“He’s not just doing nothing,” said T’ruth sharply. “He’s sleeping. It’s not everybody who can sleep for forty or fifty or sixty thousand years and can wake up a few times a month, just to see how things are going.”
Casher started to whistle and then stopped himself, as though he feared to waken the unconscious, naked old man on the table. “So that’s why he chose you.”
T’ruth corrected him as she washed her hands vigorously in a washbasin. “That’s why he had me made. Turtle stock, three hundred years. Multiply that with intensive stroon treatments, three hundred times. Ninety thousand years. Then he had me printed to love him and adore him. He’s not my master, you know. He’s my god.”
“Your what?”
“You heard me. Don’t get upset. I’m not going to give you any illegal memories. I worship him. That’s what I was printed for, when my little turtle eyes opened and they put me back in the tank to enlarge my brain and to make a woman out of me. That’s why they printed every memory of the citizeness Agatha Madigan right into my brain. I’m what he wanted. Just what he wanted. I’m the most wanted being on any planet. No wife, no sweetheart, no mother has ever been wanted as much as he wants me now, when he wakes up and knows that I am still here. You’re a smart man. Would you trust any machine—any machine at all—for ninety thousand years?”
“It would be hard,” said Casher, “to get batteries of monitors long enough for them to repair each other over that long a time. But that means you have ninety thousand years of it. Four times, five times a day, I can’t even multiply the numbers. Don’t you ever get tired of it?”
“He’s my love, he’s my joy, he’s my darling little boy,” she caroled, as she lifted his eyelids and put colorless drops in each eye. Absentmindedly, she explained. “With this slow metabolism, there’s always some danger that his eyelids will stick to his eyeballs. This is part of the check-up.”
She tilted the sleeping man’s head, looked earnestly into each eye. She then stepped a few paces aside and put her face close to the dial of a gently-humming machine. There was the sound of a shot. Casher almost reached for his gun, which he did not have.
The child turned back to him with a free mischievous smile. “Sorry, I should have warned you. That’s my noisemaker. I watch the encephalograph to make sure his brain keeps a little auditory intake. It showed up with the noise. He’s asleep, very deeply asleep, but he’s not drifting downward into death.”
Back at the table she pushed Madigan’s chin upward so that the head leaned far back on its neck. Deftly holding the forehead, she took a retractor, opened his mouth with her fingers, depressed the tongue, and looked down into the throat.
“No accumulation there,” she muttered, as if to herself.
She pushed the head back into a comfortable position. She seemed on the edge of another set of operations when it was obvious that an idea occurred to her. “Go wash your hands, thoroughly, over there, at the basin. Then push the timer down and be sure you hold your hands under the sterilizer until the timer goes off. You can help me turn him over. I don’t have help here. You’re the first visitor.”
Casher obeyed and while he washed his hands, he saw the girl drench her hands with some flower-scented unguent. She began to massage the unconscious body with professional expertness, even with a degree of roughness. As he stood with his hands under the sterilizer-drier, Casher marveled at the strength of those girlish arms and those little hands. Indefatigably they stroked, rubbed, pummelled, pulled, stretched, and poked the old body. The sleeping man seemed to be utterly unaware of it, but Casher thought that he could see a better skin color and muscle tone appearing.
He walked back to the table and stood facing T’ruth.
A huge peacock walked across the imaginary lawn outside the window, his tail shimmering in a paroxysm of colors.
T’ruth saw the direction of Casher’s glance.
“Oh, I program that, too. He likes it when he wakes up. Don’t you think he was clever, before he went into catalepsis—to have me made, to have me created to love him and to care for him? It helps that I’m a girl. I can’t ever love anybody but him, and it’s easy for me to remember that this is the man I love. And it’s safer for him. Any man might get bored with these responsibilities. I don’t.”
“Yet—” said Casher.
“Shh,” she said, “wait a bit. This takes care.” Her strong little fingers were now plowing deep into the abdomen of the naked old man. She closed her eyes so that she could concentrate all her senses on the one act of tactile impression. She took her hands away and stood erect. “All clear,” she said. “I’ve got to find out what’s going on inside him. But I don’t dare use X-rays on him. Think of the radiation he’d build up in a hundred years or so. He defecates about twice a month while he’s sleeping. I’ve got to be ready for that. I also have to prime his bladder every week or so. Otherwise he would poison himself just with his own body wastes. Here, now, you can help me turn him over. But watch the wires. Those are the monitor controls. They report his physiological processes, radio a message to me if anything goes wrong, and meanwhile supply the missing neurophysical impulses if any part of the automatic nervous system began to fade out or just simply went off.”
“Has that ever happened?”
“Never,” she said, “not yet. But I’m ready. Watch that wire. You’re turning him too fast. There now, that’s right. You can stand back while I massage him on the back.”
She went back to her job of being a masseuse. Starting at the muscles joining the skull to the neck, she worked her way down the body, pouring ointment on her hands from time to time. When she got to his legs, she seemed to work particularly hard. She lifted the feet, bent the knees, slapped the calves.
Then she put on a rubber glove, dipped her hand into another jar—one which opened automatically as her hand approached—and came out with her hand greasy. She thrust her fingers into his rectum, probing, thrusting, groping, her brow furrowed.
Her face cleared as she dropped the rubber glove in a disposal can and wiped the sleeping man with a soft linen towel, which also went into a disposal can. “He’s all right. He’ll get along well for the next two hours. I’ll have to give him a little sugar then. All he’s getting now is normal saline.”
She stood facing him. There was a faint glow in her cheeks from the violent exercise in which she had been indulging, but she still looked both the child and the lady—the child irrecoverably remote, hidden in her own wisdom from the muddled world of adults, and the lady, mistress in her own home, her own estates, her own planet, serving her master with almost-immortal love and zeal.
“I was going to ask you, back there—” said Casher and then stopped.
“You were going to ask me?”
He spoke heavily. “I was going to ask you, what happens to you when he dies? Either at the right time or possibly before his time. What happens to you?”
“I couldn’t care less,” her voice sang out. He could see by the open, honest smile on her face that she meant it. “I’m his. I belong to him. That’s what I’m for. They may have programmed something into me, in case he dies. Or they may have forgotten. What matters is his life, not mine. He’s going to get every possible hour of life that I can help him get. Don’t you think I’m doing a good job?”
“A good job, yes,” said Casher. “A strange one, too.”
“We can go now,” she said.
“What are those alcoves for?”
“Oh, those—they’re his make-believes. He picks one of them to go to sleep in—his coffin, his fort, his ship, or his bedroom. It doesn’t matter which. I always get him up with the hoist and put him back on his table, where the machines and I can take proper care of him. He doesn’t really mind waking up on the table. He has usually forgotten which room he went to sleep in. We can go now.”
They walked toward the door.
Suddenly she stopped. “I forgot something. I never forget things, but this is the first tim
e I ever let anybody come in here with me. You were such a good friend to him. He’ll talk about you for thousands of years. Long, long after you’re dead,” she added somewhat unnecessarily. Casher looked at her sharply to see if she might be mocking or deprecating him. There was nothing but the little-girl solemnity, the womanly devotion to an established domestic routine.
“Turn your back,” she commanded peremptorily.
“Why?” he asked. “Why—when you have trusted me with all the other secrets.”
“He wouldn’t want you to see this.”
“See what?”
“What I’m going to do. When I was the citizeness Agatha—or when I seemed to be her—I found that men are awfully fussy about some things. This is one of them.”
Casher obeyed and stood facing the door.
A different odor filled the room—a strong wild scent, like a geranium pomade. He could hear T’ruth breathing heavily as she worked beside the sleeping man.
She called to him: “You can turn around now.”
She was putting away a tube of ointment, standing high to get it into its exact position on a tile shelf.
Casher looked quickly at the body of Madigan. It was still asleep, still breathing very lightly and very slowly.
“What on earth did you do?”
T’ruth stopped in mid-step: “You’re going to get nosy.”
Casher stammered mere sounds.
“You can’t help it,” she said. “People are inquisitive.”
“I suppose they are,” he said, flushing at the accusation.
“I gave him his bit of fun. He never remembers it when he wakes up, but the cardiograph sometimes shows increased activity. Nothing happened this time. That was my own idea. I read books and decided that it would be good for his body tone. Sometimes he sleeps through a whole Earth-year, but usually he wakes up several times a month.”
She passed Casher, almost pulled herself clear of the floor tugging on the great inside levers of the main door.
She gestured him past. He stooped and stepped through.
“Turn away again,” she said, “All I’m going to do is to spin the dials, but they’re cued to give any viewer a bad headache so he will forget the combination. Even robots. I’m the only person tuned to these doors.”
He heard the dials spinning but did not look around.
She murmured, almost under her breath, “I’m the only one. The only one.”
“The only one for what?” asked Casher.
“To love my master, to care for him, to support his planet, to guard his weather. But isn’t he beautiful? Isn’t he wise? Doesn’t his smile win your heart?”
Casher thought of the faded old wreck of a man with the yellow pajama bottoms. Tactfully, he said nothing.
T’ruth babbled on, quite cheerfully, “He is my father, my husband, my baby son, my master, my owner. Think of that, Casher, he owns me! Isn’t he lucky—to have me? And aren’t I lucky—to belong to him?”
“But what for?” asked Casher, a little crossly, thinking that he was falling in and out of love with this remarkable girl himself.
“For life!” she cried. “In any form, in any way. I am made for ninety thousand years and he will sleep and wake and dream and sleep again, a large part of that.”
“What’s the use of it?” insisted Casher.
“The use,” she said, “the use? What’s the use of the little turtle-egg they took and modified in its memory chains, right down to the molecular level? What’s the use of turning me into an undergirl, so that even you have to love me off and on? What’s the use of little me, meeting my master for the first time, when I had been manufactured to love him? I can tell you, man, what the use is. Love.”
“What did you say?” said Casher.
“I said the use was love. Love is the only end of things. Love on the one side, and death on the other. If you are strong enough to use a real weapon, I can give you a weapon which will put all Mizzer at your mercy. Your cruiser and your laser would just be toys against the weapon of love. You can’t fight love. You can’t fight me.”
They had proceeded down a corridor, forgotten pictures hanging on the walls, unremembered luxuries left untouched by centuries of neglect.
The bright yellow light of Henriada poured in through an open doorway on their right.
From the room came snatches of a man singing while playing a stringed instrument. Later, Casher found that this was a verse of the Henriada Song, the one which went:
Don’t put your ship in the Boom Lagoon,
Look up North for the raving wave.
Henriada’s boiled away
But Ambiloxi’s a saving grave.
They entered the room.
A gentleman stood up to greet them.
It was the great go-pilot, John Joy Tree. His ruddy face smiled, his bright blue eyes lit up, a little condescendingly, as he greeted his small hostess, but then his glance took in Casher O’Neill.
The effect was sudden, and evil.
John Joy Tree looked away from both of them. The phrase which he had started to use stuck in his throat.
He said, in a different voice, very “away” and deeply troubled, “There is blood all over this place. There is a man of blood right here. Excuse me. I am going to be sick.”
He trotted past them and out the door which they had entered.
“You have passed a test,” said T’ruth. “Your help to my master has solved the problem of the captain and honorable John Joy Tree. He will not go near that control room if he thinks that you are there.”
“Do you have more tests for me? Still more? By now, you ought to know me well enough not to need tests.”
“I am not a person,” she said, “but just a built-up copy of one. I am getting ready to give you your weapon. This is a communications room as well as a music room. Would you like something to eat or drink?”
“Just water,” he said.
“At your hand,” said T’ruth.
A rock-crystal carafe had been standing on the table beside him, unnoticed. Or had she transported it into the room with one of the tricks of the Hechizera, the dreaded Agatha herself? It didn’t matter. He drank. Trouble was coming.
XII
T’ruth had swung open a polished cabinet panel. The communicator was the kind they mount in planoforming ships right beside the pilot. The rental on one of them was enough to make any planetary government reconsider its annual budget.
“That’s yours?” cried Casher.
“Why not?” said the little-girl lady. “I have four or five of them”
“But you’re rich!”
“I’m not. My master is. I belong to my master, too.”
“But things like this. He can’t handle them. How does he manage?”
“You mean money and things?” The girlish part of her came out. She looked pleased, happy, and mischievous. “I manage them for him. He was the richest man on Henriada when I came here. He had credits of stroon. Now he is about forty times richer.”
“He’s a Rod McBan!” exclaimed Casher.
“Not even near. Mister McBan had a lot more money than we. But he’s rich. Where do you think all the people from Henriada went?”
“I don’t know,” said Casher.
“To four new planets. They belong to my master and he charges the new settlers a very small land-rent.”
“You bought them?” Casher asked.
“For him.” T’ruth smiled. “Haven’t you heard of planet-brokers?”
“But that’s a gambler’s business—” said Casher.
“I gambled,” she said, “and I won. Now keep quiet and watch me.”
She pressed a button, “Instant message.”
“Instant message,” repeated the machine. “What priority?”
“War news, double A one, subspace penalty.”
“Confirmed,” said the machine.
“The planet Mizzer. Now. War and peace information. Will fighting end soon?”
; The machine clucked to itself.
Casher, knowing the prices of this kind of communication, almost felt that he could see the arterial spurt of money go out of Henriada’s budget as the machines reached across the galaxy, found Mizzer, and came back with the answer.
“Skirmishing. Seventh Nile. Ends three local days.”
“Close message,” said T’ruth.
The machine went off.
T’ruth turned to him. “You’re going home soon, Casher, if you can pass a few little tests.”
He stared at her.
He blurted, “I need my weapons, my cruiser, and my laser.”
“You’ll have weapons. Better ones than those. Right now, I want you to go to the front door. When you have opened the door, you will not let anybody in. Close the door. Then please come back to me here, dear Casher, and if you are still alive, I will have some other things for you to do.”
Casher turned in bewilderment. It did not occur to him to contradict her. He could end up a forgetty, like the maidservant Eunice or the Administrator’s brown man, Gosigo.
Down the halls, he walked. He met no one except for a few shy cleaning-robots, who bowed their heads politely as he passed.
He found the front door. It stopped him. It looked like wood on the outside, but it was actually a Daimoni door, made of near-indestructible material. There was no sign of a key or dials or controls. Acting like a man in a dream, he took a chance that the door might be keyed to himself. He put his right palm firmly against it, at the left or opening edge.
The door swung in.
Meiklejohn was there. Gosigo held the Administrator upright. It must have been a rough trip. The Administrator’s face was bruised and blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. His eyes focused on Casher.
“You’re alive. She caught you, too?”
Quite formally, Casher asked, “What do you want in this house?”
“I have come,” said the Administrator, “to see her.”
“To see whom?” insisted Casher.
The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated Page 70