“What’s all this stuff?”
“Shipping. Technological change. Somebody wrote it all off the computers, so they didn’t have to think of it any more. This is the thing which underpeople and robots are searching, to supply the ancient artifacts for the Rediscovery of Man. One of our boys-rat stock, with a human I.Q. of 300 — found something marked Muse National. It was the whole National Museum of the Republic of Mali, which had been put inside a mountain when the ancient wars became severe. Mali apparently was not a very important ‘nation,’ as they called those groupings, but it had the same language as France, and we were able to supply the real material with almost everything they needed to restore some kind of a French civilization. China has been hard. The Chinesians survived longer than any other nation, and they did their own grave robbing, so that we have found it impossible to reconstruct China before the age of space. We can’t modify people into being Ancient Chinese.”
Rod stopped, thunderstruck. “Can I talk to you here?”
C’mell listened with a faraway look on her face. “Not here. I feel the very weak sweep of a monitor across my mind now and then. In a couple of minutes you can. Let’s hurry along.”
“I just thought,” cried Rod, “of the most important question in all the worlds!”
“Stop thinking it, then,” said C’mell, “until we come to a safe place.”…
Instead of going straight on through the big aisle between the forgotten crates and packages, she squeezed between two crates and made her way to the edge of the big underground storeroom.
“That package,” she said, “is stroon. They lost it. We could help ourselves to it if we wanted to, but we’re afraid of it.”
Rod looked at the names on the package. It had been shipped by Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan XXVI to Adaminaby Port and reconsigned to Earthport. “That’s one hundred and twenty-five generations ago, shipped from the Station of Doom. My farm. I think it turns poison if you leave it for more than two hundred years. Our own military people have some horrible uses for it, when invaders show up, but ordinary Norstrilians, when they find old stroon, always turn it in to the Commonwealth. We’re afraid of it. Not that we often lose it. It’s too valuable and we’re too greedy, with a twenty million percent import duty on everything…”
C’mell led on. They unexpectedly passed a tiny robot, a lamp fixed to his head, who was seated between two enormous piles of books. He was apparently reading them one by one, because he had beside him a pile of notes larger in bulk than he was. He did not look up, nor did they interrupt him.
At the wall, C’mell said, “Now do exactly what you’re told. See the dust along the base of this crate?”
“I see it,” said Rod.
“That must be left undisturbed. Now watch. I’m going to jump from the top of this crate to the top of that one, without disturbing the dust. Then I want you to jump the same way and go exactly where I point, without even thinking about it, if you can manage. I’ll follow. Don’t try to be polite or chivalrous, or you’ll mess up the whole arrangement.”
Rod nodded.
She jumped to a case against the wall. Her red hair did not fly behind her, because she had tied it up in a turban before they started out, when she had obtained coveralls for each of them from the robot-servants of the Lady Frances Oh. They had looked like an ordinary couple of working c’people.
Either she was very strong or the case was very light. Standing on the case, she tipped it very delicately, so that the pattern of dust around its base would be unchanged, save for microscopic examination. A blue glow came from beyond the case. With an odd, practised turn of the wrist she indicated that Rod should jump from his case to the tipped one, and from there into the area — whatever it might be — beyond the case. It seemed easy for him, but he wondered if she could support both his weight and hers on the case. He remembered her order not to talk or think. He tried to think of the salmon steak he had eaten the day before. That should certainly be a good cat-thought, if a monitor should catch his mind at that moment! He jumped, teetered on the slanting top of the second packing case, and scrambled into a tiny doorway just big enough for him to crawl through. It was apparently designed for cables, pipes and maintenance, not for habitual human use: it was too low to stand it. He scrambled forward.
There was a slam.
C’mell had jumped in after him, letting the case fall back into its old and apparently undisturbed position.
She crawled up to him. “Keep going,” she said.
“Can we talk here?”
“Of course! Do you want to? It’s not a very sociable place.”
“That question, that big question,” said Rod. “I’ve got to ask you. You underpeople are taking charge of people, if you’re fixing up their new cultures for them, you’re getting to be the masters of men!”
“Yes,” said C’mell, and let the explosive affirmative hang in the air between them.
He couldn’t think of anything to say; it was his big bright idea for the day, and the fact that she already knew underpeople were becoming secret masters — that was too much!
She looked at his friendly face and said, more gently, “We underpeople have seen it coming for a long time. Some of the human people do, too. Especially the Lord Jestocost. He’s no fool. And, Rod, you fit in.”
“I?”
“Not as a person. As an economic change. As a source of unallocated power.”
“You mean, C’mell, you’re after me, too? I can’t believe it. I can recognize a pest or a nuisance or a robber. You don’t seem like any of these. You’re good, all the way through.” His voice faltered. “I meant it this morning, C’mell, when I asked you to marry me.”
The delicacy of cat and the tenderness of woman combined in her voice as she answered, “I know you meant it.” She stroked a lock of hair away from his forehead, in a caress as restrained as any touch could be. “But it’s not for us. And I’m not using you myself, Rod. I want nothing for myself, but I want a good world for underpeople. And for people too. For people too. We cats have loved you people long before we had brains. We’ve been your cats longer than anyone can remember. Do you think our loyalty to the human race would stop just because you changed our shapes and added a lot of thinking power? I love you, Rod, but I love people too. That’s why I’m taking you to the Aitch Eye!”
“Can you tell me what that is — now?”
She laughed. “This place is safe. It’s the Holy Insurgency. The secret government of the underpeople. This is a silly place to talk about it, Rod. You’re going beneath the ground. E’ikasus is one of His sons.”
“All of them?” Rod was thinking of the Chiefs of the Instrumentality.
“It’s not a them, it’s a him. The E’telekeli. The bird meet the head of it, right now.”
“If there’s only one, how did you choose him? Is he like the British Queen, whom we lost so long ago?”
C’mell laughed. “We did not choose Him. He grew and now He leads us. You people took an eagle’s egg and tried to make it into a Daimoni man. When the experiment failed, you threw the fetus out. It lived. It’s He. It’ll be the strongest mind you’ve ever met. Come on. This is no place to talk, and we’re still talking.”
She started crawling down the horizontal shaft, waving at Rod to follow her.
He followed.
As they crawled, he called to her, ”
“C’mell, stop a minute.”
She stopped until he caught up with her. She thought he might ask for a kiss, so worried and lonely did he look. She was ready to be kissed. He surprised her by saying, instead,
“I can’t smell, C’mell. Please, I’m so used to smelling that I miss it. What does this place smell like?”
Her eyes widened and then she laughed: “It smells like underground. Electricity burning the air. Animals somewhere far away, a lot of different smells of them. The old, old smell of man, almost gone. Engine oil and bad exhaust. It smells like a headache. It smells like silence, like things untouched. There, is that it?”