Cordwainer Smith - Norstrilia

They suspected that he could hier now and then without being able to control it. They did not know that when he did hier, he could hier everything for miles around with microscopic detail and telescopic range. His telepathic intake, when it did work, went right through other people’s mind-shields as though they did not exist. (If some of the women in the farms around the Station of Doom knew what he had accidentally peeped out of their minds, they would have blushed the rest of their lives.) As a result, Rod McBan had a frightful amount of unsorted knowledge which did not quite fit together.

Previous committees had neither awarded him the Station of Doom nor sent him off to the giggle death. They had appreciated his intelligence, his quick wit, his enormous physical strength. But they remained worried about his telepathic handicap. Three times before he had been judged. Three times. And three times judgment had been suspended. They had chosen the lesser cruelty and had sent him not to death, but to a new babyhood and a fresh upbringing, hoping that the telepathic capacity of his mind would naturally soar up to the Norstrilian normal.

They had underestimated him.

He knew it.

Thanks to the eavesdropping which he could not control, he understood bits and pieces of what was happening, even though nobody had ever told him the rational whys and hows of the process.

It was a gloomy but composed big boy who gave the dust of his own front yard one last useless kick, who turned back into the cabin, walking right through to the main room to the rear door and the back yard, and who greeted his kinswomen politely enough as they, hiding their aching hearts, prepared to dress him up for his trial. They did not want the child to be upset, even though he was as big as a man and showed more composure than did most adult men. They wanted to hide the fearful truth from him. How could they help it?

He already knew. But he pretended he didn’t.

Cordially enough, just scared enough but not too much, he said,

“What ho, auntie! Hello, cousin. Morning Maribel. Here’s your sheep. Curry him up and trim him for the livestock competition. Do I get a ring in my nose or a bow ribbon around my neck?”

One or two of the young ones laughed, but his oldest “aunt” — actually a fourth cousin, married into another family — pointed seriously and calmly at a chair in the yard and said:

“Do sit down, Roderick. This is a serious occasion and we usually do not talk while preparations are going on.”

She bit her lower lip and then she added, not as though she wanted to frighten him but because she wanted to impress him:

“The Vice-Chairman will be here today.” (“The Vice-Chairman” was the head of the government; there had been no Chairman of the Temporary Commonwealth Government for some thousands of years. Norstrilians did not like posh and they thought that Vice-Chairman was high enough for any one man to go. Besides, it kept the offworlders guessing.)

Rod was not impressed. He had seen the man. It was in one of his rare moments of broad hiering, and he found that the mind of the Vice-Chairman was full of numbers and horses, the results of every horse race for three hundred and twenty years, and the projection forward of six probable horse races in the next two years.)

“Yes, auntie,” he said.

“Don’t bray all the time today. You don’t have to use your voice for little things like saying yes. Just nod your head. It will make a much better impression.”

He started to answer, but gulped and nodded instead.

She sank the comb into his thick yellow hair. Another one of the women, almost a girl, brought up a small table and a basin. He could tell from her expression that she was spieking to him, but this was one of the times in which he could not hier at all. The aunt gave his hair a particularly fierce tug just as the girl took his hand. He did not know what she meant to do. He yanked his hand back.

The basin fell off the small table. Only then did he realize that it was merely soapy water for a manicure.

“I am sorry,” he said; even to him, his voice sounded like a bray. For a moment he felt the fierce rash of humiliation and self-hate.

They should kill me, he thought… By the time the sun goes down I’ll be in the Giggle Room, laughing and laughing before the medicine makes my brains boil away.

He had reproached himself.

The two women had said nothing. The aunt had walked away to get some shampoo, and the girl was returning with a pitcher, to refill the basin.

He looked directly into her eyes, and she into his.

“I want you,” she said, very clearly, very quietly, and with a smile which seemed inexplicable to him.

“What for?” said he, equally quietly.

“Just you,” she said. “I want you for myself. You’re going to live.”

“You’re Lavinia, my cousin,” said he, as though discovering it for the first time.

“Sh-h-h,” said the girl. “She’s coming back.”

When the girl had settled down to getting his fingernails really clean, and the aunt had rubbed something like sheep-dip into his hair, Rod began to feel happy. His mood changed from the indifference which he had been pretending to himself. It became a real indifference to his fate, an easy acceptance of the grey sky above him, the dull rolling earth below. He had a fear — a little tiny fear, so small that it might have seemed to be a midget pet in a miniature cage — running around the inside of his thinking. It was not the fear that he would die: somehow he suddenly accepted his chances and remembered how many other people had had to take the same play with fortune. This little fear was something else, the dread that he might not behave himself properly if they did tell him to die.

But then, he thought, I don’t have to worry. Negative is never a word — just a hypodermic, so that the first bad news the victim has is his own excited, happy laugh.

With this funny peace of mind, his hiering suddenly lifted.

He could not see the Garden of Death, but he could look into the minds tending it; it was a huge van hidden just beyond the next roll of hills, where they used to keep Old Billy, the eighteen hundred-ton sheep. He could hear the clatter of voices in the little town eighteen kilometers away. And he could look right into Lavinia’s mind.

It was a picture of himself. But what a picture! So grown, so handsome, so brave looking. He had schooled himself not to move when he could hier, so that other people would not realize that his rare telepathic gift had come back to him.

Auntie was spieking to Lavinia without noisy words. “We’ll see this pretty boy in his coffin tonight.”

Lavinia thought right back, without apology. “No, we won’t.”

Rod sat impassive in his chair. The two women, their faces grave and silent, went on spieking the argument at each other with their minds.

“How would you know — you’re not very old?” spieked auntie.

“He has the oldest station in all of Old North Australia. He was one of the very oldest names. He is—” and even in spieking her thoughts cluttered up, like a stammer — “he is a very nice boy and he’s is going to be a wonderful man.”

“Mark my thought,” spieked the auntie again, “I’m telling you that we’ll see him in his coffin tonight and that by midnight he’ll be on his coffin-ride to the Long Way Out.”

Lavinia jumped to her feet. She almost knocked over the basin of water a second time. She moved her throat and mouth to speak words but she just croaked,

“Sorry, Rod. Sorry.”

Rod McBan, his face guarded, gave a pleasant, stupid little nod, as though he had no idea of what they had been spieking to each other.

She turned and ran, shout-spieking the loud thought at auntie, “Get somebody else to do his hands. You’re heartless, hopeless. Get somebody else to do your corpse washing for you. Not me. Not me.”