Norstrilia

“This is the most interesting-smelling place I have ever been,” said he to C’mell.

She glanced at him idly. “That’s nice. You can smell like a dog-man. Most of the real people I have known couldn’t smell their own feet. Come on though, C’roderick — remember who you are! If we’re not tagged and licensed for the surface, we’ll get stopped by that policeman in one minute or less.”

She carried E’ikasus and steered Rod with a pressure on his elbow. They came to a ramp which led to an underground passage, well illuminated. Machines, robots and underpeople were hurrying back and forth along it, busy with the commerce of Earth.

Rod would have been completely lost if he had been without C’mell. Though his miraculous broadband hiering, which had so often surprised him at home, had not returned during his few hours on Old Earth, his other senses gave him a suffocating awareness of the huge number of people around him and above him. (He never realized that there were times, long gone, when the cities of Earth had populations which reached the tens of millions; to him, several hundred thousand people, and a comparable number of underpeople, was a crowd almost beyond all measure.) The sounds and smells of underpeople were subtly different from those of people; some of the machines of Earth were bigger and older than anything which he had previously imagined; and above all, the circulation of water in immense volumes, millions upon millions of gallons, for the multiple purposes of Earthport — sanitation, cooling, drinking, industrial purposes — made him feel that he was not among a few buildings, which he would have called a city in Old North Australia, but that he himself had become a blood-cell thrusting through the circulatory system of some enormous composite animal, the nature of which he imperfectly understood. This city was alive with a sticky, wet, complicated aliveness which he had hitherto not even imagined to be possible. Movement characterized it. He suspected that the movement went on by night and day, that there was no real cessation to it, that the great pumps thrust water through feeder pipes and drains whether people were awake or not, that the brains of this organization could be no one place, but had to comprise many sub-brains, each committed and responsible for its particular tasks. No wonder underpeople were needed! It would be boredom and pain, even with perfected automation, to have enough human supervisors to reco

Rod was bewildered, but C’mell was not.

She had put A’gentur down, over his whined monkey-like protest. He trotted unwillingly beside them.

With the impudent knowledgeability of a true city girl, she had led them to a cross-walk from which a continuous whistling roar came forth. By writing, by picture, and by loudspeaker, the warning system repeated: KEEP OFF, FREIGHT ONLY, DANGER, KEEP OFF. She had snatched up A’gentur-E’ikasus, grabbed Rod by the arm, and jumped with them on a series of rapidly moving airborne platforms. Rod, startled by the sudde

“Freight? What’s that?”

“Things. Boxes. Foods. This is the Central Trackway. No sense in walking six kilometers when we can get this. Be ready to jump off with me when I give you the sign!”

“It feels dangerous,” he said.

“It isn’t,” she said, “not if you’re a cat.”

With this somewhat equivocal reassurance, she let them ride. A’gentur could not care less. He cuddled his head against her shoulder, wrapped his long, gibbon-like arms around her upper arm and went soundly to sleep.

C’mell nodded at Rod.

“Soon now!” she called, judging their distance by landmarks which he found meaningless. The landing points had flat, concrete-lined area where the individual flat cars, rushing along on their river of air, could be shunted suddenly to the side for loading or unloading. Each of these landing areas had a number, but Rod had not even noticed at what point they had gotten on. The smells of the underground city changed so much as they moved from one district to another that he was more interested in odors than in the numbers on the platforms.

She pinched his upper arm very sharply as a sign that he should get ready.

They jumped.

He staggered across the platform until he caught himself up against a large vertical crate marked Algonquin Paper Works — Credit Slips, Miniature — 2mm. C’mell landed as gracefully as if she had been acting a rehearsed piece of acrobatics. The little monkey on her shoulder stared with wide bright eyes.

“This,” said the monkey A’gentur-E’ikasus firmly and contemptuously, “is where all the people play at working. I’m tired, I’m hungry, and my body sugar is low.” He curled himself tight against C’mell’s shoulder, closed his eyes, and went back to sleep.

“He has a point,” said Rod. “Could we eat?”

C’mell started to nod and then caught herself short—

“You’re a cat.”

He nodded. Then he gri

“Sandbox?” she asked puzzled.

“An awef,” he said very clearly, using the Old North Australian term.

“Awef?”

It was his turn to get embarrassed. He said it in full: “An animal waste evacuation facility.”

“You mean a joh

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Each kind of underpeople has to use its own. It’s death if you don’t use one and it’s death if you use the wrong one. The cat one is four stations back on this underground trackway. Or we can walk back on the surface. It would only be a half hour.”

He said something rude to Earth. She wrinkled her brow.

“All I said was, ‘Earth is a large healthy sheep.’ That’s not so dirty.” Her good humor returned.

Before she could ask him another question he held up a firm hand. “I am not going to waste a half hour. You wait here.” He had seen the universal sign for “men’s room” at the upper level of the platform. Before she could stop him he had gone into it. She caught her hand up to her mouth, knowing that the robot police would kill him on sight if they found him in the wrong place. It would be such a ghastly joke if the man who owned the Earth were to die in the wrong toilet.

As quick as thought she followed him, stopping just outside the door to the men’s room. She dared not go in; she trusted that the place was empty when Rod entered it, because she had heard no boom of a slow, heavy bullet, none of the crisp buzzing of a burner. Robots did not use toilets, so they went in only when they were investigating something. She was prepared to distract any man living if he tried to enter that toilet, by offering him the combination of an immediate seduction or a complimentary and unwanted monkey.