Cordwainer Smith: Norstrilia

He found himself humming a bit of a rhyme that had always been a part of the tradition of Old North Australia:

He’d been taught, bone deep, that his own world was a very special world, envied, loved, hated, and dreaded across the galaxy. He knew that he was part of a very special people. Other races and kinds of men farmed crops, or raised food, or designed machines, and manufactured weapons. Norstrilians did none of these things. From their dry fields, their sparse wells, their enormous sick sheep, they refined immortality itself.

And sold it for a high, high price. Rod McBan walked a little way into the yard. His home lay behind him. It was a log cabin built out of Daimoni beams — beams uncuttable, unchangeable, solid beyond all expectations of solidity. They had been purchased as a matched set thirty-odd planet hops away and brought to Old North Australia by photo-sails. The cabin was a fort which could withstand even major weapons, but it was still a cabin, simple inside and with a front yard of scuffed dust. The last red bit of dawn was whitening into day. Rod knew that he could not go far. He could hear the women out behind the house, the kinswomen who had come to barber and groom him for the triumph — or the other.

They never knew how much he knew. Because of his affliction, they had thought around him for years, counting on his telepathic deafness to be constant. Trouble was, it wasn’t; lots of times he heard things which nobody intended him to hear. He even remembered the sad little poem they had about the young people who failed to pass the test for one reason or another and had to go to the Dying House instead of coming forth as Norstrilian citizens and fully recognized subjects of Her-majesty-the-queen. (Nors-trilians had not had a real queen for some fifteen thousand years, but they were strong on tradition and did not let mere facts boggle them.) How did the little poem run, “This is the house of the long ago…”? In its own gloomy way it was cheerful. He erased his own footprint from the dust and suddenly he remembered the whole thing. He chanted it softly to himself.

It was all right to say that they looked with awe at the young and bold, but he hadn’t met a person yet who did not prefer life to death. He’d heard about people who chose death — of course he had — who hadn’t? But the experience was third-hand, fourth-hand, fifth-hand.

He knew that some people had said of him that he would be better off dead, just because he had never learned to communicate telepathically and had to use old spoken words like off-worlders or barbarians.

Rod himself certainly didn’t think he would be better dead.

Indeed, he sometimes looked at normal people and wondered how they managed to go through life with the constant silly chatter of other people’s thoughts running through their minds. In the times that his mind lifted, so that he could hier for a while, he knew that hundreds or thousands of minds rattled in on him with unbearable clarity; he could even hier the minds that thought they had their telepathic shields up. Then, in a little while, the merciful cloud of his handicap came down on his mind again and he had a deep unique privacy which everybody on Old North Australia should have envied.

His computer had said to him once, “The words hier and spiek are corruptions of the words hear and speak. They are always pronounced in the second rising tone of voice, as though you were asking a question under the pressure of amusement and alarm, if you say the words with your voice. They refer only to telepathic communication between persons or between persons and underpeople.”

“What are underpeople?” he had asked. “Animals modified to speak, to understand, and usually to look like men. They differ from cerebro-centered robots in that the robots are built around an actual animal mind, but are mechanical and electronic relays, while underpeople are composed entirely of Earth-derived living tissue.” “Why haven’t I ever seen one?” “They are not allowed on Norstrilia at all, unless they are in the service of the defense establishments of the Commonwealth.”

“Why are we called a Commonwealth, when all the other places are called worlds or planets?”

“Because you people are subjects of the Queen of England.”

“Who is the Queen of England?” “She was an Earth ruler in the Most Ancient Days, more than fifteen thousand years ago.” “Where is she now?”

“I said,” the computer had said, “that it was fifteen thousand years ago.”

“I know it,” Rod had insisted, “but if there hasn’t been any Queen of England for fifteen thousand years, how can we be her subjects?”

“I know the answer in human words,” the reply had been from the friendly red machine, “but since it makes no sense to me, I shall have to quote it to you as people told it to me. ‘She bloody well might turn up one of these days. Who knows? This is Old North Australia out here among the stars and we can dashed well wait for our own Queen. She might have been off on a trip when Old Earth went sour.’ ” The computer had clucked a few times in its odd ancient voice and had then said hopefully, in its toneless voice, “Could you restate that so that I could program it as part of my memory assembly?”

“It doesn’t mean much to me. Next time I can hier other minds thinking I’ll try to pick it out of somebody else’s head.”

That had been about a year ago, and Rod had never run across the answer.

Last night he had asked the computer a more urgent question:

“Will I die tomorrow?”

“Question irrelevant. No answer available.”

“Computer!” he had shouted, “you know I love you.”

“You say so.”

“I started’ your historical assembly up after repairing you, when that part had been thinkless for hundreds of years.”

“Correct.”

“I crawled down into this cave and found the personal controls, where great 14-grandfather had left them when they became obsolete.”

“Correct.”

“I’m going to die tomorrow and you won’t even be sorry.”

“I did not say that,” said the computer.

“Don’t you care?”

“I was not programmed for emotion. Since you yourself repaired me, Rod, you ought to know that I am the only all-mechanical computer functioning in this part of the galaxy. I am sure that if I had emotions I would be very sorry indeed. It is an extreme probability, since you are my only companion. But I do not have emotions. I have numbers, facts, language, and memory — that is all.”

“What is the probability, then, that I will die tomorrow in the Giggle Room?”

“That is not the right name. It is the Dying House.”

“All right, then, the Dying House.”

“The judgment on you will be a contemporary human judgment based upon emotions. Since I do not know the individuals concerned, I cannot make a prediction of any value at all.”