The Bell and the Bank ran through all the disposal devices at high speed. Jestocost felt his nerves go on edge. No human being could have memorized these thousands of patterns as they flashed across the Bell too fast for human eyes, but the brain reading the Bell through his eyes was not human. It might even be locked into a computer of its own. It was, thought Jestocost, an indignity for a Lord of the Instrumentality to be used as a human spy-glass.
The machine blotted up.
“You’re a fraud,” cried the Lord Issan. “There’s no evidence.”
“Maybe the offworlder tried,” said the Lady Johanna.
“Shadow him,” said Lord William. “If he would steal ancient coins he would steal anything.”
The Lady Johanna turned to C’mell. “You’re a silly thing. You have wasted our time and you have kept us from serious inter-world business.”
“It is inter-world business,” wept C’mell. She let her hand slip from Jestocost’s shoulder, where it had rested all the time. The body-to-body relay broke and the telepathic link broke with it.
“We should judge that,” said Lord Issan.
“You might have been punished,” said Lady Johanna.
The Lord Jestocost had said nothing, but there was a glow of happiness in him. If the E-telekeli was half as good as he seemed, the underpeople had a list of checkpoints and escape routes which would make it easier to hide from the capricious sentence of painless death which human authorities meted out.
5
There was singing in the corridors that night.
Underpeople burst into happiness for no visible reason.
C’mell danced a wild cat dance for the next customer who came in from outworld stations, that very evening. When she got home to bed, she knelt before the picture of her father C’mackintosh and thanked the E-telekeli for what Jestocost had done.
But the story became known a few generations later, when the Lord Jestocost had won acclaim for being the champion of the underpeople and when the authorities, still unaware of E-telekeli, accepted the elected representatives of the underpeople as negotiators for better terms of life; and C’mell had died long since.
She had first had a long, good life.
She became a female chef when she was too old to be a girly girl. Her food was famous. Jestocost once visited her. At the end of the meal he had asked, “There’s a silly rhyme among the underpeople. No human beings know it except me.”
“I don’t care about rhymes,” she said.
“This is called The what-she-did.’ ”
C’mell blushed all the way down to the neckline of her capacious blouse. She had filled out a lot in middle age. Running the restaurant had helped.
“Oh, that rhyme!” she said. “It’s silly.”
“It says you were in love with a hominid.”
“No,” she said. “I wasn’t.” Her green eyes, as beautiful as ever, stared deeply into his. Jestocost felt uncomfortable. This was getting personal. He liked political relationships; personal things made him uncomfortable.
The light in the room shifted and her cat eyes blazed at him, she looked like the magical fire-haired girl he had known.
“I wasn’t in love. You couldn’t call it that…”
Her heart cried out, It was you, it was you, it was you.
“But the rhyme,” insisted Jestocost, “says it was a hominid. It wasn’t that Prins van de Schemering?”
“Who was he?” C’mell asked the question quietly, but her emotions cried out, Darling, will you never, never know?
“The strong man.”
“Oh, him. I’ve forgotten him.”
Jestocost rose from the table. “You’ve had a good life, C’mell. You’ve been a citizen, a committee woman, a leader. And do you even know how many children you have had?”
“Seventy-three,” she snapped at him. “Just because they’re multiple doesn’t mean we don’t know them.”
His playfulness left him. His face was grave, his voice kindly. “I meant no harm, C’mell.”
He never knew that when he left she went back to the kitchen and cried for a while. It was Jestocost whom she had vainly loved ever since they had been comrades, many long years ago.
Even after she died, at the full age of five-score and three, he kept seeing her about the corridors and shafts of Earthport. Many of her great-granddaughters looked just like her and several of them practiced the girly-girl business with huge success.
They were not half-slaves. They were citizens (reserved grade) and they had photopasses which protected their property, their identity and their rights. Jestocost.was the godfather to them all; he was often embarrassed when the most voluptuous creatures in the universe threw playful kisses at him. All he asked was fulfillment of his political passions, not his personal ones. He had always been in love, madly in love—
With justice itself.
At last, his own time came, and he knew that he was dying, and he was not sorry. He had had a wife, hundreds of years ago, and had loved her well; their children had passed into the generations of man.
In the ending, he wanted to know something, and he called to a nameless one (or to his successor) far beneath the ground. He called with his mind till it was a scream.
I have helped your people.
