“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.