of the robots.

  Casher stood aghast.

  "Is this a test?" he asked, softly.

  "You could call it that," said T'ruth, looking away from him.

  Casher thought furiously and rapidly. It wouldn't do any good to make them into forgetties. The household had enough of them. T'ruth had announced a plan to let them loose again. Mister and owner Murray Madigan must have told her, sometime or other, to "do something" about the wind-people. She was trying to do it. The whole crowd watched him. What might T'ruth expect?

  The answer came to him
in a flash.

  If she were asking him, it must be something to do with himself, something which he—uniquely among these people, underpeople, and robots—had brought to the storm-sieged mansion of Beauregard.

  Suddenly he saw it.

  "Use me, my Lady Ruth," said he, deliberately giving her the wrong title, "to print on them nothing from my intellectual knowledge, but everything from my emotional makeup. It wouldn't do them any good to know about Mizzer, where the Twelve Niles work their way down across the Intervening Sands. Nor about Pontoppidan, the Gem Planet. Nor about Olympia, where the blind brokers promenade under numbered clouds. Knowing things would not help these children. But wanting—"

  He was unique. He had wanted to return to Mizzer. He had wanted to return beyond all dreams of blood and revenge. He had wanted things fiercely, wildly, so that even if he could not get them, he zig-zagged the galaxy in search of them.

  T'ruth was speaking to him again, urgently and softly, but not in so low a voice that the others in the room could not hear.

  "And what, Casher O'Neill, should I give them from you?"

  "My emotional structure. My determination. My desire. Nothing else. Give them that and throw them back into the winds. Perhaps if they want something fiercely enough, they will grow up to find out what it is."

  There was a soft murmur of approval around the room.

  T'ruth hesitated a moment and then nodded. "You answered, Casher. You answered quickly and perceptively. Bring seven helmets, Eunice. Stay here, doctor."

  Eunice, the forgetty, left, taking two robots with her.

  "A chair," said T'ruth to no one in particular. "For him."

  A large powerful underman pushed his way through the crowd and dragged a chair to the end of the room.

  T'ruth gestured that Casher should sit in it.

  She stood in front of him. Strange, thought Casher, that she should be a great lady and still a little girl. How would he ever find a girl like her? He was not even afraid of the mystery of the Fish, or the image of the man on two pieces of wood. He no longer dreaded space-three, where so many travelers had gone in and so few had come out. He felt safe, comforted by her wisdom and authority. He felt that he would never see the likes of this again—a child running a planet and doing it well; a half-dead man surviving through the endless devotion of his maidservant; a fierce woman hypnotist living on with all the anxieties and angers of humanity gone, but with the skill and obstinacy of turtle genes to sustain her in her re-imprinted form.