“I also,” added the E’telekeli, “will take care of all the little incidentals through my own network and I will leave the memory of them in your mind. If you trust me that should be enough. You get home, safe. You are protected, off Norstrilia, into which I rarely reach, for as long as you live. You have a separate life right now with C’mell and you will remember most of it. In return, you go to the wall and transfer your fortune, minus one-half FOE megacredit, to the Foundation of Rod McBan.”
Rod did not see that the underpeople thronged around him like worshippers. He had to stop when a very pale, tall girl took his hand and held it to her cheek. “You may not be the Promised One, but you are a great and good man. We can take nothing from you. We can only ask. That is the teaching of Joan. And you have given.”
“Who are you?” said Rod in a frightened voice, thinking that she might be some lost human girl whom the underpeople had abducted to the guts of the Earth.
“E’lamelanie, daughter of the E’telekeli.”
Rod stared at her and went to the wall. He pushed a routine sort of button. What a place to find it! “The Lord Jestocost,” he called. “McBan speaking. No, you fool, I own this system.”
A handsome, polished plumpish man appeared on the screen. “If I guess right,” said the strange man, “you are the first human being ever to get into the depths. Can I serve you, Mister and Owner McBan?”
“Take a note—” said the E’telekeli, out of sight of the machine, beside Rod.
Rod repeated it.
The Lord Jestocost called witnesses at his end.
It was a long dictation, but at last the conveyance was finished. Only at one point did Rod balk. When they tried to call it the McBan Foundation, he said, “Just call it the One Hundred and Fifty Fund.”
“One Hundred and Fifty?” asked Jestocost.
“For my father. It’s his number in our family. I’m to-the-hundred-and-fifty-first. He was before me. Don’t explain the number. Just use it.”
“All clear,” said Jestocost. “Now we have to get notaries and official witnesses to veridicate our imprints of your eyes, hands and brain. Ask the Person with you to give you a mask, so that the cat-man face will not upset the witnesses. Where is this machine you are using supposed to be located? I know perfectly well where I think it is.”
“At the foot of Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, in a forgotten market,” said the E’telekeli. “Your servicemen will find it there tomorrow when they come to check the authenticity of the machine.” He still stood out of line of sight of the machine, so that Jestocost could hear him but not see him.
“I know the voice,” said Jestocost. “It comes to me as in a great dream. But I shall not ask to see the face.”
“Your friend down here has gone where only underpeople go,” said the E’telekeli, “and we are disposing of his fate in more ways than one, my Lord, subject to your gracious approval.”
“My approval does not seem to have been needed much,” snorted Jestocost, with a little laugh.
“I would like to talk to you. Do you have any intelligent underperson near you?”
“I can call C’mell. She’s always somewhere around.”
“This time, my lord, you cannot. She’s here.”
“There, with you? I never knew she went there.” The amazement showed on the face of the Lord Jestocost.
“She is here, nevertheless. Do you have some other underperson?”
Rod felt like a dummy, standing in the visiphone while the two voices, unseen by one another, talked past him. But he felt, very truly, that they both wished him well. He was almost nervous in anticipation of the strange happiness which had been offered to him and C’mell, but he was a respectful enough young man to wait until the great ones got through their business.
“Wait a moment,” said Jestocost.
On the screen, in the depths, Rod could see the Lord of the Instrumentality work the controls of other, secondary screens. A moment later Jestocost answered:
“B’dank is here. He will enter the room in a few minutes.”
’Twenty minutes from now, my Sir and Lord, will you hold hands with your servant B’dank as you once did with C’mell? I have the problem of this young man and his return. There are things which you do not know, and I would rather not put them on the wires.”
Jestocost hesitated only for the slightest of moments. “Good, then,” he laughed. “I might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.”
The E’telekeli stood aside. Someone handed Rod a mask which hid his cat-man features and still left his eyes and hands exposed. The brain print was gotten through the eyes.
The recordings were made.
Rod went back to the bench and table. He helped himself to another drink of water from the carafe. Someone threw a wreath of fresh flowers around his shoulders. Fresh flowers! In such a place… He wondered. Three rather pretty undergirls, two of them of cat origin and one of them derived from dogs, were loading a freshly dressed C’mell toward him. She wore the simplest and most modest of all possible white dresses. Her waist was cinched by a broad golden belt. She laughed, stopped laughing and then blushed as they led her to Rod.
Two seats were arranged on the bench. Cushions were disposed so that both of them would be comfortable. Silky metallic caps, like the pleasure caps used in surgeries, were fitted on their heads. Rod felt his sense of smell explode within his brain; it came alive richly and suddenly. He took C’mell by the hand and began walking through an immemorial Earth forest, with a temple older than time shining in the clear soft light cast by Earth’s old moon. He knew that he was already dreaming. C’mell caught his thought and said,
“Rod, my master and lover, this is a dream. But I am in it with you…”
Who can measure a thousand years of happy dreaming — the travels, the hunts, the picnics, the visits to forgotten and empty cities, the discovery of beautiful views and strange places? And the love, and the sharing, and the re-reflection of everything wonderful and strange by two separate, distinct and utterly harmonious personalities. C’mell the c’girl and C’roderick the c’man: they seemed happily doomed to be with one another. Who can live whole centuries of real bliss and then report it in minutes? Who can tell the full tale of such real lives — happiness, quarrels, reconciliations, problems, solutions and always sharing, happiness, and more sharing… ?
When they awakened Rod very gently, they let C’mell sleep on. He looked down at himself and expected to find himself old. But he was a young man still, in the deep forgotten underground of the E’telekeli, and he could not even smell. He reached for the thousand wonderful years as he watched C’mell, young again, lying on the bench, but the dream-years had started fading even as he reached for them.
Rod stumbled on his feet. They led him to a chair. The E’telekeli sat in adjacent chair, at the same table. He seemed weary.
“My Mister and Owner McBan, I monitored your dreamsharing, just to make sure it stayed in the right general direction. I hope you are satisfied.”
Rod nodded, very slowly, and reached for the carafe of water, which someone had refilled while he slept.
“While you slept, Mister McBan,” said the great E’man, “I had a telepathic conference with the Lord Jestocost, who has been your friend, even though you do not know him. You have heard of the new automatic planoform ships.”
“They are experimental,” said Rod.
“So they are,” said the E’telekeli, “but perfectly safe. And the best ‘automatic’ ones are not automatic at all. They have snake-men pilots. My pilots. They can outperform any pilots of the Instrumentality.”