“As you wish, madam. I have had many adventures, and I do not propose to tell them to you. I can see quickly enough that you have what is seemingly a good life, and I hope that my deeds this morning in the palace will have made it better. You’ll find out soon enough. Good-bye.”
The door closed upon him and he walked back through the sun-drenched market of the leather workers. There were golden hides there. Hides of animals which had then been artfully engraved with very fine strips of beaten gold so that they gleamed in the sunlight. Casher looked upward and around.
Where do I go now? thought he. Where do I go when I’ve done everything I had to do? When I’ve loved everyone I have wanted to love, when I have been everything I have had to be? What does a man with a mission do when the mission is fulfilled? Who can be more hollow than a victor? If I had lost, I could still want revenge. But I haven’t. I’ve won. And I’ve won nothing. I’ve wanted nothing for myself from this dear city. I want nothing from this dear world. It’s not in my power to give it or to take it. Where do I go when I have nowhere to go? What do I become when I am not ready for death and I have no reason whatsoever for life?
There sprang into his mind the memory of the world of Henriada with the twisting snakes of the little tornadoes. He could see the slender, pale, hushed face of the girl T’ruth and he remembered at last that which it was which she had held in her hand. It was the magic. It was the secret sign of the Old Strong Religion. There was the man forever dying nailed to two pieces of wood. It was the mystery behind the civilization of all these stars. It was the thrill of the First Forbidden One, the Second Forbidden One, the Third Forbidden One. It was the mystery on which the robot, rat, and Copt agreed when they came back from space-three. He knew what he had to do.
He could not find himself because there was no himself to be found. He was a used tool. A discarded vessel. He was a shard tossed on the ruins of time, and yet he was a man with eyes and brains to think and with many unaccustomed powers.
He reached into the sky with his mind, calling for a public flying machine. “Come and get me,” he said, and the great winged birdlike machine came soaring over the rooftops and dropped gently into the square.
“I thought I heard you call, sir.”
Casher reached into his pocket and took out his imaginary pass signed by Wedder, authorizing him to use all the vehicles of the republic in the secret service of the regime of Colonel Wedder, The sergeant recognized the pass and almost popped out his eyes in respect.
“The Ninth Nile, can you reach it with this machine?”
“Easily,” said the sergeant. “But you better get some shoes first. Iron shoes because the ground there is mostly volcanic glass.”
“Wait here for me,” said Casher. “Where can I get the shoes?”
“Two streets over and better get two water bottles, too.”
IV
Within a matter of minutes he was back. The sergeant watched him fill the bottles in the fountain. He looked at his medical insignia without doubt and showed him how to sit on the cramped emergency seat inside the great machine bird. They snapped their seat belts and the sergeant said, “Ready?” and the ornithopter spread out its wings, and flew into the air.
The huge wings were like oars digging into a big sea. They rose rapidly and soon Kaheer was below them, the fragile minarets and the white sand with the racing turf along the river, and the green fields, and even the pyramids copied from something on Ancient Earth.
The operator did something and the machine flew harder. The wings, although far slower than any jet aircraft, were steady, and they moved with respectable speed across the broad dry desert. Casher still wore his decimal watch from Henriada, and it was two whole decimal hours before the sergeant turned around, pinched him gently awake from the drowse into which he had fallen, shouted something, and pointed down. A strip of silver matched by two strips of green wandering through a wilderness of black, gleaming glittering black, with the beige sands of the everlasting desert stretching everywhere in the distance.
“The Ninth Nile?” shouted Casher. The sergeant smiled the smile of a man who had heard nothing but wanted to be agreeable, and the ornithopter dived with a lurching suddenness toward the twist in the river. A few buildings became visible. They were modest and small. Verandas, perhaps, for the use of a visitor. Nothing more.
It was not the sergeant’s business to query anyone on secret orders from Colonel Wedder. He showed the cramped Casher O’Neill how to get out of the ornithopter, and then, standing in his seat, saluted, and said, “Anything else, sir?”
Casher said, “No. I’ll make my own way. If they ask you who I was, I am the Doctor Bindaoud and you have left me here under orders.”
“Right, sir,” said the sergeant, and the great machine reached out its gleaming wings, flapped, spiraled, climbed, became a dot, and vanished.
Casher stood there alone. Utterly alone. For many years he had been supported by a sense of purpose, by a drive to do something, and now the drives and the purpose were gone, and his life was gone, and the use of his future was gone, and he had nothing. All he had was the ultimate imagination, health, and great skills. These were not what he wanted. He wanted the liberation of all Mizzer. But he had gotten that, so what was it? He almost stumbled towards one of the nearby buildings.
A voice spoke up. A woman’s voice. The friendly voice of an old woman.
Very unexpectedly, she said, “I’ve been waiting for you, Casher: come on in.”
V
He stared at her. “I’ve seen you,” he said. “I’ve seen you somewhere. I know you well. You’ve affected my fate. You did something to me and yet I don’t know who you are. How could you be here to meet me when I didn’t know I was coming?”
“Everything in its time,” said the woman. “With a time for everything and what you need now is rest. I’m D’alma, the dog-woman from Pontoppidan. The one who washed the dishes.”
“Her,” cried he.
“Me,” she said.
“But you—but you—how did you get here?”
“I got here,” she said. “Isn’t that obvious?”
“Who sent you?”
“You’re part of the way to the truth,” she said. “You might as well hear a little more of it. I was sent here by a lord whose name I will never mention. A lord of the underpeople. Acting from Earth. He sent out another dog-woman to take my place. And he had me shipped here as simple baggage. I worked in the hospital where you recovered and I read your mind as you got well. I knew what you would do to Wedder and I was pretty sure that you would come up here to the Ninth Nile, because that is the road that all searchers must take.”
“Do you mean,” he said, “that you know the road to—” He hesitated and then plunged into his question, “—the Holy of Unholies, the Thirteenth Nile?”
“I don’t see that it means anything, Casher. Except that you’d better take off those iron shoes; you don’t need them yet. You’d better come in here. Come on in.”
He pushed the beaded curtains aside and entered the bungalow. It was a simple frontier official dwelling. There were cots hither and yon, a room to the rear which seemed to be hers; a dining room to the right and there were papers, a viewing machine, cards, and games on the table. The room itself was astonishingly cool.
She said, “Casher, you’ve got to relax. And that is the hardest of all things to do. To relax, when you had a mission for many many years.”
“I know it,” said he. “I know it. But knowing it and doing it aren’t the same things.”
“Now you can do it,” said D’alma.
“Do what?” he snapped.
“Relax, as we were talking about. All you have to do here is to have some good meals. Just sleep a few times, swim in the river if you want to. I have sent everyone away except myself, and you and I shall have this house. And I am an old woman, not even a human being. You’re a man, a true man, who’s conquered a thousand worlds. And who has finally triumphed over
Wedder. I think we’ll get along. And when you’re ready for the trip, I’ll take you.”
The days did pass as she said they would. With insistent but firm kindness, she made him play games with her: simple, childish games with dice and cards. Once or twice he tried to hypnotize her. To throw the dice his own way. He changed the cards in her hand. He found that she had very little telepathic offensive power, but that her defenses were superb. She smiled at him whenever she caught him playing tricks. And his tricks failed.
With this kind of atmosphere he really began to relax. She was the woman who had spelled happiness for him on Pontoppidan when he didn’t know what happiness was. When he had abandoned the lovely Genevieve to go on with his quest for vengeance.
Once he said to her, “Is that old horse still alive?”
“Of course he is,” she said. “That horse will probably outlive you and me. He thinks he’s on Mizzer by galloping around a patrol capsule. Come on back; it’s your turn to play.”
He put down the cards, and slowly the peace, the simplicity, the reassuring, calm sweetness of it all stole over him and he began to perceive the nature of her therapy. It was to do nothing but slow him down. He was to meet himself again.
It may have been the tenth day, perhaps it was the fourteenth, that he said to her, “When do we go?”
She said, “I’ve been waiting for that question and we’re ready now. We go.”
“When?”
“Right now. Put on your shoes. You won’t need them very much.” she said, “but you might need them where we land. I am taking you part way there.”
Within a few minutes, they went out into the yard. The river in which he had swum lay below. A shed, which he did not remember having noticed before, lay at the far end of the yard. She did something to the door, removing a lock, and the door flung open. And she pulled out a skeletonized ornithopter motor, wings, tails. The body was just a bracket of metal. The source of power was as usual an ultra-miniaturized, nuclear-powered battery. Instead of seats, there were two tiny saddles, like the saddles used in the bicycles of old, old Earth which he had seen in museums.
“You can fly that?” he asked.
“Of course I can fly it. It’s better than going 200 miles over broken glass. We are leaving civilization now. We are leaving everything that was on any map. We are flying directly to the Thirteenth Nile, as you well knew it should be that.”
“I knew that,” he said. “I never expected to reach it so soon. Does this have anything to do with that Sign of the Fish you were talking about?”
“Everything, Casher. Everything. But everything in its place. Climb in behind me.” He sat on top of the ornithopter, and this one ran down the yard on its tall, graceful mechanical legs before the flaps of its wings put it in the air. She was a better pilot than the sergeant had been; she soared more and beat the wings less. She flew over country that he, a native of Mizzer, had never dreamed about.
They came to a city gaudy in color. He could see large fires burning alongside the river, and brightly painted people with their hands lifted in prayer. He saw temples and strange gods in them. He saw markets with goods, which he never thought to see marketed.
“Where are we?” he asked.
D’alma said, “This is the City of Hopeless Hope.” She put the ornithopter down and, as they climbed out of the saddles, it lifted itself into the air and flew back, in the direction from whence they had come. “You are staying with me?” asked Casher.
“Of course I am. I was sent to be with you.”
“What for?”
“You are important to all the worlds. Casher, not just Mizzer. By the authority of the friends I have, they have sent me here to help you.”
“But what do you get out of it?”
“I get nothing, Casher. I find my own destruction, perhaps, but I will accept that. Even the loss of my own hope if it only moves you further on in your voyage. Come, let us enter the City of Hopeless Hope.”
VI
They walked through the strange streets. Almost everyone in the streets seemed to be engaged in the practice of religion. The stench of the burning dead was all round them, Talismans, luck charms, and funeral supplies were in universal abundance.
Casher said, speaking rather quietly to D’alma, “I never knew there was anything like this on any civilized planet.”
“Obviously,” she replied, “there must be many people who believe in worry about death; there are many who do know about this place. Otherwise there would not be the throngs here. These are the people who have the wrong hope and who go to no place at all, who find under this earth and under the stars their final fulfillment. These are the ones who are so sure that they are right that they never will be right. We must pass through them quickly, Casher, lest we, too, start believing.”
No one impeded their passage in the streets, although many people paused to see that a soldier, even a medical soldier, in uniform, had the audacity to come there.
They were even more surprised that an old hospital attendant who seemed to be an off-world dog walked along beside him.
“We cross the bridge now, Casher, and this bridge is the most terrible thing I’ve ever seen, whereas now we are going to come to the Jwindz, and the Jwindz oppose you and me and everything you stand for.”
“Who are the Jwindz?” asked Casher.
“The Jwindz are the perfect ones. They are perfect in this earth. You will see soon enough.”
VII
As they crossed the bridge, a tall, blithe police official, clad in a neat black uniform, stepped up to them and said, “Go back. People from your city are not welcome here.”
“We are not from that city,” said D’alma. “We are travelers.”
“Where are you bound?” asked the police official.
“We are bound for the source of the Thirteenth Nile.”
“Nobody goes there,” said the guard.
“We are going there,” said D’alma.
“By what authority?”
Casher reached into his pocket and took out a genuine card. He had remade one, from the memories he had retained in his mind. It was an all-world pass, authorized by the Instrumentality.
The police official looked at it and his eyes widened.
“Sir and master, I thought you were merely one of Wedder’s men. You must be someone of great importance. I will notify the scholars in the Hall of Learning at the middle of the city. They will want to see you. Wait here. A vehicle will come.”
D’alma and Casher O’Neill did not have long to wait. She said nothing at all in this time. Her air of good humor and competence ebbed perceptibly. She was distressed by the cleanliness and perfection around her, by the silence, by the dignity of the people.
When the vehicle came, it had a driver, as correct, as smooth, and as courteous as the guard at the bridge. He opened the door and waved them in. They climbed in and they sped noiselessly through the well-groomed streets: houses, each one in immaculate taste; trees, planted the way in which trees should be planted.
In the center square of the city, they stopped. The driver got out, walked around the vehicle, opened their door.
He pointed at the archway of the large building and he said, “They are expecting you.”
Casher and D’alma walked up the steps reluctantly. She was reluctant because she had some sense of what this place was, a special dwelling for quiet doom and arrogant finality. He was reluctant because he could feel that in every bone of her body she resented this place. And he resented it, too.
They were led through the archway and across a patio to a large, elegant conference room.
Within the room a circular table had already been set in preparation of a meal.
Ten handsome men rose to greet them.
The first one said, “You are Casher O’Neill. You are the wanderer. You are the man dedicated to this planet and we appreciate what you have done for us, even though the power of Colonel Wedder never reached here.”
&
nbsp; “Thank you,” said Casher, “I am surprised to hear that you know of me.”
“That’s nothing,” said the man. “We know of everyone. And you, woman,” said the same man to D’alma, “you know full well that we never entertain women here. And you are the only underperson in this city. A dog at that. But in honor of our guest we shall let you pass. Sit down if you wish. We want to talk to you.”
A meal was served. Little squares of sweet unknown meat, fresh fruits, bits of melon, chased with harmonious drinks which cleared the mind and stimulated it, without intoxicating or drugging.
The language of their conversations was clear and elevated. All questions were answered swiftly, smoothly, and with positive clarity.
Finally, Casher was moved to ask, “I do not seem to have heard of you, Jwindz; who are you?”
“We are the perfect ones,” said the oldest Jwindz, “We have all the answers; there is nothing else left to find.”
“How do you get here?” said Casher.
“We are selected from many worlds.”
“Where are your families?”
“We don’t bring them with us.”
“How do you keep out intruders?”
“If they are good, they wish to stay. If they are not good, we destroy them.”
Casher—still shocked by his experience of fulfilling all his life’s work in the confrontation with Wedder—though his life might be at stake, asked casually, “Have you decided yet whether I am perfect enough to join you? Or am I not perfect and to be destroyed?”
The heaviest of all the Jwindz, a tall, portly man, with a great bushy shock of black hair, replied ponderously.
“Sir, you are forcing our decision, but I think that you may be something exceptional. We cannot accept you. There is too much force in you. You may be perfect, but you are more than perfect. We are men, sir, and I do not think that you are any longer a mere man. You are almost a machine. You are yourself dead people. You are the magic of ancient battles coming to strike among us. We are all of us a little afraid of you, and yet we do not know what to do with you. If you were to stay here a while, if you calmed down, we might give you hope. We know perfectly well what that dog-woman of yours calls our city. She calls it the City of the Perfect Ones. We just call it Jwindz Jo, in memory of the ancient Rule of the Jwindz, which somewhere once obtained upon old Earth. And therefore we think that we will neither kill you nor accept you. We think—do we not, gentlemen?—that we will speed you on your way, as we have sped no other traveler. And that we will send you, then, to a place which few people pass. But you have the strength and if you are going to the source of the Thirteenth Nile, you will need it.”
The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated Page 74