We the Underpeople (44 page)

John Fisher rubbed his chin. His suspicious eyes looked down at Redlady, who had taken a seat, and looked up at the doctor, whose head was still bumping the ceiling.

A voice behind him spoke.

"Take it, Mister Financial Secretary. The boy won't use money if he's dead. You can't fight the Instrumentality, you can't be reasonable with the Instrumentality, and you can't buy the Instrumentality. With what they've been taking off us all these thousands of years, they've got more stroon than we do. Hidden away somewhere. You, there!" said Bill rudely to the Lord Redlady. "Do you have any idea what the Instrumentality is worth?"

The Lord Redlady creased his brow. "Never thought of it. I suppose it must have a limit. But I never thought of it. We do have accountants, though."

"See," said Bill. "Even the Instrumentality would hate to lose money. Take the doctor's bid, Redlady. Take him up on it, Fisher." His use of their surnames was an extreme incivility, but the two men were convinced.

"I'll do it," said Redlady. "It's awfully close to writing insurance, which we are not chartered to do. I'll write it in as his emergency clause."

"I'll take it," said John Fisher. "It's got to be a thousand years until another Norstrilian Financial Secretary pays money for a ticket like this, but it's worth it. To him. I'll square it in his accounts to our planet."

"I'll witness it," said the doctor.

"No, you won't," said Bill savagely. "The boy has one friend here. That's me. Let
me
do it."

They stared at him, all three.

He stared back.

He broke. "Sirs and Misters, please let me be the witness."

The Lord Redlady nodded and opened the console. He and John Fisher spoke the contract into it. At the end Bill shouted his full name as witness.

The two women brought Rod McBan, mother-naked, into the room. He was immaculately clean and he stared ahead as though he were in an endless dream.

"That's the operating room," said the Lord Redlady. "I'll spray us all with antiseptic, if you don't mind."

"Of course," said the doctor. "You must."

"You're going to cut him up and boil him down—here and now?" cried Aunt Doris.

"Here and now," said the Lord Redlady, "if the doctor approves. The sooner he goes, the better chance he has of coming through the whole thing alive."

"I consent," said the doctor. "I approve."

He started to take Rod by the hand, leading him toward the room with the long coffin and the small box. At some sign from Redlady, the walls had opened up to show a complete surgical theater.

"Wait a moment," said the Lord Redlady. "Take your colleague."

"Colleague?" said the giant.

"A'gentur," said Redlady. "It'll be he who puts Rod together again."

"Of course," said the doctor.

The monkey had jumped out of his basket when he heard his name mentioned.

Together, the giant and the monkey led Rod into the little gleaming room. They closed the door behind them.

The ones who were left behind sat down nervously.

"Mister and Owner Redlady," said Bill, "since I'm staying, could I have some more of that drink?"

"Of course, Sir and Mister," said the Lord Redlady, not having any idea of what Bill's title might be.

There were no screams from Rod, no thuds, no protest. There was the cloying sweet horror of unknown medicines creeping through the airvents. The two women said nothing as the group of people sat around. Eleanor, wrapped in an enormous towel, came and sat with them. In the second hour of the operations on Rod, Lavinia began sobbing.

She couldn't help it.

We all know that no communications systems are leakproof. Even inside the far-reaching communications patterns of the Instrumentality, there were soft spots, rotten points, garrulous men. The MacArthur-McBan computer, sheltered in the Palace of the Governor of Night, had had time to work out abstract economics and weather patterns, but the computer had not tasted human love or human wickedness. All the messages concerning Rod's speculation in the forward santaclara crop and stroon export had been sent in the clear. It was no wonder that on many worlds, people saw Rod as a chance, an opportunity, a victim, a benefactor, or an enemy.

For we all know the old poem:

 
Luck is hot and people funny.
Everybody's fond of money.
Lose a chance and sell your mother.
Win the pot and buy another.
Other people fall and crash:
You may get the ton of cash!
 

It applied in this case too. People ran hot and cold with the news.

Commissioner Teadrinker tapped his teeth with a pencil.

Four megacredits foe money already and more, much more to come.

Teadrinker lived in a fever of perpetual humiliation. He had chosen it. It was called "the honorable disgrace" and it applied to ex-Lords of the Instrumentality who chose long life instead of service and honor. He was a thousandmorer, meaning that he had traded his career, his reputation, and his authority for a long life of one thousand or more years. (The Instrumentality had learned, long ago, that the best way to protect its members from temptation was to tempt them itself. By offering "honorable disgrace" and low, secure jobs within the Instrumentality to those Lords who might be tempted to trade long life for their secrets, it kept its own potential defectors. Teadrinker was one of these.)

He saw the news and he was a skilled wise man. He could not do anything to the Instrumentality with money, but money worked wonders on Earth. He could buy a modicum of honor. Perhaps he could even have the records falsified and get married again. He flushed slightly, even after hundreds of years, when he remembered his first wife blazing at him when she saw his petition for long life and honorable disgrace: "Go ahead and live, you fool. Live and watch me die without you, inside the decent four hundred years which everybody else has if they work for it and want it. Watch your children die, watch your friends die, watch all your hobbies and ideas get out of date. Go along, you horrible little man, and let me die like a human being!"

A few megacredits could help that.

Teadrinker was in charge of incoming visitors. His underman, the cattle-derived B'dank, was custodian of the scavenger spiders—half-tame one-ton insects which stood by for emergency work if the services of the tower failed. He wouldn't need to have this Norstrilian merchant very long. Just long enough for a recorded order and a short murder.

Perhaps not. If the Instrumentality caught him, it would be dream-punishments, things worse than Shayol itself.

Perhaps yes. If he succeeded, he would escape a near immortality of boredom and could have a few decades of juicy fun instead.

He tapped his teeth again.

"Do nothing, Teadrinker," he said to himself, "but think, think, think. Those spiders look as though they might have possibilities."

"Put two converted police cruisers in orbit around the Sun. Mark them for charter or sale, so that we won't run into the police.

"Put an agent into every liner which is Earthbound within the time stated.

"Remember, we don't want the man. Just his luggage. He's sure to be carrying a half-ton or so of stroon. With that kind of fortune, we could pay off all the debts we gathered with that Bozart business. Funny we never heard from Bozart. Nothing.

"Put three senior thieves in Earthport itself. Make sure that they have fake stroon, diluted down to about one-thousandth, so that they can work the luggage switch if they have the chance.

"I know all this costs money, but you have to spend money to get it. Agreed, gentlemen of the larcenical arts?"

There was a chorus of agreement around the table, except for one old, wise thief who said,

"You know my views."

"Yes," said the chairman, with toneless polite hatred, "we know your views. Rob corpses. Clean out wrecks. Become human hyenas instead of human wolves."

With unexpected humor the old man said, "Crudely put. But correct. And safer."

"Do we need to vote?" said the chairman, looking around the table.

There was a chorus of nos.

"Carried, then," said the presiding chief. "Hit hard, and hit for the small target, not the big one."

"He is coming, father! He is coming."

"Who is coming?" said the voice, like a great drum resounding.

E'lamelanie said it as though it were a prayer: "The blessed one, the appointed one, the guarantor of our people, the new messenger on whom the robot, rat and Copt agreed. With money he is coming, to help us, to save us, to open to us the light of day and the vaults of heaven."

"You are blasphemous," said the E'telekeli.

The girl fell into a hush. She not only respected her father. She worshipped him as her personal religious leader. His great eyes blazed as though they could see through thousands of meters of dirt and rock and still see beyond into the deep of space. Perhaps he could see that far . . . Even his own people were never sure of the limits of his power. His white face and white feathers gave his penetrating eyes a miraculously piercing capacity.

Calmly, rather kindly, he added, "My darling, you are wrong. We simply do not know who this man McBan really is."

"Couldn't it be written?" she pleaded. "Couldn't it be promised? That's the direction of space from which the robot, the rat and the Copt sent back our very special message, 'From the uttermost deeps one shall come, bringing uncountable treasure and a sure delivery.' So it might be now! Mightn't it?"

"My dear," he responded, "you still have a crude idea of real treasure if you think it is measured in megacredits. Go read The Scrap of the Book, then think, and then tell me what you have thought. But meanwhile—no more chatter. We must not excite our poor oppressed people."

On this day Ruth thought nothing at all of Norstrilia or treasures. She was trying to do watercolors of the breakers and they came out very badly indeed. The real ones kept on being too beautiful and the water colors looked like watercolors.

"All the riffraff of all the worlds. They're all going to make a run for that silly boy of ours."

"Right."

"If he stays here, they'll come here."

"Right."

"Let's let him go to Earth. I have a feeling that little rascal Redlady will smuggle him out tonight and save us the trouble."

"Right."

"After a while it will be all right for him to come back. He won't spoil our hereditary defense of looking stupid. I'm afraid he's bright but by Earth standards he's just a yokel."

"Right."

"Should we send along twenty or thirty more Rod McBans and get the attackers really loused up?"

"No."

"Why not, Sir and Owner?"

"Because it would look clever. We rely on never looking clever. I have the next best answer."

"What's that?"

"Suggest to all the really rum worlds we know that a good impersonator could put his hands on the McBan money. Make the suggestion so that they would not know that we had originated it. The starlanes will be full of Rod McBans, complete with phony Norstrilian accents, for the next couple of hundred years. And no one will suspect that we set them up to it. Stupid's the word, mate, stupid. If they ever think we're clever, we're for it!" The speaker sighed: "How do the bloody fools suppose our forefathers got off Paradise VII if they weren't clever? How can they think we'd hold this sharp little monopoly for thousands of years? They're stupid not to think about it, but let's not make them think. Right?"

"Right."

Rod woke with a strange feeling of well-being. In a corner of his mind there were memories of pandemonium—knives, blood, medicine, a monkey working as surgeon. Rum dreams! He glanced around and immediately tried to jump out of bed.

The whole world was on fire!

Bright blazing intolerable fire, like a blowtorch.

But the bed held him. He realized that a loose comfortable jacket ended in tapes and that the tapes were anchored in some way to the bed.

"Eleanor!" he shouted. "Come here."

He remembered the mad bird attacking him, Lavinia transporting him to the cabin of the sharp Earthman, Lord Redlady. He remembered medicines and fuss. But this—what was this?

When the door opened, more of the intolerable light poured in. It was as though every cloud had been stripped from the sky of Old North Australia, leaving only the blazing heavens and the fiery sun. There were people who had seen that happen, when the weather machines occasionally broke down and let a hurricane cut a hole in the clouds, but it had certainly not happened in his time, or in his grandfather's time.

The man who entered was pleasant, but he was no Norstrilian. His shoulders were slight, he did not look as though he could lift a cow, and his face had been washed so long and so steadily that it looked like a baby's face. He had an odd medical-looking suit on, all white, and his face combined the smile and the ready professional sympathy of a good physician.

"We're feeling better, I see," said he.

"Where on Earth am I?" asked Rod. "In a satellite? It feels odd."

"You're not on Earth, man."

"I know I'm not. I've never been there. Where's this place?"

"Mars. The Old Star Station. I'm Jeanjacques Vomact." Rod mumbled the name so badly the other man had to spell it out for him. When that was straightened out, Rod came back to the subject.

"Where's Mars? Can you untie me? When's that light going to go off?"

"I'll untie you right now," said Doctor Vomact, "but stay in bed and take it easy until we've given you some food and taken some tests. The light—that's sunshine. I'd say it's about seven hours, local time, before it goes off. This is late morning. Don't you know what Mars is? It's a planet."