She had a womanliness which was truer than that of any hominid woman. She knew the value of her trained smile, her splendidly kept red hair with its unimaginably soft texture, her lithe young figure with firm breasts and persuasive hips. She knew down to the last millimeter the effect which her legs had on hominid men. True humans kept few secrets from her. The men betrayed themselves by their unfulfillable desires, the women by their irrepressible jealousies. But she knew people best of all by not being one herself. She had to learn by imitation, and imitation is conscious. A thousand little things which ordinary women took for granted, or thought about just once in a whole lifetime, were subjects of acute and intelligent study to her. She was a girl by profession; she was a human by assimilation: she was an inquisitive cat in her genetic nature. Now she was falling in love with Jestocost, and she knew it
Even she did not realize that the romance would sometime leak out into rumor, be magnified into legend, distilled into romance. She had no idea of the ballad about herself that would open with the lines which became famous much later:
She got the which of the what-she-did,
Hid the bell with a blot, she did,
But she fell in love with a hominid.
Where is the which of the what-she-did?
All this lay in the future, and she did not know it.
She knew her own past.
She remembered the off-Earth prince who had rested his head in her lap and had said, sipping his glass of moti by way of farewell:
“Funny, C’mell, you’re not even a person and you’re the most intelligent human being I’ve met in this place. Do you know it made my planet poor to send me here? And what did I get out of them? Nothing, nothing, and a thousand times nothing. But you, now. If you’d been running the government of Earth, I’d have gotten what my people need, and this world would be richer too. Manhome, they call it. Manhome, my eye! The only smart person on it is a female cat.”
He ran his fingers around her ankle. She did not stir. That was part of hospitality, and she had her own ways of making sure that hospitality did not go too far. Earth police were watching her; to them, she was a convenience maintained for outworld people, something like a soft chair in the Earthport lobbies or a drinking fountain with acid-tasting water for strangers who could not tolerate the insipid water of Earth. She was not expected to have feelings or to get involved. If she had ever caused an incident, they would have punished her fiercely, as they often punished animals or underpeople, or else (after a short formal hearing with no appeal) they would have destroyed her, as the law allowed and custom encouraged.
She had kissed a thousand men, maybe fifteen hundred. She had made them feel welcome and she had gotten their complaints or their secrets out of them as they left. It was a living, emotionally tiring but intellectually very stimulating. Sometimes it made her laugh to look at human women with their pointed-up noses and their proud airs, and to realize that she knew more about the men who belonged to the human women than the human women themselves ever did.
Once a policewoman had had to read over the record of two pioneers from New Mars. C’mell had been given the job of keeping in very close touch with them. When the policewoman got through reading the report she looked at C’mell and her face was distorted with jealousy and prudish rage.
“Cat, you call yourself. Cat! You’re a pig, you’re a dog, you’re an animal. You may be working for Earth but don’t ever get the idea that you’re as good as a person. I think it’s a crime that the Instrumentality lets monsters like you greet real human beings from outside! I can’t stop it. But may the Bell help you, girl, if you ever touch a real Earth man! If you ever get near one! If you ever try tricks here! Do you understand me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” C’mell had said. To herself she thought, “That poor thing doesn’t know how to select her own clothes or how to do her own hair. No wonder she resents somebody who manages to be pretty.”
Perhaps the policewoman thought that raw hatred would be shocking to C’mell. It wasn’t. Underpeople were used to hatred, and it was not any worse raw than it was when cooked with politeness and served like poison. They had to live with it.
But now, it was all changed.
She had fallen in love with Jestocost.
Did he love her?
Impossible. No, not impossible. Unlawful, unlikely, indecent—yes, all these, but not impossible. Surely he felt something of her love.
If he did, he gave no sign of it.
People and underpeople had fallen in love many times before. The underpeople were always destroyed and the real people brainwashed. There were laws against that kind of thing. The scientists among people had created the underpeople, had given them capacities which real people did not have (the fifty-meter jump, the telepath two miles underground, the turtle-man waiting a thousand years next to an emergency door, the cow-man guarding a gate without reward), and the scientists had also given many of the underpeople the human shape. It was handier that way. The human eye, the five-fingered hand, the human size—these were convenient for engineering reasons. By making underpeople the same size and shape as people, more or less, the scientists eliminated the need for two or three or a dozen different sets of furniture. The human form was good enough for all of them.
But they had forgotten the human heart.
And now she, C’mell had fallen in love with a man, a true man old enough to have been her own father’s grandfather.
But she didn’t feel daughterly about him at all. She remembered that with her own father there was an easy comradeship, an innocent and forthcoming affection, which masked the fact that he was considerably more cat-like than she was. Between them there was an aching void of forever-unspoken words—things that couldn’t quite he said by either of them, perhaps things that couldn’t be said at all. They were so close to each other that they could get no closer. This created enormous distance, which was heartbreaking but unutterable. Her father had died, and now this true man was here, with all the kindness—
“That’s it,” she whispered to herself, “with all the kindness that none of these passing men have ever really shown. With all the depth which my poor underpeople can never get. Not that it’s not in them. But they’re born like dirt, treated like dirt, put away like dirt when they die. How can any of my own men develop real kindness? There’s a special sort of majesty to kindness. It’s the best part there is to being people. And he has whole oceans of it in him. And it’s strange, strange, strange that he’s never given his real love to any human woman.”
She stopped, cold.
Then she consoled herself and whispered on, “Or if he did, it’s so long ago that it doesn’t matter now. He’s got me. Does he know it?”
4
The Lord Jestocost did know, and yet he didn’t. He was used to getting loyalty from people, because he offered loyalty and honor in his daily work. He was even familiar with loyalty becoming obsessive and seeking physical form, particularly from women, children and underpeople. He had always coped with it before. He was gambling on the fact that C’mell was a wonderfully intelligent person, and that as a girly girl, working on the hospitality staff of the Earthport police, she must have learned to control her personal feelings.
“We’re born in the wrong age,” he thought, “when I meet the most intelligent and beautiful female I’ve ever met, and then have to put business first. But this stuff about people and underpeople is sticky. Sticky. We’ve got to keep personalities out of it.”
So he thought. Perhaps he was right.
If the nameless one, whom he did not dare to remember, commanded an attack on the Bell itself, that was worth their lives. Their emotions could not come into it. The Bell mattered: justice mattered: the perpetual return of mankind to progress mattered. He did not matter, because he had already done most of his work. C’mell did not matter, because their failure would leave her with mere underpeople forever. The Bell did count.
The price of what he proposed to do was high, but the entire job could be done in a few minutes if it were done at the Bell itself.
The Bell, of course, was not a Bell. It was a three-dimensional situation table, three times the height of a man. It was set one story below the meeting room, and shaped roughly like an ancient bell. The meeting table of the Lords of the Instrumentality had a circle cut out of it, so that the Lords could look down into the Bell at whatever situation one of them called up either manually or telepathically. The Bank below it, hidden by the floor, was the key memory-bank of the entire system. Duplicates existed at thirty-odd other places on Earth. Two duplicates lay hidden in interstellar space, one of them beside the ninety-million-mile gold-colored ship left over from the War against Raumsog and the other masked as an asteroid.
Most of the Lords were offworld on the business of the Instrumentality.
Only three besides Jestocost were present—the Lady Johanna, Gnade, the Lord Issan Olascoaga and the Lord William Not-from-here. (The Not-from-heres were a great Norstrilian family which had migrated back to Earth many generations before.)
The E-telekeli told Jestocost the rudiments of a plan.
He was to bring C’mell into the chambers on a summons.
The summons was to be serious.
