Since she was in a rare good humor, he dared to mention his half-secret project to her.
“Do you think, my lady, that if we have all this unexpected credit, we could waste a little of our stroon imports?”
Her laugh stopped. “On what?” she said sharply.
“On the underpeople. For the best of them.”
“Oh, no. Oh, no! Not for the animals, while there are still people who suffer. You’re mad to think of it, my Lord.”
“I’m mad,” he said. “I’m mad all right. Mad — for justice. And this strikes me as simple justice. I’m not asking for equal rights. Merely for a little more justice for them.”
“They’re underpeople,” she said blankly. “They’re animals.” As though this comment settled the matter altogether.
“You never heard, did you, my lady, of the dog named Joan?” His question held a wealth of allusion.
She saw no depth in it, said flatly, “No,” and went back to studying the agency for the day.
The old engines turned like tides. The smell of hot oil was on them. Down here there were no luxuries. Life and flesh were cheaper than transistors; besides, they had much less radiation to be detected. In the groaning depths, the hidden and forgotten under-people lived. They thought their chief, the E’telekeli, to be magical. Sometimes he thought so himself.
His white handsome face staring like a marble bust of immortality, his crumpled wings hugged closely to him in fatigue, he called to his first-egg child, the girl E’lamelanie,
“He comes, my darling.”
“That one, father? The promised one.”
“The rich one.”
Her eyes widened. She was his daughter but she did not always understand his powers. “How do you know, father?”
“If I tell you the truth, will you agree to let me erase it from your mind right away, so there will be no danger of betrayal?”
“Of course, father.”
“No,” said the marble-faced bird-man, “you must say the right words—”
“I promise, father, that if you fill my heart with the truth, and if my joy at the truth is full, that I will yield to you my mind, my whole mind without fear, hope, or reservation, and that I will ask you to take from my mind whatever truth or parts of the truth might hurt our kind of people, in the name of the First Forgotten One, in the Name of the Second Forgotten One, in the Name of the Third Forgotten One, and for the sake of D’joan whom we all love and remember!”
He stood. He was a tall man, His legs ended in the enormous feet of a bird, with white talons shimmering like mother of pearl. His humanoid hands stood forth from the joint of his wings; with them he extended the prehistoric gesture of blessing over her head, while he chanted the truth in a ringing hypnotic voice,
“Let the truth be yours, my daughter, that you may be whole and happy with the truth. Knowing the truth, my daughter, know freedom and the right to forget!
“The child, my child, who was your brother, the little boy you loved…”
“Yeekasoose!” she said, her voice trance-like and childish.
“E’ikasus, whom you remember, was changed by me, his father, into the form of a small ape-man, so that the true people mistook him for an animal, not an underperson. They trained him as a surgeon and sent him to the Lord Redlady. He came with this young man McBan to Mars, where he met C’mell, whom I recommended to the Lord Jestocost for confidential errands. They are coming back with this man today. He has already bought the Earth, or most of it. Perhaps he will do us good. Do you know what you should know, my daughter?”
“Tell me, father, tell me. How do you know?”
“Remember the truth, girl, and then lose it! The messages come from Mars. We cannot touch the Big Blink or the message-coding machines, but each recorder has his own style. By a shift in the pace of his work, a friend can relay moods, emotions, ideas, and sometimes names. They have sent me words like ‘riches, monkey, small, cat, girl, everything, good’ by the pitch and speed of their recording. The human messages carry ours and no cryptographer in the world can find them.
“Now you know, and you will now now now now forget!”
He raised his hands again.
E’lamelanie looked at him normally with a happy smile, “It’s so sweet and funny, daddy, but I know I’ve just forgotten something good and wonderful!” Ceremonially he added, “Do not forget Joan.” Formally she responded, “I shall never forget Joan.”
THE HIGH SKY FLYING
Rod walked to the edge of the little park. This was utterly unlike any ship he had ever seen or heard about in Norstrilia. There was no noise, no cramping, no sign of weapons — just a pretty little cabin which housed the controls, the Go-Captain, the Pinlighters, and the Stop-Captain, and then a stretch of incredible green grass. He had walked on this grass from the dusty ground of Mars. There was a purr and a whisper. A false blue sky, very beautiful, covered him like a canopy.
He felt strange. He had whiskers like a cat, forty centimeters long, growing out of his upper lip, about twelve whiskers to each side. The doctor had colored his eyes with bright green irises. His ears reached up to a point. He looked like a cat-man and he wore the professional clothing of an acrobat; C’mell did too.
He had not gotten over C’mell.
She made every woman in Old North Australia look like a sack of lard. She was lean, limber, smooth, menancing and beautiful; she was soft to the touch, hard in her motions, quick, alert, and cuddlesome. Her red hair blazed with the silkiness of animal fire. She spoke with a soprano which tinkled like wild bells. Her ancestors and ancestresses had been bred to produce the most seductive girl on Earth. The task had succeeded. Even in repose, she was voluptuous. Her wide hips and sharp eyes invited the masculine passions. Her catlike dangerousness challenged every man whom she met. The true men who looked at her knew that she was a cat, and still could not keep their eyes off her. Human women treated her as though she were something disgraceful. She traveled as an acrobat, but she had already told Rod McBan confidentially that she was by profession a “girlygirl,” a female animal, shaped and trained like a person to serve as hostess to offworld visitors, required by law and custom to invite their love, while promised the penalty of death if she accepted it.
Rod liked her, though he had been painfully shy with her at first. There was no side to her, no posh, no swank. Once she got down to business, her incredible body faded partway into the background, though with the sides of his eyes he could never quite forget it. It was her mind, her intelligence, her humor and good humor, which carried them across the hours and days they spent together. He found himself trying to impress her that he was a grown man, only to discover that in the spontaneous, sincere affections of her quick cat heart she did not care in the least what his status was. He was simply her partner and they had work to do together. It was his job to stay alive and it was her job to keep him alive.
Doctor Vomact had told him not to speak to the other passengers, not to say anything to each other, and to call for silence if any of them spoke.
There were ten other passengers who stared at one another in uncomfortable amazement.
Ten in number, they were.
All ten of them were Rod McBan.
Ten identified Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBans to the one hundred and fifty-first, all exactly alike. Apart from C’mell herself and the little monkey-doctor, A’gentur, the only person on the ship who was not Rod McBan was Rod McBan himself. He had become the cat-man. The others seemed, each by himself, to be persuaded that he alone was Rod McBan and that the other nine were parodies. They watched each other with a mixture of gloom and suspicion mixed with amusement, just as the real Rod McBan would have done, had he been in their place.