Norstrilia

AT THE GATE OF THE GARDEN OF DEATH

Rod McBan faced the day of days. He knew what it was all about, but he could not really feel it. He wondered if they had tranquilized him with half-refined stroon, a product so rare and precious that it was never, never sold off-planet.

He knew that by nightfall he would be laughing and giggling and drooling in one of the Dying Rooms, where the unfit were put away to thin out the human breed, or else he would stand forth as the oldest landholder on the planet, Chief Heir to the Station of Doom. The farm had been salvaged by his great-³²-grandfather had bought an ice-asteroid, crashed it into the farm over the violent objections of his neighbors, and learned clever tricks with artesian wells which kept his grass growing while the neighbors’ fields turned from grey-green to blowing dust. The McBans had kept the sarcastic old name for their farming station, the Station of Doom. By night, Rod knew, the Station would be his. Or he would be dying, giggling his way to death in the killing place where people laughed and grinned and rollicked about while they died.

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 great¹⁴-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.”

“What do you think is going to happen to me, computer?”

“I do not really think, I respond. I have no input on that topic.”

“Do you know anything at all about my life and death tomorrow? I know I can’t spiek with my mind, but I have to make sounds with my mouth instead. Why should they kill me for that?”

“I do not know the people concerned and therefore I do not know the reasons,” the computer had replied, “but I know the history of Old North Australia down to your great¹⁴-grandfather’s time.”

“Tell me that, then,” Rod had said. He had squatted in the cave which he had discovered, listening to the forgotten set of computer controls which he had repaired, and had heard again the story of Old North Australia as his great¹⁴-grandfather had understood it. Stripped of personal names and actual dates, it was a simple story.

This morning his life hung on it.

Norstrilia had to thin out its people if it were going to keep its Old Old Earth character and be another Australia, out among the stars. Otherwise the fields would fill up, the deserts turn into apartment houses, the sheep die in cellars under endless kennels for crowded and useless people. No Old North Australian wanted that to happen, when he could keep character, immortality, and wealth — in that particular order of importance. It would be contrary to the character of Norstrilia.

The simple character of Norstrilia was immutable — as immutable as anything out among the stars. This ancient Commonwealth was the only human institution older than the Instrumentality.

The story was simple, the way the computer’s clear long-circuited brain had sorted it out.

Take a farmer culture straight off Old Old Earth — Manhome itself.

Put the culture on a remote planet.

Touch it with prosperity and blight it with drought.

Teach it sickness, deformity, hardihood. Make it learn poverty so bad that men sold one child to buy another child the drink of water which would give it an extra day of life while the drills whirred deep into the dry rock, looking for wetness.

Teach that culture thrift, medicine, scholarship, pain, survival.

Give those people the lessons of poverty, war, grief, greed, magnanimity, piety, hope and despair by turn.

Let the culture survive.

Survive disease, deformity, despair, desolation, abandonment.

Then give it the happiest accident in the history of time.

Out of sheep-sickness came infinite riches, the santaclara drug or stroon which prolonged human life indefinitely.

Prolonged it — but with queer side effects, so that most Norstrilians preferred to die in a thousand years or so.

Norstrilia was convulsed by the discovery.

So was every other inhabited world.

But the drug could not be synthesized, paralleled, duplicated. It was something which could be obtained only from the sick sheep on the Old North Australian plains.

Robbers and governments tried to steal the drug. Now and then they succeeded, long ago, but they hadn’t made it since the time of Rod’s great¹⁹-grandfather.

They had tried to steal the sick sheep.

Several had been taken off the planet, (The Fourth Battle of New Alice, in which half the menfolk of Norstrilia had died beating off the Bright Empire, had led to the loss of two of the sick sheep — one female and one male. The Bright Empire thought it had won. It hadn’t. The sheep got well, produced healthy lambs, exuded no more stroon, and died. The Bright Empire had paid four battle fleets for a coldbox full of mutton.) The monopoly remained in Norstrilia.

The Norstrilians exported the santaclara drug, and they put the export on a systematic basis.

They achieved almost infinite riches.

The poorest man on Norstrilia was always richer than the richest man anywhere else, emperors and conquerors included. Every farm hand earned at least a hundred Earth credits a day — measured in real money on Old Earth, not in paper which had to travel a steep arbitrage.

But the Norstrilians made their choice: the choice—

To remain themselves.

They taxed themselves back into simplicity.

Luxury goods got a tax of twenty million percent. For the price of fifty palaces on Olympia, you could import a handkerchief into Norstrilia. A pair of shoes, landed, cost the price of a hundred yachts in orbit. All machines were prohibited, except for defense and the drug-gathering. Underpeople were never made on Nostrilia, and imported only by the defense authority for top secret reasons. Old North Australia remained simple, pioneer, fierce, open.

Many families emigrated to enjoy their wealth; they could not return.

But the population problem remained, even with the taxation and simplicity and hard work.

Cut back, then — cut back people if you must.

But how, whom, where? Birth control — beastly. Sterilization — inhuman, unmanly, un-British. (This last was an ancient word meaning very bad indeed.)

By families, then. Let the families have the children. Let the Commonwealth test them at sixteen. If they ran under the standards, send them to a happy, happy death.

But what about the families? You can’t wipe a family out, not in a conservative farmer society, when the neighbors are folk who have fought and died beside you for a hundred generations. The Rule of Exceptions came. Any family which reached the end of its line could have the last surviving heir reprocessed — up to four times. If he failed, it was the Dying House, and a designated adopted heir from another family took over the name and the estate.

Otherwise their survivors would have gone on, in this century a dozen, in that century twenty. Soon Norstrilia would have been divided into two classes, the sound ones and a privileged class of hereditary freaks. This they could not stand, not while the space around them stank of danger, not when men a hundred worlds away dreamed and died while thinking of how to rob the stroon. They had to be fighters and chose not to be soldiers or emperors. Therefore they had to be fit, alert, healthy, clever, simple and moral. They had to be better than any possible enemy or any possible combination of enemies.

They made it.

Old North Australia became the toughest, brightest, simplest world in the galaxy. One by one, without weapons, Norstrilians could tour the other world and kill almost anything which attacked them. Governments feared them. Ordinary people hated them or worshipped them. Off-world men eyed their women queerly. The Instrumentality left them alone, or defended them without letting the Norstrilians know they had been defended. (As in the case of Raumsog, who brought his whole world to a death of cancer and volcanoes, because the Golden Ship struck once.) Norstrilian mothers learned to stand by with dry eyes when their children, unexpectedly drugged if they failed the tests, drooled with pleasure and went giggling away to their deaths.

The space and subspace around Norstrilia became sticky, sparky with the multiplicity of their defenses. Big outdoorsy men sailed tiny fighting crafts around the approaches to Old North Australia. When people met them in outports, they always thought that Norstrilians looked simple; the looks were a snare and a delusion. The Norstrilians had been conditioned by thousands of years of unprovoked attack. They looked as simple as sheep but their minds were as subtle as serpents.

And now — Rod McBan.

The last heir, the very last heir, of their proudest old family had been found a half-freak. He was normal enough by Earth standards, but by Norstrilian measure he was inadequate. He was a bad, bad telepath. He could not be counted on to hier. Most of the time other people could not transmit into his mind at all; they could not even read it. All they got was a fiery bubble and a dull fuzz of meaningless subsememes, fractions of thought which added up to less than nothing. And on spieking, he was worse. He could not talk with his mind at all. Now and then he transmitted. When he did, the neighbors ran for cover. If it was anger, a bloody screaming roar almost blotted out their consciousnesses with a rage as solid and red as meat hanging in a slaughterhouse. If he was happy, it was worse. His happiness, which he transmitted without knowing it, had the distractiveness of a speed saw cutting into diamond-grained rock. His happiness drilled into people with an initial sense of pleasure, followed rapidly by acute discomfort and the sudden wish that all their own teeth would fall out: the teeth had turned into spinning whirls of raw, unqualified discomfort. They did not know his biggest personal secret.

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.”

“What’s the matter with her?” said Rod to the auntie, just as though he did not know.

“She’s just difficult, that’s all. Just difficult. Nerves, I suppose,” she added in her croaking spoken words. She could not talk very well, since all her family and friends could spiek and hier with privacy and grace. “We were spieking with each other about what you would be doing tomorrow.”

“Where’s a priest, auntie?” said Rod.

“A what?”

“A priest, like the old poem has, in the rough rough days before our people found this planet and got our sheep settled down. Everybody knows it.

There’s more to it, but that’s the part I remember. Isn’t a priest a specialist in how to die? Do we have any around here?”

He watched her mind as she lied to him. As he had spoken, he had a perfectly clear picture of one of their more distant neighbors, a man named Tolliver, who had a very gentle manner; but her words were not about Tolliver at all.

“Some things are men’s business,” she said, cawing her words. “Anyhow, that song isn’t about Norstrilia at all. If s about Paradise VII and why we left it. I didn’t know you knew it.”

In her mind he read, “That boy knows too much.”

“Thanks, auntie,” said he meekly.

“Come along for the rinse,” said she. “We’re using an awful lot of real water on you today.”

He followed her and he felt more kindly toward her when he saw her think, Lavinia had the right feelings but she drew the wrong conclusion. He’s going to be dead tonight.

That was too much.

Rod hesitated for a moment, tempering the chords of his oddly attuned mind. Then he let out a tremendous howl of telepathic joy, just to bother the lot of them. It did. They all stopped still. Then they stared at him.

“In words the auntie said, “What was that?”

“What?” said he, innocently.

“That noise you spieked. It wasn’t meaning.”

“Just sort of a sneeze, I suppose. I didn’t know I did it.” Deep down inside himself he chuckled. He might be on his way to the Hoohoo House, but he would fritter their friskies for them while he went.

It was a dashed silly way to die, he thought all to himself.

And then a strange, crazy, happy idea came to him:

Perhaps they can’t kill me. Perhaps I have powers. Powers of my own. Well, we’ll soon enough find out.