Cordwainer Smith - Norstrilia

Rod hesitated and then obeyed.

“Great crooked stars!” said the doctor. “I can smell it too. There’s a little bit in your upper respiratory system, perhaps a little even in your lungs. Do you need your sense of smell for the next few days?”

Rod said he did not.

“Fine,” said the doctor. “We can numb that section of the brain and do it very gently. There’ll be no residual damage. You won’t smell anything for eight to ten days, and by that time the smell of Amaral will be gone. Incidentally, you were charged with first-degree murder, tried, and acquitted. On the matter of Tostig Amaral.”

“How could I be?” said Rod. “I wasn’t even arrested.”

“The Instrumentality computered it They had the whole scene on tape, since Amaral’s room has been under steady surveillance since yesterday. When he warned you that whether cat or man, you were dying, he finished the case against himself. That was a death threat and your acquittal was for self-defense.”

Rod hesitated and then blurted out the truth, “And the men in the shaft?”

“The Lord Jestocost and Crudelta and I talked it over. We decided to let the matter drop. It keeps the police lively if they have a few unsolved crimes here and there. Now lie down, so I can kill off that smell.”

Rod lay down. The doctor put his head in a clamp and called in robot assistants. The smell-killing process knocked him out, and when he awakened, it was in a different building. He sat up in bed and saw the sea itself. C’mell was standing at the edge of the water. He sniffed. He smelled no salt, no wet, no water, no Amaral. It was worth the change.

C’mell came to him. “My dear, my very dear, my Sir and Master but my very dear! You chanced your life for me last night.”

“I’m a cat myself,” laughed Rod.

He leaped from the bed and ran out to the water margin. The immensity of blue water was incredible. The white waves were separate, definable miracles, each one of them. He had seen the enclosed lakes of Norstrilia, but none of them did things like this.

C’mell had the tact to stay silent till he had seen his fill.

Then she broke the news.

“You own Earth. You have work to do. Either you stay here and begin studying how to manage your property. Or you go somewhere else. Either way, something a little bit sad is going to happen. Today.”

He looked at her seriously, his pajamas flapping in the wet wind which he could no longer smell.

“I’m ready,” he said. “What is it?”

“You lose me.”

“Is that all?” he laughed.

C’mell looked very hurt. She stretched her fingers as though she were a nervous cat looking for something to claw.

“I thought—” said she, and stopped. She started again, “I thought—” She stopped again. She turned to look at him, staring fully, trustingly into his face. “You’re such a young man, but you can do anything. Even among men you are fierce and decided. Tell me, Sir and Master, what — what do you wish?”

“Nothing much,” he smiled at her, “except that I am buying you and taking you home. We can’t go to Norstrilia unless the law changes, but we can go to New Mars. They don’t have any rules there, none which a few tons of stroon won’t get changed. C’mell, I’ll stay cat. Will you marry me?”

She started laughing but the laughter turned into weeping. She hugged him and buried her face against his chest. At last she wiped her tears off on her arm and looked up at him:

“Poor silly me! Poor silly you! Don’t you see it, Mister, I am a cat. If I had children, they would be cat-kittens, every one of them, unless I went every single week to get the genetic code recycled so that they would turn out underpeople. Don’t you know that you and I can never marry — not with any real hope? Besides, Rod, there is the other rule. You and I cannot even see each other again from this sunset onward. How do you think the Lord Jestocost saved my life yesterday? How did he get me into a hospital to be flushed out of all those Amaral poisons? How did he break almost all the rules of the book?”

The brightness had gone out of Rod’s day. “I don’t know,” he said dully.

“By promising them I would die promptly and obediently if there were any more irregularities. By saying I was a nice animal. A biddable one. My death is hostage for what you and I must do. It’s not a law. It’s something worse than a law — it’s an agreement between the Lords of the Instrumentality.”

“I see,” said he, understanding the logic of it, but hating the cruel Earth customs which put C’mell and himself together, only to tear them apart.

“Let’s walk down the beach, Rod,” she said. “Unless you want your breakfast first of all…”

“Oh, no,” he said. “Breakfast! A flutty crupp for all the breakfasts on Earth!”

She walked as though she had not a care in the world, but there was an undertone of meaning to her walk which warned Rod that she was up to something.

It happened.

First, she kissed him, with a kiss he remembered the rest of his life.

Then, before he could say a word, she spieked. But her spieking was not words or ideas at all. It was singing of a high wild kind. It was the music which went along with her very own poem, which she had sung to him atop Earthport:

But it was not those words, not those ideas, even though they seemed subtly different this time. She was doing something which the best telepaths of Old North Australia had tried in vain for thousands of years to accomplish — she was transmitting the mathematical and proportional essence of music right of her mind, and she was doing it with a clarity and force which would have been worthy of a great orchestra. The “high wind driving” fugue kept recurring.

He turned his eyes away from her to see the astonishing thing which was happening all around them. The air, the ground, the sea were all becoming thick with life. Fish flashed out of blue waves. Birds circled by the multitude around them. The beach was thick with little running birds. Dogs and running animals which he had never seen before stood restlessly around C’mell — hectares of them. Abruptly she stopped her song. With very high volume and clarity, she spat commands in all directions:

“Think of people.”

“Think of this cat and me running away somewhere.”

“Think of ships.”

“Look for strangers.”

“Think of things in the sky.”

Rod was glad he did not have his broad-band hiering come on, as it sometimes had done at home. He was sure he would have gone dizzy with the pictures and the contradictions of it all.

She had grabbed his shoulders and was whispering fiercely into his ear:

“Rod, they’ll cover us. Please make a trip with me, Rod. One last dangerous trip. Not for you. Not for me. Not even for mankind. For life, Rod. The Aitch Eye wants to see you.”

“Who’s the Aitch Eye?”

“He’ll tell you the secret if you see him,” she hissed. “Do it for me, then, if you don’t trust my ideas.”

He smiled. “For you, C’mell, yes.”

“Don’t even think, then, till you get there. Don’t even ask questions. Just come along. Millions of lives depend on you, Rod.”

She stood up and sang again, but the new song had no grief in it, no anguish, no weird keening from species to species. It was as cool and pretty as a music box, as simple as an assured and happy goodbye.

The animals vanished so rapidly that it was hard to believe that legions of them had so recently been there.