The boy stood up in the forbidden room.
“Fight it is,” he said to the cubes on the floor, “and a good thanks to you, grandfather-to-the-nineteenth. You met the law and did not lose. And now it is my turn to be Rod McBan.”
He turned and shouted to himself,
“To Earth!”
The call embarrassed him. He felt unseen eyes staring at him. He almost blushed and would have hated himself if he had.
He stood on the top of a treasure-chest turned on its side. Two more gold coins, worthless as money but priceless as curios, fell noiselessly on the thick old rugs. He thought a goodbye again to his secret room and he jumped upward for the bar. He caught it, chinned himself, raised himself higher, swung a leg on it but not over it, got his other foot on the bar, and then, very carefully but with the power of all his muscles, pushed himself into the black opening above. The lights suddenly went off, the dehumidifier hummed louder, and the daylight dazzled him as the trap-door, touched, flung itself open.
He thrust his head into the culvert. The daylight seemed deep grey after the brilliance of the treasure room.
All silent. All clear. He rolled into the ditch. The door, with silence and power, closed itself behind him. He was never to know it, but it had been cued to the genetic code of the descendants of Rod McBan. Had any other person touched it, it would have withstood them for a long time. Almost forever.
You see, it was not really his door. He was its boy. “This land has made me,” said Rod aloud, as he clambered out of the ditch and looked around. The young ram had apparently wakened; his snoring had stopped and over the quiet hill there came the sound of his panting. Thirsty again! The Station of Doom was not so rich that it could afford unlimited water to its giant sheep. They lived all right. But he would have asked the trustees to sell even the sheep for water, if a real drought set in. But never the land. Never the land. No land for sale.
It didn’t even really belong to him: he belonged to it — the rolling dry fields, the covered rivers and canals, the sky catchments which caught every drop which might otherwise have gone to his neighbors. That was the pastoral business — its product immortality and its price water. The Commonwealth could have flooded the planet and could have crated small oceans, with the financial resources it had at command, but the planet and the people were regarded as one ecological entity. Old Australia — that fabulous continent of old Earth now covered by the ruins of the abandoned Chinesian cityworld of Aoujou Nam-bien — had in its prime been broad, dry, open, beautiful; the planet of Old North Australia, by the dead weight of its own tradition, had to remain the same. Imagine trees. Imagine leaves — vegetation dropping uneaten to the ground. Imagine water pouring by the thousands of tons, no one greeting it with tears of relief or happy laughter! Imagine Earth. Old Earth. Manhome itself. Rod had tried to think of a whole planet inhabited by Hamlets, drenched with music and poetry, knee-deep in blood and drama. It was unimaginable, really, though he had tried to think it through.
Like a chill, a drill, a thrill cutting into his very nerves he thought:
Imagine Earth women!
What terrifying beautiful things they must be. Dedicated to ancient and corruptive arts, surrounded by the objects which Norstrilia had forbidden long ago, stimulated by experiences which the very law of his own world had expunged from the books! He would meet them; he couldn’t help it; what, what would he do when he met a genuine Earth woman?
He would have to ask his computer, even though the neighbors laughed at him for having the only pure computer left on the planet.
They didn’t know what grandfather-to-the-nineteenth had done. He had taught the computer to lie. It stored all the forbidden things which the Law of the Clean Sweep had brushed out of Norstrilian experience. It could lie like a trooper. Rod wondered whether a “trooper” might be some archaic Earth official who did nothing but tell the untruth, day in and day out, for his living. But the computer usually did not lie to him.
If grandfather 19 had behaved as saucily and unconventionally with the computer as he had with everything else, that particular computer would know all about women. Even things which they did not themselves know. Or wish to know.
Good computer! thought Rod as he trotted around the long, long fields to his house. Eleanor would have the tucker on. Doris might be back. Bill and Hopper would be angry if they had to wait for the mister before they ate. To speed up his trip, he headed straight for the little cliff behind the house, hoping no one would see him jump down it. He was much stronger than most of the men he knew, but he was anxious, for some private inexpressible reason, for them not to know it.
The route was clear.
He found the cliff.
No observers.
He dropped over it, feet first, his heels kicking up the scree as he tobogganed through loose rock to the foot of the slope.
And aunt Doris was there.
“Where have you been?” said she.
“Walking, mum,” said he.
She gave him a quizzical look but knew better than to ask more. Talking always fussed her, anyhow. She hated the sound of her own voice, which she considered much too high. The matter passed.
Inside the house, they ate. Beyond the door and the oil lamp, a grey world became moonless, starless, black. This was night, his own night.
THE QUARREL AT THE DINNER TABLE
At the end of the meal he waited for Doris to say grace to the Queen. She did but under her thick eyebrows her eyes expressed something other than thanks.
“You’re going out,” she said right after the prayer. It was an accusation, not a question.
The two hired men looked at him with quiet doubt. A week ago he had been a boy. Now he was the same person, but legally a man.
The workwoman Eleanor looked at him too. She smiled very unobtrusively to herself. She was on his side whenever any other person came into the picture; when they were alone, she nagged him as much as she dared. She had known his parents before they went offworld for a long-overdue honeymoon and were chewed into molecules by a battle between raiders and police. That gave her a proprietary feeling about him.
He tried to spiek to Doris with his mind, just to see if it would work.
It didn’t. The two men bounded from their seats and ran for the yard, Eleanor sat in her chair holding tight to the table but saying nothing, and aunt Doris screeched so loud that he could not make out the words.
He knew she meant “Stop it!”, so he did, and looked at her friendlily.
That started a fight.
Quarrels were common in Norstrilian life, because the Fathers had taught that they were therapeutic. Children could quarrel until adults told them to stop, freemen could quarrel as long as misters were not involved, misters could quarrel as long as an owner was not present, and owners could quarrel if, at the very end, they were willing to fight it out. No one could quarrel in the presence of an offworlder, nor during an alert, nor with a member of the defense or police on active duty.
Rod McBan was a mister and owner, but he was under trusteeship; he was a man, but he had not been given clear papers; he was a handicapped person.
The rules got all mixed up.
When Hopper came back to the table he muttered, “Do that again, laddie, and I’ll clout you one that you won’t forget!” Considering how rarely he used his voice, it was a beautiful man’s voice, resonant, baritone, full-bodied, hearty and sincere in the way the individual words came out.
Bill didn’t say a word, but from the contortions of his face Rod gathered that he was spieking to the others at a great rate and working off his grievance that way.
“If you’re spieking about me, Bill,” said Rod with a touch of arrogance which he did not really feel, “you’ll do me the pleasure of using words or you’ll get off my land!”