Cordwainer Smith - Norstrilia

“All right,” he conceded, “play your pitch.”

“I am a clinical psychologist. The only one on Earth and probably the only one on any planet. I got my knowledge from some ancient books when I was a kitten, being changed into a young man. I change people just a little, little bit. You know that the Instrumentality has surgeons and brains experts and all sorts of doctors. They can do almost anything with personality — anything but the light stuff… That, I do.”

“I don’t get it,” said Rod.

“Would you go to a brain surgeon to get a haircut? Would you need a dermatologist to give you a bath? Of course not. I don’t do heavy work. I just change people a little bit It makes them happy. If I can’t do anything with them, I give them souvenirs from this junkpile out here. The real work is in there. That’s where you’re going, pretty soon.” He nodded his head at the door marked HATE HALL.

Rod cried out, “I’ve been taking orders from one stranger after another, all these long weeks since my computers and I made that money! Can’t I ever do anything myself?”

The Catmaster looked at him with sympathy. “None of us can. We may think that we are free. Our lives are made for us by the people we happen to know, the places we happen to be, the jobs or hobbies which we happen to run across. Will I be dead a year from now? I don’t know. Will you be back in Old North Australia a year from now, still only seventeen, but rich and wise and on your way to happiness? I don’t know. You’ve had a run of good luck. Look at it that way. It’s luck. And I’m part of the luck. If you get killed here, it will not be my doing but just the over-strain of your body against the devices which the Lady Goroke approved a long time ago — devices which the Lord Jestocost reports to the Instrumentality. He keeps them legal that way. I’m the only underman in the universe who is entitled to process real people in any way whatever without having direct human supervision. All I do is to develop people, like an Ancient Man developing a photograph from a piece of paper exposed to different grades of light. I’m not a hidden jungle, like your men in the Garden of Death. It’s going to be you against you, with me just helping, and when you come out you’re going to be a different you — the same you, but a little better there, a little more flexible here. As a matter of fact, that cat-type body you’re wearing is going to make your contest with yourself a little harder for me to manage. We’ll do it, Rod. Are you ready?”

“Ready for what?”

“For the tests and changes there.” The Catmaster nodded at the door marked HATE HALL.

“I suppose so,” said Rod. “I don’t have much choice.”

“No,” said the Catmaster, sympathetically and almost sadly, “not at this point, you don’t. If you walk out that door, youre an illegal cat-man, in immediate danger of being buzzed down by the robot police.”

“Please,” said Rod, “win or fail, can I have one of these Cape triangles?”

The Catmaster smiled. “I promise you — if you want one, you shall have it.” He waved at the door: “Go on in.”

Rod was not a coward, but it was with feet and legs of lead that he walked to the door. It opened by itself. He walked in, steady but afraid.

The room was dark with a darkness deeper than mere black. It was the dark of blindness, the expanse of cheek where no eye has ever been.

The door closed behind him and he swam in the dark, so tangible had the darkness become.

He felt blind. He felt as if he had never seen.

But he could hear.

He heard his own blood pulsing through his head.

He could smell — indeed, he was good at smelling. And this air — this air — this air smelled of the open night on the dry plains of Old North Australia.

The smell made him feel little and afraid. It reminded him of his repeated childhoods, of the artificial drownings in the laboratories where he had gone to be reborn from one childhood to another.

He reached out his hands.

Nothing.

He jumped gently. No ceiling.

Using a fieldsman’s trick familiar from times of dust-storms, he dropped lightly to his hands and feet. He scuttled crabwise on two feet and one hand, using the other hand as a shield to protect his face. In a very few meters he found the wall. He followed the wall around.

Circular.

This was the door.

Follow again.

With more confidence, he moved fast. Around, around, around. He could not tell whether the floor was asphalt or some kind of rough worn tile.

Door again.

A voice spieked to him.

Spieked! And he heard it.

He looked upward into the nothing which was bleaker than blindness, almost expecting to see the words in letters of fire, so clear had they been.

The voice was Norstrilian and it said,

Rod McBan is a man, man, man.

But what is man?

(Immediate percussion of crazy, sad laughter.)

Rod never noticed that he reverted to the habits of babyhood. He sat flat on his rump, legs spread out in front of him at a ninety-degree angle. He put his hands a little behind him and leaned back, letting the weight of his body push his shoulders a little bit upward. He knew the ideas that would follow the words, but he never knew why he so readily expected them.

Light formed in the room, as he had been sure it would.

The images were little, but they looked real.

Men and women and children, children and women and men marched into his vision and out again.

They were not freaks; they were not beasts; they were not alien monstrosities begotten in some outside universe; they were not robots; they were not underpeople; they were all hominids like himself, kinsmen in the Earthborn races of men.

First came people like Old North Australians and Earth people, very much alike, and both similar to the ancient types, except that Norstrilians were pale beneath their tanned skins, bigger, and more robust.

Then came Daimoni, white-eyed pale giants with a magical assurance, whose very babies walked as if they had already been given ballet lessons.

Then heavy men, fathers, mothers, infants swimming on the solid ground from which they would never arise.

Then rainmen from Amazonas Triste, their skins hanging in enormous folds around them, so that they looked like bundles of wet rags wrapped around monkeys.

Blind men from Olympia, staring fiercely at the world through the radars mounted on their foreheads.

Bloated monster-men from abandoned planets — people as bad off as his own race had been after escaping from Paradise VII.

And still more races.

People he had never heard of.

Men with shells.

Men and women so thin that they looked like insects.

A race of smiling, foolish giants, lost in the irreparable hebephrenia of their world. (Rod had the feeling that they were shepherded by a race of devoted dogs, more intelligent than themselves, who cajoled them into breeding, begged them to eat, led them to sleep. He saw no dogs, only the smiling unfocused fools, but the feeling dog, good dog! was somehow very near.)

A funny little people who pranced with an indefinable deformity of gait.

Water-people, the clean water of some unidentified world pulsing through their gills.

And then—

More people, still, but hostile ones. Lipsticked hermaphrodites with enormous beards and fluting voices. Carcinomas which had taken over men. Giants rooted in the Earth. Human bodies crawling, and weeping as they crawled through wet grass, somehow contaminated themselves and looking for more people to infect.

Rod did not know it, but he growled.

He jumped into a squatting position and swept his hands across the rough floor, looking for a weapon.