He stood up from the remains of their meal and wandered over toward the window. That terrible piece of religious jewelry made him uncomfortable. He knew that it was against all laws to ship religion from world to world. What would he do, what could he do, now that he had actually beheld an image of the God Nailed High? That was exactly the kind of contraband which the police and customs robots of hundreds of worlds were looking for.
The Instrumentality was easy about most things, but the transplanting of religion was one of its hostile obsessions. Religions leaked from world to world, anyhow. It was said that sometimes even the underpeople and robots carried bits of religion through space, though this seemed improbable. The Instrumentality left religion alone when it had a settled place on a single planet, but the Lords of the Instrumentality themselves shunned other people’s devotional lives and simply took good care that fanaticisms did not once more flare up between the stars, once again bringing wild hope and great death to all the mankinds.
And now, thought Casher, the Instrumentality has been good to me in its big impersonal collective way, but what will it do when my brain is on fire with forbidden knowledge?
The girl’s voice called him back to himself.
“I have the answer to your problem, Casher,” said she, “if you would only listen to me. I am the Hechizera of Gonfalon, at least I am as much as any one person can be printed on another.”
His jaw dropped as he turned back to her. “You mean that you, child, really are imprinted with this woman Agatha Madigan? Really imprinted?”
“I have all her skills, Casher,” said the girl quietly, “and a few more which I have learned on my own.”
“But I thought it was just a story…” said Casher. “If you’re that terrible woman from Gonfalon, you don’t need me. I’m quitting. Now.”
Casher walked toward the door. Disgusted, finished, through. She might be a child, she might be charming, she might need help, but if she came from that terrible old story, she did not need him.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” said she.
IX
Unexpectedly, she took her place in the doorway, barring it.
In her hand was the image of the man on the two pieces of wood.
Ordinarily Casher would not have pushed a lady. Such was his haste that he did so this time. When he touched her, it was like welded steel; neither her gown nor her body yielded a thousandth of a millimeter to his strong hand and heavy push.
“And now what?” she asked gently.
Looking back, he saw that the real T’ruth, the smiling girl-woman, still stood soft and real in the window.
Deep within, he began to give up; he had heard of hypnotists who could project, but he had never met one as strong as this.
She was doing it. How was she doing it? Or was she doing it? The operation could be subvolitional. There might be some art carried over from her animal past which even her re-formed mind could not explain. Operations too subtle, too primordial for analysis. Or skills which she used without understanding.
“I project,” she said.
“I see you do,” he replied glumly and flatly.
“I do kinesthetics,” she said. His knife whipped out of his bootsheath and floated in the air in front of him.
He snatched it out of the air instinctively. It wormed a little in his grasp, but the force on the knife was nothing more than he had felt when passing big magnetic engines.
“I blind,” she said. The room went totally dark for him.
“I hear,” he said, and prowled at her like a beast, going by his memory of the room and by the very soft sound of her breathing. He had noticed by now that the simulacrum of herself which she had put in the doorway did not make any sound at all, not even that of breathing.
He knew that he was near her. His fingertips reached out for her shoulder or her throat. He did not mean to hurt her, merely to show her that two could play at tricks.
“I stun,” she said, and her voice came at him from all directions. It echoed from the ceiling, came from all five walls of the old odd room, from the open windows, from both the doors. He felt as though he were being lifted into space and turned slowly in a condition of weightlessness. He tried to retain self-control, to listen for the one true sound among the many false sounds, to trap the girl by some outside chance.
“I make you remember,” said her multiple echoing voice.
For an instant he did not see how this could be a weapon, even if the turtle-girl had learned all the ugly tricks of the Hechizera of Gonfalon.
But then he knew.
He saw his uncle, Kuraf, again. He saw his old apartments vividly around himself. Kuraf was there. The old man was pitiable, hateful, drunk, horrible; the girl on Kuraf’s lap laughed at him, Casher O’Neill, and she laughed at Kuraf, too. Casher had once had a teenager’s passionate concern with sex and at the same time had had a teen-ager’s dreadful fear of all the unstated, invisible implications of what the man-woman relationship, gone sour, gone wrong, gone bad, might be. The present-moment Casher remembered the long-ago Casher and as he spun in the web of T’ruth’s hypnotic powers he found himself back with the ugliest memory he had.
The killings in the palace at Mizzer.
The colonels had taken Kaheer itself, and they ultimately let Kuraf run away to the pleasure planet of Ttiollé.
But Kuraf’s companions, who had debauched the old republic of the Twelve Niles, those people! They did not go. The soldiers, stung to fury, had cut them down with knives. Casher thought of the blood, blood sticky on the floors, blood gushing purple into the carpets, blood bright red and leaping like a fountain when a white throat ended its last gurgle, blood turning brown where handprints, themselves bloody, had left it on marble tables. The warm palace, long ago, had gotten the sweet sick stench of blood all the way through it. The young Casher had never known that people had so much blood inside them, or that so much could pour out on the perfumed sheets, the tables still set with food and drink, or that blood could creep across the floor in growing pools as the bodies of the dead yielded up their last few nasty sounds and their terminal muscular spasms.
Before that day of butchery had ended, one thousand, three hundred and eleven human bodies, ranging in age from two months to eighty-nine years, had been carried out of the palaces once occupied by Kuraf. Kuraf, under sedation, was waiting for a starship to take him to perpetual exile and Casher—Casher himself O’Neill!—was shaking the hand of Colonel Wedder, whose orders had caused all the blood. The hand was washed and the nails pared and cleaned, but the cuff of the sleeve was still rimmed with the dry blood of some other human being. Colonel Wedder either did not notice his own cuff, or he did not care.
“Touch and yield!” said the girl-voice out of nowhere.
Casher found himself on all fours in the room, his sight suddenly back again, the room unchanged, and T’ruth smiling.
“I fought you,” she said.
He nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.
He reached for his water-glass, looking at it closely to see if there were any blood on it.
Of course not. Not here. Not this time, not this place.
He pulled himself to his feet.
The girl had sense enough not to help him.
She stood there in her thin modest shift, looking very much like a wise female child, while he stood up and drank thirstily. He refilled the glass and drank again.
Then, only then, did he turn to her and speak:
“Do you do all that?”
She nodded.
“Alone? Without drugs or machinery?”
She nodded again.
“Child,” he cried out, “you’re not a person! You’re a whole weapons system all by yourself. What are you, really? Who are you?”
“I am the turtle-child T’ruth,” she said, “and I am the loyal property and loving servant of my good master, the Mister and Owner Murray Madigan.”
“Madam,” said Casher, “you are almost a thousand yea
rs old. I am at your service. I do hope you will let me go free later on. And especially, that you will take that religious picture out of my mind.”
As Casher spoke, she picked a locket from the table. He had not noticed it. It was an ancient watch or a little round box, swinging on a thin gold chain.
“Watch this,” said the child, “if you trust me, and repeat what I then say.”
(Nothing at all happened: nothing—anywhere.)
Casher said to her, “You’re making me dizzy, swinging that ornament. Put it back on. Isn’t that the one you were wearing?”
“No, Casher, it isn’t.”
“What were we talking about?” demanded Casher.
“Something,” said she. “Don’t you remember?”
“No,” said Casher brusquely. “Sorry, but I’m hungry again.” He wolfed down a sweet roll encrusted with sugar and decorated with fruits. His mouth full, he washed the food down with water. At last he spoke to her. “Now what?”
She had watched with timeless grace.
“There’s no hurry, Casher. Minutes or hours, they don’t matter.”
“Didn’t you want me to fight somebody after Gosigo left me here?”
“That’s right,” she said, with terrible quiet.
“I seem to have had a fight right here in this room.” He stared around stupidly.
She looked around the room, very cool. “It doesn’t look as though anybody’s been fighting here, does it?”
“There’s no blood here, no blood at all. Everything is clean,” said he.
“Pretty much so.”
“Then why,” said Casher, “should I think I had a fight?”
“This wild weather on Henriada sometimes upsets off-worlders until they get used to it,” said T’ruth mildly.
“If I didn’t have a fight in the past, am I going to get into one in the future?”
The old room with the golden-oak furniture swam around him. The world outside was strange with the sunlit marshes and wide bayous trailing off to the forever-thundering storm, just over the horizon, which lay beyond the weather machines. Casher shrugged and shivered. He looked straight at the girl. She stood erect and looked at him with the even regard of a reigning empress. Her young budding breasts barely showed through the thinness of her shift; she wore golden flat-heeled shoes. Around her neck there was a thin gold chain, but the object on the chain hung down inside her dress. It excited him a little to think of her flat chest barely budding into womanhood. He had never been a man who had an improper taste for children, but there was something about this person which was not childlike at all.
“You are a girl and not a girl…” he said in bewilderment.
She nodded gravely.
“You are that woman in the story, the Hechizera of Gonfalon. You are reborn.”
She shook her head, equally seriously. “No, I am not reborn. I am a turtle-child, an underperson with a very long life, and I have been imprinted with the personality of the Citizen Agatha. This is all.”
“You stun,” he said, “but I do not know how you do it.”
“I stun,” she said flatly and around the edge of his mind there flickered up hot little torments of memory.
“Now I remember,” he cried. “You have me here to kill somebody. You are sending me into a fight.”
“You are going to a fight, Casher. I wish I could send somebody else, not you, but you are the only person here strong enough to do the job.”
Impulsively he took her hand. The moment he touched her, she ceased to be a child or an underperson. She felt tender and exciting, like the most desirable and important person he had ever known. His sister? But he had no sister. He felt that he was himself terribly, unendurably important to her. He did not want to let her hand go, but she withdrew from his touch with an authority which no decent man could resist.
“You must fight to the death, now, Casher,” she said, looking at him as evenly as might a troop commander examining a special soldier selected for a risky mission.
He nodded. He was tired of having his mind confused. He knew something had happened to him after the forgetty, Gosigo, had left him at the front door, but he was not at all sure of what it was. They seemed to have had a sort of meal together in this room. He felt himself in love with the child. He knew that she was not even a human being. He remembered something about her living ninety thousand years and he remembered something else about her having gotten the name and the skills of the greatest battle hypnotist of all history, the Hechizera of Gonfalon. There was something strange, something frightening about that chain around her neck: there were things he hoped he would never have to know.
He strained at the thought and it broke like a bubble.
“I’m a fighter,” he said. “Give me my fight and let me know.”
“He can kill you. I hope not. You must not kill him. He is immortal and insane. But in the law of Old North Australia, from which my master, the Mister and Owner Murray Madigan, is an exile, we must not hurt a house guest, nor may we turn him away in a time of great need.”
“What do I do?” snapped Casher impatiently.
“You fight him. You frighten him. You make his poor crazy mind fearful that he will meet you again.”
“I’m supposed to do this.”
“You can,” she said very seriously, “I’ve already tested you. That’s where you have the little spot of amnesia about this room.”
“But why? Why bother? Why not get some of your human servants and have them tie him up or put him in a padded room?”
“They can’t deal with him. He is too strong, too big, too clever, even though insane. Besides, they don’t dare follow him.”
“Where does he go?” said Casher sharply.
“Into the control room,” replied T’ruth, as if it were the saddest phrase ever uttered.
“What’s wrong with that? Even a place as fine as Beauregard can’t have too much of a control room. Put locks on the control.”
“It’s not that kind of a control room.”
Almost angry, he shouted, “What is it, then?”
“The control room,” she answered, “is for a planoform ship. This house. These counties, all the way to Mottile on the one side and to Ambiloxi on the other. The sea itself, way out into the Gulf of Esperanza. All this is one ship.”
Casher’s professional interest took over. “If it’s turned off, he can’t do any harm.”
“It’s not turned off,” she said. “My master leaves it on a very little bit. That way, he can keep the weather machines going and make this edge of Henriada a very pleasant place.”
“You mean,” said Casher, “that you’d risk letting a lunatic fly all these estates off into space.”
“He doesn’t even fly,” said T’ruth gloomily.
“What does he do, then?” yelled Casher.
“When he gets at the controls, he just hovers.”
“He hovers? By the Bell, girl, don’t try to fool me. If you hover a place as big as this, you could wipe out the whole planet any moment. There have been only two or three pilots in the history of space who would be able to hover a machine like this one.”
“He can, though,” insisted the little girl.
“Who is he, anyhow?”
“I thought you knew. Or had heard somewhere about it. His name is John Joy Tree.”
“Tree the Go-Captain?” Casher shivered in the warm room. “He died a long time ago after he made that record flight.”
“He did not die. He bought immortality and went mad. He came here and he lives under my master’s protection.”
“Oh,” said Casher. There was nothing else he could say. John Joy Tree, the great Norstrilian who took the first of the Long Plunges outside the galaxy: he was like Magno Taliano of ages ago, who could fly space on his living brain alone.
But fight him? How could anybody fight him?
Pilots are for piloting; killers are for killing; women are for loving or forgetting. When you mix up the purpos
es, everything goes wrong.
Casher sat down abruptly. “Do you have any more of that coffee?”
“You don’t need coffee,” she said.
He looked up, inquiringly.
“You’re a fighter. You need a war. That’s it,” she said, pointing with her girlish hand to a small doorway which looked like the entrance to a closet. “Just go in there. He’s in there now. Tinkering with the machines again. Making me wait for my master to get blown to bits at any minute! And I’ve put up with it for over a hundred years.”
“Go yourself,” he said.
“You’ve been in a ship’s control room,” she declared.
“Yes,” he nodded.
“You know how people go all naked and frightened inside. You know how much training it takes to make a Go-Captain. What do you think happens to me?” At last, long last, her voice was shrill, angry, excited, childish.
“What happens?” said Casher dully, not caring very much; he felt weary in every bone. Useless battles, murder he had to try, dead people arguing after their ballads had already grown out of fashion. Why didn’t the Hechizera of Gonfalon do her own work?
Catching his thought, she screeched at him, “Because I can’t!”
“All right,” said Casher. “Why not?”
“Because I turn into me.”
“You what?” said Casher, a little startled.
“I’m a turtle-child. My shape is human. My brain is big. But I’m a turtle. No matter how much my master needs me, I’m just a turtle.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“What do turtles do when they’re faced with danger? Not underpeople turtles, but real turtles, little animals. You must have heard of them somewhere.”
“I’ve even seen them,” said Casher, “on some world or other. They pull into their shells.”
“That’s what I do”—she wept—“when I should be defending my master. I can meet most things. I am not a coward. But in that control room, I forget, forget, forget!”
“Send a robot, then!”
She almost screamed at him. “A robot against John Joy Tree? Are you mad, too?”
Casher admitted, in a mumble, that on second thought it wouldn’t do much good to send a robot against the greatest Go-Captain of them all. He concluded, lamely, “I’ll go, if you want me to.”
The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated Page 68