He turned his eyes away from her to see the astonishing thing which was happening all around them. The air, the ground, the sea were all becoming thick with life. Fish flashed out of blue waves. Birds circled by the multitude around them. The beach was thick with little running birds. Dogs and running animals which he had never seen before stood restlessly around C’mell — hectares of them. Abruptly she stopped her song. With very high volume and clarity, she spat commands in all directions:
“Think of people.”
“Think of this cat and me running away somewhere.”
“Think of ships.”
“Look for strangers.”
“Think of things in the sky.”
Rod was glad he did not have his broad-band hiering come on, as it sometimes had done at home. He was sure he would have gone dizzy with the pictures and the contradictions of it all.
She had grabbed his shoulders and was whispering fiercely into his ear:
“Rod, they’ll cover us. Please make a trip with me, Rod. One last dangerous trip. Not for you. Not for me. Not even for mankind. For life, Rod. The Aitch Eye wants to see you.”
“Who’s the Aitch Eye?”
“He’ll tell you the secret if you see him,” she hissed. “Do it for me, then, if you don’t trust my ideas.”
He smiled. “For you, C’mell, yes.”
“Don’t even think, then, till you get there. Don’t even ask questions. Just come along. Millions of lives depend on you, Rod.”
She stood up and sang again, but the new song had no grief in it, no anguish, no weird keening from species to species. It was as cool and pretty as a music box, as simple as an assured and happy goodbye.
The animals vanished so rapidly that it was hard to believe that legions of them had so recently been there.
“That,” said C’mell, “should rattle the telepathic monitors for a while. They are not very imaginative anyhow, and when they get something like this they write up reports about it. Then they can’t understand their reports and sooner or later one of them asks me what I did. I tell them the truth. It’s simple.”
“What are you going to tell them this time?” he asked, as they walked back to the house.
“That I had something which I did not want them to hear.”
“They won’t take that.”
“Of course not, but they will suspect me of trying to beg stroon for you to give to the underpeople.”
“Do you want some, C’mell?”
“Of course not! It’s illegal and it would just make me live longer than my natural life. The Catmaster is the only underperson who gets stroon, and he gets it by a special vote of the Lords.”
They had reached the house. C’mell paused:
“Remember, we are the servants of the Lady Frances Oh. She promised Jestocost that she would order us to do anything that I asked her to. So she’s going to order us to have a good, hearty breakfast. Then she is going to order us to look for something far under the surface of Earthport.”
“She is? But why—”
“No questions, Rod.” The smile she gave him would have melted a monument. He felt well. He was amused and pleased by the physical delight of hiering and spieking with the occasional true people who passed by. (Some underpeople could hier and spiek but they tried to conceal it, for fear that they would be resented.) He felt strong. Losing C’mell was a sad thing to do, but it was a whole day off; he began dreaming of things that he could do for her when they parted. Buying her the services of thousands of people for the rest of her life? Giving her jewelry which would be the envy of Earth mankind? Leasing her a private planoform yacht? He suspected these might not be legal, but they were pleasant to think about.
Three hours later, he had no time for pleasant thoughts. He was bone-weary again. They had flown into Earthport city “on the orders” of their hostess, the Lady Oh, and they had started going down. Forty-five minutes of dropping had made his stomach very queasy. He felt the air go warm and stale and he wished desperately that he had not given up his sense of smell.
Where the dropshafts ended, the tunnels and the elevators began.
Down they went, where incredibly old machinery spun slowly in a spray of oil, performing tasks which only the wildest mind could guess at.
In one room, C’mell had stopped and had shouted at him over the noise of engines:
“That’s a pump.”
It did not look obvious. Huge turbines moved wearily. They seemed to be hooked up to an enormous steam engine powered by nuclear fuel. Five or six brightly polished robots eyed them suspiciously as they walked around the machine, which was at least eighty meters long by forty-five high.
“And come here…” shouted C’mell.
They went into another room, empty and clean and quiet except for a rigid column of moving water which shot from floor to ceiling with no evidence of machinery at all. An underman, sloppily formed from a rat body, got up from his rocking chair when they entered. He bowed to C’mell as though she were a great lady but she waved him back to his chair.
She took Rod near the column of water and pointed to a shiny ring on the floor.
“That’s the other pump. They do the same amount of work.”
“What is it?” he shouted.
“Force-field, I guess. I’m not an engineer.” They went on.
In a quieter corridor she explained that the pumps were both of them for the service of weather control. The old one had been running six or seven thousand years, and showed very little wear. When people had needed a supplementary one, they had simply printed it on plastic, set it in the floor, and turned it on with a few amps. The underman was there just to make sure that nothing broke down or went critical.
“Can’t real people design things any more?” asked Rod.
“Only if they want to. Making them want to do things is the hard part now.”
“You mean, they don’t want to do anything?”
“Not exactly,” said C’mell, “but they find that we are better than they are at almost anything. Real work, that is, not statesmanship like running the Instrumentality and the Earth government. Here and there a real human being gets to work, and there are always offworlders like you to stimulate them and challenge them with new problems. But they used to have secure lives of four hundred years, a common language, and a standard conditioning. They were dying off, just by being too perfect. One way to get better would have been to kill off us underpeople, but they couldn’t do that all the way. There was too much messy work to be done that you couldn’t count on robots for. Even the best robot, if he’s a computer linked to the mind of a mouse, will do fine routine, but unless he has a very complete human education, he’s going to make some wild judgments which won’t suit what people want. So they need underpeople. I’m still cat underneath it all, but even the cats which are unchanged are pretty close relatives of human beings. They make the same basic choices between power and beauty, between survival and self-sacrifice, between common sense and high courage. So the Lady Alice More worked out this plan for the Rediscovery of Man. Set up Ancient Nations, give everybody an extra culture besides the old one based on the Old Common Tongue, let them get mad at each other, restore some disease, some danger, some accidents, but average it out so that nothing is really changed.”
They had come to a storeroom, the sheer size of which made Rod blink. The great reception hall at the top of Earthport had astounded him; this room was twice the size. The room was filled with extremely ancient cargoes which had not even been unpacked from their containers. Rod could see that some were marked outbound for worlds which no longer existed, or which had changed their names; others were inbound, but no one had unpacked them for five thousand years and more.