We the Underpeople (46 page)

"
I printed real news.

"Rod, the roof fell in. All persons who had been reconditioned for Spanish were given stability tests. I was asked, did I know the law? Certainly, said I, I knew the law. No mass communications except within government. News is the mother of opinion, opinion the cause of mass delusion, delusion the source of war. The law was plain and I thought it did not matter. I thought it was just an old law.

"I was wrong, Rod, wrong. They did not charge me with violating the news laws. They charged me with revolt—against the Instrumentality. They sentenced me to death, immediately. Then they made it conditional, conditional on my going offplanet and behaving well. When I got here, they made it double conditional. If my act has no bad results.
But I can't find out.
I can go back to Earth any time. That part is no trouble. If they think my misdeed still has effect, they will give me the dream punishments or send me off to that awful planet somewhere. If they think it doesn't matter, they will restore my citizenship with a laugh. But they don't know the worst of it. My underman learned Spanish and the underpeople are keeping the newspaper going very secretly. I can't even imagine what they will do to me if they ever find out what has gone wrong and know that it was me who started it all. Do you think I'm wrong, Rod?"

Rod stared at him. He was not used to judging adults, particularly not at their own request. In Old North Australia, people kept their distance. There were fitting ways for doing everything, and one of the most fitting things was to deal only with people of your own age group.

He tried to be fair, to think in an adult way, and he said, "Of course I think you're wrong, Mister and Doctor Vomact. But you're not very wrong. None of us should trifle with war."

Vomact seized Rod's arm. The gesture was hysterical, almost ugly. "Rod," he whispered, very urgently, "you're rich. You come from an important family. Could you get me into Old North Australia?"

"Why not?" said Rod. "I can pay for all the visitors I want."

"No, Rod, I don't mean that. As an immigrant."

It was Rod's turn to become tense. "Immigrant?" he said. "The penalty for immigration is death. We're killing our own people right now, just to keep the population down. How do you think we could let outsiders settle with us? And the stroon. What about that?"

"Never mind, Rod," said Vomact. "I won't bother you again. I won't mention it again. It's a weary thing, to live many years with death ready to open the next door, ring the next bell, be on the next page of the message file. I haven't married. How could I?" With a whimsical turn of his vivacious mind and face, he was off on a cheerful track. "I have a medicine, Rod, a medicine for doctors, even for rebels. Do you know what it is?"

"A tranquilizer?" Rod was still shocked at the indecency of anyone mentioning immigration to a Norstrilian. He could not think straight.

"Work," said the little doctor. "That's my medicine."

"Work is always good," said Rod, feeling pompous at the generalization. The magic had gone out of the afternoon.

The doctor felt it too. He sighed. "I'll show you the old sheds which men from Earth first built. And then I'll go to work. Do you know what my main work is?"

"No," said Rod, politely.

"You," said Doctor Vomact, with one of his sad gay mischievous smiles. "You're well, but I've got to make you more than well. I've got to make you kill-proof."

They had reached the sheds.

The ruins might be old but they were not very impressive. They looked something like the homes on the more modest stations back on Norstrilia.

On their way back Rod said, very casually,

"What are you going to do to me, Sir and Doctor?"

"Anything you want," said Vomact lightly.

"Really, now. What?"

"Well," said Vomact, "the Lord Redlady sent along a whole cube of suggestions. Keep your personality. Keep your retinal and brain images. Change your appearance. Change your workwoman into a young man who looks just like your description."

"You can't do that to Eleanor. She's a citizen."

"Not here, not on Mars, she isn't. She's your baggage."

"But her legal rights!"

"This is Mars, Rod, but it's Earth territory. Under Earth law. Under the direct control of the Instrumentality. We can do these things all right. The hard thing is this: Would you consent to passing for an underman?"

"I never saw one. How would I know?" said Rod.

"Could you stand the shame of it?"

Rod laughed, by way of an answer.

Vomact sighed. "You're funny people, you Norstrilians. I'd rather die than be mistaken for an underman. The disgrace of it, the contempt! But the Lord Redlady said that you could walk into Earth as free as a breeze if we made you pass for a cat-man. I might as well tell you, Rod. Your wife is already here."

Rod stopped walking. "My wife? I have no wife."

"Your cat-wife," said the doctor. "Of course it isn't real marriage. Underpeople aren't allowed to have it. But they have a companionship which looks something like marriage and we sometimes slip and call them husband and wife. The Instrumentality has already sent a cat-girl out to be your 'wife.' She'll travel back to Earth with you from Mars. You'll just be a pair of lucky cats who've been doing dances and acrobatics for the bored station personnel here."

"And Eleanor?"

"I suppose somebody will kill her, thinking it's you. That's what you brought her for, isn't it? Aren't you rich enough?"

"No, no, no," said Rod, "nobody is that rich. We have to think of something else."

They spent the entire walk making new plans which would protect Eleanor and Rod both.

As they entered the shedport and took off their helmets, Rod said,

"This wife of mine, when can I see her?"

"You won't overlook her," said Vomact. "She's as wild as fire and twice as beautiful."

"Does she have a name?"

"Of course she does," said the doctor. "They all do."

"What is it, then?"

"C'mell."

People waited, here and there. If there had been worldwide news coverage, the population would have converged on Earthport with curiosity, passion, or greed. But
news
had been forbidden long before; people could know only the things which concerned them personally; the centers of Earth remained undisturbed. Here and there, as Rod made his trip from Mars to Earth, there were anticipations of the event. Overall, the world of Old Old Earth remained quiet, except for the perennial bubble of its inward problems.

"They shut me out of the meeting this morning, when I'm in charge of visitors. That means that something is in the air," said Commissioner Teadrinker to his underman, B'dank.

B'dank, expecting a dull day, had been chewing his cud while sitting on his stool in the corner. He knew far more about the case than did his master, and he had learned his additional information from the secret sources of the underpeople, but he was resolved to betray nothing, to express nothing. Hastily he swallowed his cud and said, in his reassuring, calm bull voice:

"There might be some other reason, Sir and Master. If they were considering a promotion for you, they would leave you out of the meeting. You certainly deserve a promotion, Sir and Master."

"Are the spiders ready?" asked Teadrinker crossly.

"Who can tell the mind of a giant spider?" said B'dank calmly. "I talked to the foreman-spider for three hours yesterday with sign language. He wants twelve cases of beer. I told him I would give him more—he could have ten. The poor devil can't count, though he thinks he can, so he was pleased at having outbargained me. They will take the person you designate to the steeple of Earthport and they will hide that person so that the human being cannot be found for many hours. When I appear with the cases of beer, they will give me the person. I will then jump out of a window, holding the person in my arms. There are so few people who go down the outside of Earthport that they may not notice me at all. I will take the person to the ruined palace directly under Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, the one which you showed me, Sir and Master, and there I will keep the person in good order until you come and do the things which you have to do."

Teadrinker looked across the room. The big, florid, handsome face was so exasperatingly calm that it annoyed him. Teadrinker had heard that bull-men, because of their cattle origin, were sometimes subject to fits of uncontrollable frantic rage, but he had never seen the least sign of any such phenomenon in B'dank. He snapped,

"Aren't you worried?"

"Why should I worry, Sir and Master? You are doing the worrying for both of us."

"Go fry yourself!"

"That is not an operational instruction," said B'dank. "I suggest that the master eat something. That will calm his nerves. Nothing at all will happen today, and it is very hard for true men to wait for nothing at all. I have seen many of them get upset."

Teadrinker gritted his teeth at this extreme reasonableness. Nevertheless, he took a dehydrated banana out of his desk drawer and began chewing on it.

He looked sharply across at B'dank. "Do you want one of these things?"

B'dank slid off his chair with surprisingly smooth agility; he was at the desk, his enormous ham-sized hand held out, before he said,

"Yes, indeed, sir. I love bananas."

Teadrinker gave him one and then said, fretfully,

"Are you sure of the fact you never met the Lord Redlady?"

"Sure as any underman can be," said B'dank, munching the banana. "We never really know what has been put into our original conditioning, or who put it there. We're inferior and we're not supposed to know. It is forbidden even to inquire."

"So you admit that you might be a spy or agent of the Lord Redlady?"

"I might be, sir, but I do not feel like it."

"Do you know who Redlady is?"

"You have told me, sir, that he is the most dangerous human being in the whole galaxy."

"That's right," said Teadrinker, "and if I am running into something which the Lord Redlady has set up, I might as well cut up my throat before I start."

"It would be simpler, sir," said B'dank, "not to kidnap this Rod McBan at all. That is the only element of danger. If you did nothing, things would go on as they always have gone on—quietly, calmly."

"That's the horror and anxiety of it! They
do
always go on. Don't you think I want to get out of here, to taste power and freedom again?"

"You say so, sir," said B'dank, hoping that Teadrinker would offer him one more of those delicious dried bananas.

Teadrinker, distracted, did not.

He just walked up and down his room, desperate with the torment of hope, danger and delay.

The Lady Johanna Gnade was there first. She was clean, well dressed, alert. The Lord Jestocost, who followed her in, wondered if she had any personal life at all. It was bad manners, among the Chiefs of the Instrumentality, to inquire into another Chief's personal affairs, even though the complete personal histories of each of them, kept up to the day and minute, was recorded in the computer cabinet in the corner. Jestocost knew, because he had peeped his own record, using another Chief's name, just so that he could see whether several minor illegalities of his had been recorded; they had been, all except for the biggest one—his deal with the cat-girl C'mell—which he had successfully kept off the recording screens. (The record simply showed him having a nap at the time.) If the Lady Johanna had any secrets, she kept them well.

"My Sir and Colleague," said she, "I suspect you of sheer inquisitiveness—a vice most commonly attributed to women."

"When we get as old as this, my lady, the differences in character between men and women become imperceptible. If, indeed, they ever existed in the first place. You and I are bright people and we each have a good nose for danger or disturbance. Isn't it likely we would both look up somebody with the impossible name of Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan to the hundred-and-fifty-first generation? See—I memorized all of it! Don't you think that was rather clever of me?"

"Rather," said she, in a tone which implied she didn't.

"I'm expecting him this morning."

"You are?" she asked, on a rising note which implied that there was something improper about his knowledge. "There's nothing about it in the messages."

"That's it," said the Lord Jestocost, smiling. "I arranged for Mars solar radiation to be carried two extra decimals until he left. This morning it's back down to three decimals. That means he's coming. Clever of me, wasn't it?"

"Too clever," she said. "Why ask me? I never thought you valued my opinion. Anyhow, why are you taking all these pains with the case? Why don't you just ship him out so far that it would take him a long lifetime, even with stroon, to get back here again?"

He looked at her evenly until she flushed. He said nothing.

"My—my comment was improper, I suppose," she stammered. "You and your sense of justice. You're always putting the rest of us in the wrong."

"I didn't mean to," he said mildly, "because I am just thinking of Earth. Did you know he owns this tower?"

"Earthport?" she cried. "Impossible."

"Not at all," said Jestocost. "I myself sold it to his agent ten days ago. For forty megacredits foe money. That's more than we happen to have on Earth right now. When he deposited it, we began paying him three percent a year interest. And that wasn't all he bought from me. I sold him that ocean too, right there, the one the ancients called Atlantic. And I sold him three hundred thousand attractive underwomen trained in various tasks, together with the dower rights of seven hundred human women of appropriate ages."

"You mean you did all this to save the Earth treasury three megacredits a year?"

"Wouldn't you? Remember, this is foe money."