Welcome to Clown Town

Welcome To Clowntown

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Lake Orion - Rochester Hills - Oxford. Woodbury - Oakdale - Cottage Grove - Stillwater. White Bear Lake - Shoreview - Roseville. Blue Springs - Independence - Lee's Summit. Jefferson City - Fulton - Russellville. Downtown - South Kansas City. Waynesville- Bryson - Canton - Sylva. Franklin - Murphy - Hayesville- Robbinsville. Chappaqua - Pleasantville - Mt Kisco. Riverdale - Inwood - Washington Heights. Poughkeepsie - Pleasant Valley - Dover Plains.

Long Beach - Oceanside - Rockville Centre. Holbrook - Lake Grove - The Ronkonkomas. Hicksville - Westbury - Bethpage. Bay Shore - Brentwood - Central Islip. Lower Manhattan - Downtown. Brooklyn Heights - Fort Greene. Saugerties - Catskill - Hudson - Rhinebeck. Saratoga Springs - Queensbury. State College - Philipsburg. Johnstown - Laurel Highlands - Altoona. New Bloomfield - Newport. Summerville - North Charleston. Cedar Park - Leander - Liberty Hill.

Flower Mound - Lewisville. Wharton- East Bernard - Eagle Lake. Centreville - South Riding. The supervisor was found. He was still a musician. He remembered nothing of the story. He still remembered nothing. The sub-chief invoked an emergency and Police Drug Four "clear memory" was administered to the musician. He immediately remembered the whole silly scene, but insisted that it did not matter.

The case was referred to Lady Goroke, who instructed the authorities that the musician be told the whole horrible, beautiful story of D'joan at Fomalhaut—the very story which you are now being told—and he wept. He was not punished otherwise, but the Lady Goroke commanded that those memories be left in his mind for so long as he might live. It selected a fertilized human embryo, tagged it with the freakish name "Elaine," irradiated the genetic code with strong aptitudes for witchcraft and then marked the person's card for training in medicine, transportation by sailship to Fomalhaut III and release for service on the planet.

Elaine was born without being needed, without being wanted, without having a skill which could help or hurt any existing human being. She went into life doomed and useless. It is not remarkable that she was misbegotten.

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Remarkable was the fact that she managed to survive without being altered, corrected or killed by the safety devices which mankind has installed in society for its own protection. Unwanted, unused, she wandered through the tedious months and useless years of her own existence.

She was well fed, richly clothed, variously housed. She had machines and robots to serve her, underpeople to obey her, people to protect her against one another or against herself, should the need arise. But she could never find work; without work, she had no time for love; without work or love, she had no hope at all. If she had only stumbled into the right experts or the right authorities, they would have altered or re-trained her. This would have made her into an acceptable woman; but she did not find the police, nor did they find her. She was helpless to correct her own programming, utterly helpless.

It had been imposed on her at An-fang, way back at An-fang, where all things begin. The ruby had trembled, the tourmaline failed, the diamond passed unsupported. Thus, a woman was born doomed. Much later, when people made songs about the strange case of the dog-girl D'joan, the minstrels and singers had tried to imagine what Elaine felt like, and they had made up The Song of Elaine for her. It is not authentic, but it shows how Elaine looked at her own life before the strange case of D'joan began to flow from Elaine's own actions:.

Other women hate me. Men never touch me. I am too much me. I'll be a witch! Mama never towelled me. People never named me Dogs never shamed me Oh, I am a such me! I'll be a witch. I'll make them shun me. They'll never run me. Could they even stun me? Let them all attack me. They can only rack me. Me—I can hack me. The song overstates the case.

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Women did not hate Elaine; they did not look at her. Men did not shun Elaine; they did not notice her either. There were no places on Fomalhaut III where she could have met human children, for the nurseries were far underground because of chancy radiation and fierce weather. The song pretends that Elaine began with the thought that she was not human, but underpeople, and had herself been born a dog.

This did not happen at the beginning of the case, but only at the very end, when the story of D'joan was already being carried between the stars and developing with all the new twists of folklore and legend. She never went mad. Elaine approached it before she met D'joan. Elaine was not the only case, but she was a rare and genuine one. Her life, thrust back from all attempts at growth, had turned back on itself and her mind had spiraled inward to the only safety she could really know, psychosis.

Madness is always better than X, and X to each patient is individual, personal, secret and overwhelmingly important. Elaine had gone normally mad; her imprinted and destined career was the wrong one. These working conditions were needed on new planets. They were not coded to consult other people; most places, there would be no one to consult. Elaine did what was set for her at An-fang, all the way down to the individual chemical conditions of her spinal fluid. She was herself the wrong and she never knew it. Madness was much kinder than the realization that she was not herself, should not have lived, and amounted at the most to a mistake committed between a trembling ruby and a young, careless man with a guitar.

Their meeting occurred at a place nicknamed "the edge of the world," where the undercity met daylight. This was itself unusual; but Fomalhaut III was an unusual and uncomfortable planet, where wild weather and men's caprice drove architects to furious design and grotesque execution. Elaine walked through the city, secretly mad, looking for sick people whom she could help. She had been stamped, imprinted, designed, born, bred and trained for this task. There was no task.

She was an intelligent woman. Bright brains serve madness as well as they serve sanity—namely, very well indeed. It never occurred to her to give up her mission. The people of Fomalhaut III, like the people of Manhome Earth itself, are almost uniformly handsome; it is only in the far-out, half-unreachable worlds that the human stock, strained by the sheer effort to survive, becomes ugly, weary or varied.

She did not look much different from the other intelligent, handsome people who flocked the streets. Her hair was black, and she was tall. Her arms and legs were long, the trunk of her body short. She wore her hair brushed straight back from a high, narrow, square forehead.

Her eyes were an odd deep blue. Her mouth might have been pretty, but it never smiled, so that no one could really tell whether it was beautiful or not. She stood erect and proud: Her mouth was strange in its very lack of communicativeness and her eyes swept back and forth, back and forth like ancient radar, looking for the sick, the needy, and stricken, whom she had a passion to serve. How could she be unhappy? She had never had time to be happy. It was easy for her to think that happiness was something which disappeared at the end of childhood.

Now and then, here and there, perhaps when a fountain murmured in sunlight or when leaves exploded in the startling Fomalhautian spring, she wondered that other people—people as responsible as herself by the doom of age, grade, sex, training and career number—should be happy when she alone seemed to have no time for happiness. But she always dismissed the thought and walked the ramps and streets until her arches ached, looking for work which did not yet exist.

Human flesh, older than history, more dogged than culture, has its own wisdom. The bodies of people are marked with the archaic ruses of survival, so that on Fomalhaut III, Elaine herself preserved the skills of ancestors she never even thought about—those ancestors, who in the incredible and remote past, had mastered terrible Earth itself. But there was a part of her which suspected that she was mad.

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Perhaps this wisdom seized her as she walked from Waterrocky Road toward the bright esplanades of the Shopping Bar. She saw a forgotten door. The robots could clean near it but, because of the old, odd, architectural shape, they could not sweep and polish right at the bottom line of the door. A thin hard line of old dust and caked polish lay like a sealant at the base of the doorline. It was obvious that no one had gone through for a long, long time.

The civilized rule was that prohibited areas were marked both telepathically and with symbols. The most dangerous of all had robot or underpeople guards. But everything which was not prohibited, was permitted. Thus Elaine had no right to open the door, but she had no obligation not to do so. This was a far cry from the "I'll be a witch" motif attributed to her in the later ballad. She was not yet frantic, not yet desperate, she was not yet even noble. That opening of a door changed her own world and changed life on thousands of planets for generations to come, but the opening was not itself strange.

It was the tired caprice of a thoroughly frustrated and mildly unhappy woman. All the other descriptions of it have been improvements, embellishments, falsifications. She did get a shock when she opened the door, but not for the reasons attributed backwards to her by balladists and historians. She was shocked because the door opened on steps and the steps led down to landscape and sunlight—truly an unexpected sight on any world.

She was looking from the New City to the Old City. The New City rose on its shell out over the old city, and when she looked "indoors" she saw the sunset in the city below. She gasped at the beauty and the unexpectedness of it. There, the open door— with another world beyond it. Here, the old familiar street, clean, handsome, quiet, useless, where her own useless self had walked a thousand times.

Here, the world she knew. She did not know the words "fairyland" or "magic place," but if she had known them, she would have used them. The passerby noticed neither her nor the door. The sunset was just beginning to show in the upper city. In the lower city it was already blood-red with streamers of gold like enormous frozen flame. Elaine did not know that she sniffed the air; she did not know that she trembled on the edge of tears; she did not know that a tender smile, the first smile in years, relaxed her mouth and turned her tired tense face into a passing loveliness.

She was too intent on looking around. People walked about their business. Down the road, an underpeople type—female, possibly cat—detoured far around a true human who was walking at a slower pace. Far away, a police ornithopter flapped slowly around one of the towers; unless the robots used a telescope on her or unless they had one of the rare hawk-undermen who were sometimes used as police, they could not see her. She did not know it, but therewith unborn futures reeled out of existence, rebellion flamed into coming centuries, people and underpeople died in strange causes, mothers changed the names of unborn Lords and starships whispered back from places which men had not even imagined before.

Space3 which had always been there, waiting for men's notice, would come the sooner—because of her, because of the door, because of her next few steps, what she would say, and the child she would meet. The ballad-writers told the whole story later on, but they told it backwards, from their own knowledge of D'joan and what Elaine had done to set the worlds afire. The simple truth is the fact that a lonely woman went through a mysterious door. Everything else happened later.

At the top of the steps she stood, door closed behind her, the sunset gold of the unknown city streaming out in front of her. She could see where the great shell of the New City of Kalma arched out toward the sky; she could see that the buildings here were older, less harmonious than the ones she had left. She did not know the concept "picturesque," or she would have called it that.

She knew no concept to describe the scene which lay peacefully at her feet. Far in the distance, a fire-detector throbbed back and forth on top of an old tower. Outside of that there was nothing but the yellow-gold city beneath her, and a bird—was it a bird, or a large storm-swept leaf? Filled with fear, hope, expectation and the surmisal of strange appetites, she walked downward. With quiet, unknown purpose. At the foot of the stairs, nine flights of them there had been, a child waited—a girl, about five. The child had a bright blue smock, wavy red-brown hair, and the daintiest hands which Elaine had ever seen.

Elaine's heart went out to her. The child looked up at her and shrank away. Elaine knew the meaning of those handsome brown eyes, of that muscular supplication of trust, that recoil from people. It was not a child at all—just some animal in the shape of a person, a dog perhaps, which would later be taught to speak, to work to perform useful services. The little girl rose, standing as though she were about to run. Elaine had the feeling that the little dog-girl had not decided whether to run toward her or from her.

She did not wish to get involved with an underperson—what woman would? After all, it was small, very young. The two confronted each other for a moment, the little thing uncertain, Elaine relaxed. Then the little animal-girl spoke. Then the girl ran. A flash of blue from her dress, a twinkle of white from her running sandals, and she was gone. It was the wise mature voice of an experienced woman—a voice with a bubble of laughter underneath its phonic edge, with a hint of sympathy and enthusiasm in its tone.

The command was not merely a command. It was, even at its beginning, a happy private joke between two wise women. Elaine was not surprised when a machine spoke to her. Recordings had been telling her things all her life. She was not sure of this situation, however. You're lost or you wouldn't be here.

Put your hand in my window. A lady, in fact, and one of the Instrumentality. But my time came and they said to me, 'Would you mind if we made a machine print of your whole personality? It would be very helpful for the information booths. It felt pretty odd inside this contraption, me looking at things and talking to people and giving good advice and staying busy, until they built the new city. So what do you say? Am I me or aren't I? The warm voice lost its humor and became commanding.

The loneliness decided Elaine. She stepped up to the window and put her hand flat on the ledge. The worlds wait for you. The voice bubbled over with enthusiasm. Oh, he has waited for you a long, long time. And the little girl you met. That was D'joan herself. The story has begun. So sorry, my dear. I don't mean to confuse you. I am the lady Panc Ashash. Your number originally ended and you shouldn't even be on this planet.

All the important people here end with the numbers 5 and 6. You're a lay therapist and you're in the wrong place, but your lover is already on his way, and you've never been in love yet, and it's all too exciting. Elaine looked quickly around her. The old lower town was turning more red and less gold as the sunset progressed. The steps behind her seemed terribly high as she looked back, the door at the top very small. Perhaps it had locked on her when she closed it.

Maybe she wouldn't ever be able to leave the old lower city. The window must have been watching her in some way, because the voice of the lady Panc Ashash became tender. I haven't been me for a long, long time. I'm a machine, and still I feel like myself. Do sit down, and do forgive me.

There was the roadside marble bench behind her. She sat on it obediently. The happiness which had been in her at the top of the steps bubbled forth anew. If this wise old machine knew so much about her, perhaps it could tell her what to do. What did the voice mean by "wrong planet"? By "he is coming for you now," or was that what the voice had actually said? She might have been dead for hundreds or thousands of years, but she still spoke with the authority and kindness of a great lady. She saw a huge red cloud, like a pregnant whale, getting ready to butt the rim of the upper city, far above her and far out over the sea.

She wondered if clouds could possibly have feelings. Apparently the question was repeated. And here was a whole new world inside a house. It looked strange and rather pretty, so I came down. Wouldn't you have done the same thing? Perhaps I would have, when I was alive. I don't know that, but I know about things.

Maybe I can see the future, or perhaps the machine part of me computes such good probabilities that it just seems like it. I know who you are and what is going to happen to you. You had better brush your hair. I wish you would look at your hair. It could be prettier, not that it isn't pretty right now. You want to look your best. Your lover; that's who is coming, of course.

I'm not the kind of girl who would go ask a Subchief for the dreamies, not when I'm not entitled to the real thing. I may not be much of a person, but I have some self-respect. The next words gave her gooseflesh down her arms, they were uttered with such real earnestness, such driving sincerity. Elaine pivoted back on the bench so that she looked toward the window.

Her face was caught redly but the rays of the setting sun. She could only gasp. The inexorable voice went on. Does the name 'D'joan' mean nothing to you? God knows when I wore it last, but it'll make you feel more at easy terms with me. They're old stuff, but I think the body will work all right. This is the beginning of the story of D'joan, and I want that hair of yours brushed even if I have to brush it myself. Just wait right there, girl, wait right there. I'll just take a minute. The clouds were turning from dark red to liver-black.

What could Elaine do? She stayed on the bench. She kicked her shoe against the walk. She jumped a little when the old-fashioned street lights of the lower city went on with sharp geometrical suddenness; they did not have the subtle shading of the newer lights in the other city upstairs, where day phased into the bright clear night with no sudden shift in color. Elaine knew she must have been unconsciously expecting a monster, but this was a charming women of about her own height, wearing weird, old-fashioned clothes.

The strange woman had glossy black hair, no evidence of recent or current illness, no signs of severe lesions in the past, no impairment evident of sight, gait, reach or eyesight. There was no way she could check on smell or taste right off, but this was the medical check-up she had had built into her from birth on—the checklist which she had run through with every adult person she had ever met. She had been designed as a "lay therapist, female" and she was a good one, even when there was no one at all to treat.

Truly, the body was a rich one. It must have cost the landing charges of forty or fifty planetfalls. The human shape was perfectly rendered. The mouth moved over genuine teeth; the words were formed by throat, palate, tongue, teeth and lips, and not just by a microphone mounted in the head. The body was really a museum piece. It was probably a copy of the lady Panc Ashash herself in time of life. When the face smiled, the effect was indescribably winning. The lady wore the costume of a byegone age—a stately frontal dress of heavy blue material, embroidered with a square pattern of gold at hem, waist and bodice.

She had a matching cloak of dark, faded gold, embroidered in blue with the same pattern of squares. Her hair was upswept and set with jeweled combs. It seemed perfectly natural, but there was dust on one side of it. The robot smiled, "I'm out of date. It's been a long time since I was me. But I thought, my dear, that you would find this old body easier to talk to than the window over there The lady Panc Ashash looked at her earnestly. It's a robot body. You looked at it as though it were a real person. And I'm not me, either.

Did you know a machine could hurt? Just as I told you. Now I am a machine, and a part of your destiny. We will help each other to change the destiny of worlds, perhaps even to bring mankind back to humanity. Elaine stared at her in bewilderment. This was no common robot. It seemed like a real person and spoke with such warm authority. And this thing, whatever it was, this thing seemed to know so much about her. Nobody else had ever cared. The nurse-mothers at the Child-house on earth had said, "Another witch-child, and pretty too, they're not much trouble," and had let her life go by.

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At last Elaine could face the face which was not really a face. The charm, the humor, the expressiveness were still there. Lover first and destiny later. I was like that myself when I was a girl. The night was now complete above them. The street lights glared on the empty and unswept streets. A few doorways, not one of them less than a full street-crossing away, were illuminated with rectangles of light or shadow—light if they were far from the street lights, so that their own interior lights shone brightly, shadow if they were so close under the big lights that they cut off the glare from overhead.

But she pointed at the undistinguished white of an uninterrupted wall. There was no door at all in that place. And you do need me. It was the kindliness and composure of a mature human being. She looked up into Elaine's eyes and spoke emphatically and softly. Not because I'm a dead person—that doesn't matter any more—but because I am now a very old machine.

You will go into the Brown and Yellow Corridor and you will think of your lover, and you will do your work, and men will hunt you. But you will come out happily in the end. Do you understand this? The lady took her hand. The touch was warm and very human. And I know you will. So since you are going, go. Elaine tried to smile at her, but she was troubled, more consciously worried than ever before in her life.

Something real was happening to her, to her own individual self, at a very long last. It'll be bothersome at first, but when you meet the Hunter, it will all seem different. That whole place is thoughtproof. Nobody can see, hear, think or talk in or out of it. It's a shelter left over from the ancient wars, when the slightest sign of a thought would have brought destruction on the whole place. That's why the lord Englok built it, long before my time. But you can go in. The old robot lady waited no longer. She gave Elaine a strange friendly crooked smile, half proud and half apologetic.

She took Elaine with firm fingertips holding Elaine's left elbow. They walked a few steps down toward the wall. Elaine flinched as she was thrust toward the wall. Before she knew it, she was through. Smells hit her like a roar of battle. The air was hot. The light was dim. It looked like a picture of the Pain Planet, hidden somewhere in space.

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Poets later tried to describe Elaine at the door with a verse which begin,. There were horrid ones and horrider In the brown and yellow corridor. Trained witch, born witch that she was, she perceived the truth immediately. All these people, all she could see, at least, were sick. But the joke was on her, for she could not help a single one of them. Not one of them was a real person. They were just animals, things in the shape of man. The lady Panc Ashash, only a few moments in her past, seemed very remote.

And the city of Kalma itself, the new city, ten stories above her, almost seemed as though it had never existed at all. This, this was real. And this time, for the first time in her life, they stared right back at her. She had never seen anything like this before. They did not frighten her; they surprised her. The fright, Elaine felt, was to come later. Soon, perhaps, but not here, not now. Elaine did not know the word "damned" but she was pretty sure that "death," even to these things, meant simply "termination of life.

A witch woman, ordinary people would call me. We don't have anything to do with you underpeople. They never know that they're death. How do you think we die, if you people don't send contaminated robots in with diseases? We all die off when you do that, and then some more underpeople find this place again later on and make a shelter of it and live in it for a few generations until the death machines, things like you, come sweeping through the city and kill us off again.

This is Clown Town, the underpeople place. Haven't you heard of it? Elaine tried to walk past the woman-thing, but she found her arm grabbed. This couldn't have happened before, not in the history of the world—an underperson seizing a real person! The woman-thing let her arm go and faced toward the others.

Her voice had changed. It was no longer shrill and excited, but low and puzzled instead. Maybe it is a real person. Isn't that a joke? Lost, in here with us. Or maybe she is death. What do you think, Charley-is-my-darling? The man she spoke to stepped forward. Elaine thought, in another time, in some other place, that underperson might pass for an attractive human being.

His face was illuminated by intelligence and alertness. He looked directly at Elaine as though he had never seen her before, which indeed he had not, but he continued looking with so sharp, so strange a stare that she became uneasy. His voice, when he spoke, was brisk, high, clear, friendly; set in this tragic place, it was the caricature of a voice, as though the animal had been programmed for speech from the habits of a human, persuader by profession, whom one saw in the story-boxes telling people messages which were neither good nor important, but merely clever.

The handsomeness was itself deformity. Elaine wondered if he had come from goat stock. If we turned her head around, Mabel," said he to the underwoman who had first greeted Elaine, "turned it around eight or ten times, it would come off. Then we could live a few weeks or months longer before our lords and creators found us and put us all to death. What do you say, young lady?

Should we kill you? You mean, terminate life? It is against the law. Even the Instrumentality does not have the right to do that without trial. The police will read about the Brown and Yellow Corridor in your mind and they will flush us out with poison or they will spray disease in here so that we and our children will die.

The passionate anger did not disturb his smile or his persuasive tones, but the muscles of his eye-sockets and forehead showed the terrible strain. The result was an expression which Elaine had never seen before, a sort of self-control reaching out beyond the limits of insanity. She was not really afraid of him. Underpeople could not twist the heads of real persons; it was contrary to all regulations. A thought struck her. Perhaps regulations did not apply in a place like this, where illegal animals waited perpetually for sudden death.

The being which faced her was strong enough to turn her head around ten times clockwise or counter-clockwise. From her anatomy lessons, she was pretty sure that the head would come off somewhere during that process. She looked at him with interest. Animal-type fear had been conditioned out of her, but she had, she found, an extreme distaste for the termination of life under random circumstances.

Perhaps her "witch" training would help. She tried to pretend that he was in fact a man. We might as well get acquainted. I'm Elaine, assigned here from Manhome Earth. Mabel's mouth dropped open. The others gaped at her. One or two, more quick-witted than the rest, began whispering to their neighbors. At last Charley-is-my-darling spoke to her. Can I call you my lady? We are your people. We will do whatever you say.

Of course you got in. The lady Panc Ashash sent you. She has been telling us for a hundred years that somebody would come from Earth, a real person with an animal name, not a number, and that we should have a child named D'joan ready to take up the threads of destiny. Please, please sit down. Will you have a drink of water? We have no clean vessel here. We are all underpeople here and we have used everything in the place, so that it is contaminated for a real person. Do not touch it. Fill it with water from the top of the little waterfall.

That way our guest can have an uncontaminated drink. By now, her eyes had become accustomed to the darkness. She could see that the main corridor was painted a yellow, faded and stained, and a contrasting light brown. She wondered what possible human mind could have selected so ugly a combination.

Cross-corridors seemed to open into it; at any rate, she saw illuminated archways further down and people walking out of them briskly. No one can walk briskly and naturally out of a shallow alcove, so she was pretty sure that the archways led to something. The underpeople, too, she could see. They looked very much like people. Here and there, individuals reverted to the animal type—a horse-man whose muzzle had regrown to its ancestral size, a rat-woman with normal human features except for nylon-like white whiskers, twelve or fourteen on each side of her face, reaching twenty centimeters to either side.

One looked very much like a person indeed—a beautiful young woman seated on a bench some eight or ten meters down the corridor, and paying no attention to the crowd, to Mabel, to Charley-is-my-darling or to herself. Mabel, relieved from the tension which had seized her when she had asked if Elaine were "death," babbled with a sociability which was outre in this environment.

Nobody has to do anything at all here. The whole bunch of us are completely illegal. This corridor is a thought-shelter, so that no thoughts can escape or enter it. The whole tunnel registers 'sewage tank: People built it for their own use, a million years ago. Why, she wondered, did she snap at him? He wasn't a person, just a talking animal who had missed being dropped down the nearest incinerator. We underpeople don't get much chance to study real history. But we use this corridor. Somebody with a morbid sense of humor named this place Clown Town.

We live along for ten or twenty or a hundred years, and then people or robots find us and kill us all. That's why Mabel was upset. She thought you were death for this time. It must have been quite a shock to him to be honest. None of us really have to. We're all doomed anyhow. She's a little more honest than the rest of us.

She has her pride. She scorns the rest of us. She puts us in our place. She makes everybody feel inferior. We think she is a valuable member of the group.

We all have our pride, which is hopeless anyway, but Crawlie has her pride all by herself, without doing anything whatever about it. She sort of reminds us. If we leave her alone, she leaves us alone. Elaine thought, You're funny things, so much like people, but so inexpert about it, as though you all had to "die" before you really learned what it is to be alive. Aloud, she could only say, "I never met anybody like that. Crawlie must have sensed that they were talking about her, because she looked at Elaine with a short quick stare of blazing hatred.

Crawlie's pretty face locked itself into a glare of concentrated hostility and scorn; then her eyes wandered and Elaine felt that she, Elaine, no longer existed in the thing's mind, except as a rebuke which had been administered and forgotten. She had never seen privacy as impenetrable as Crawlie's. And yet the being, whatever she might have been made from, was very lovely in human terms.

A fierce old hag, covered with mouse-gray fur, rushed up to Elaine. The mouse-woman was the Baby-baby who had been sent on the errand. She held a ceramic cup in a pair of long tongs. Water was in it. Sixty to seventy underpeople, including the little girl in the blue dress whom she had seen outside, watched her as she sipped. The water was good. She drank it all. There was a universal exhalation, as though everyone in the corridor had waited for this moment. Elaine started to put the cup down but the old mouse-woman was too quick for her. She took the cup from Elaine, stopping her in mid-gesture and using the tongs, so that the cup would not be contaminated by the touch of an underperson.

It is our custom not to talk with a newcomer until we have offered our hospitality. Let me be frank. We may have to kill you, if this whole business turns out to be a mistake, but let me assure you that if I do kill you, I will do it nicely and without the least bit of malice. Elaine did not know what was so right about it, and said so. She visualized her head being twisted off.

Apart from the pain and the degradation, it seemed so terribly messy—to terminate life in a sewer with things which did not even have a right to exist. He gave her no chance to argue, but went on explaining, "Suppose things turn out just right. Suppose that you are the Esther-Elaine-or-Eleanor that we have all been waiting for—the person who will do something to D'joan and bring us all help and deliverance—give us life, in short, real life —then what do we do?

Why am I Esther-Elaine-or-Eleanor? What do I do to D'joan? Charley-is-my-darling stared at her as though he could not believe her question. Mabel frowned as though she could not think of the right words to put forth her opinions. Baby-baby, who had glided back to the group with swift mouselike suddenness, looked around as though she expected someone from the rear to speak. Crawlie turned her face toward Elaine and said, with infinite condescension:. You seem to be both.

We have all our information from the lady Panc Ashash. Since she is dead, she has no prejudices against us underpeople. Since she has not had much of anything to do, she has run through billions and billions of probabilities for us. All of us know what most probabilities come to—sudden death by disease or gas, or maybe being hauled off to the slaughterhouses in big police ornithopters. But the lady Panc Ashash found that perhaps a person with a name like yours would come, a human being with an oldname and not a number name, that that person would meet the Hunter, that she and the Hunter would teach the underchild D'joan a message and that the message would change the worlds.

We have kept one child after another named D'joan, waiting for a hundred years. Now you show up. Maybe you are the one. You don't look very competent to me. What are you good for? Charley-is-my-darling whispered to the group nearby, not caring whether Elaine heard his words or not, "That's wonderful, wonderful. She is a witch. Perhaps the great day is here! Elaine," said he humbly, "will you please look at us.

When she stopped to think about where she was, it was incredible that the empty old lower city of Kalma should be just outside, just beyond the wall, and the busy new city a mere thirty-five meters higher. This corridor was a world to itself. It felt like a world, with the ugly yellows and browns, the dim old lights, the stenches of man and animal mixed under intolerably bad ventilation. Baby-baby, Crawlie, Mabel and Charley-is-my-darling were part of this world.

They were real; but they were outside, outside, so far as Elaine herself was concerned. Charley-is-my-darling, who was so plainly the leader, spoke as if in a trance: The only 'going' you are going to go is death. There is no other direction. We can't let the old you go out of this door, not when the lady Panc Ashash has thrust you in to us. Either you go forward to your destiny, to our destiny too, either you do that, and all works out all right, so that you love us, and we love you," he added dreamily, "or else I kill you with my own hands.

I could give you another clean drink of water first. But that is all. There isn't much choice for you, human being Elaine.

What do you think would happen if you went outside? Would that matter to you, ma'am and Elaine? The old mouse-hag Baby-baby came close to Elaine. She looked up at her and whispered through yellow teeth. Death doesn't matter all that much, not even to you true humans with your four hundred years or to us animals with the slaughterhouse around the corner.

Death is a when , not a what. It's the same for all of us. Go straight ahead and you may find mercy and love. They're much richer than death, if you can only find them. Once you do find them, death won't be very important. The old mouse face was on fire with sheer expressiveness. Elaine could suddenly imagine what Baby-baby had looked like to a mouse-underman when she was young and sleek and gray.

Enthusiasm flushed the old features with youth as Baby-baby went on, "I don't mean love for a lover, girl. I mean love for yourself. Love for all things living. Love even for me. Your love for me. Can you imagine that? Elaine swam through fatigue but she tried to answer the question.

She looked in the dim light at the wrinkled old mouse-hag with her filthy clothes and her little red eyes. The fleeting image of the beautiful young mouse-woman had faded away; there was only this cheap, useless old thing, with her inhuman demands and her senseless pleading.

People never loved underpeople. They used them, like chairs or doorhandles. Since when did a doorhandle demand the Charter of Ancient Rights? Charley-is-my-darling shook his head as if to clear his sight. Let me go or kill me or something. This doesn't make sense. I was tired when I got here, and I'm a million years tireder now. The child D'joan spoke. She had stood at the back of the group. The way you came. The other way is death.

There is the Lord Femtiosex, who is just and without pity. There is the Lord Limaono, who thinks that underpeople are a potential danger and should not have been started in the first place. There is the Lady Goroke, who does not know how to pray, but who tries to ponder the mystery of life and who has shown kindnesses to underpeople, as long as the kindnesses were lawful ones. And there is the Lady Arabella Underwood, whose justice no man can understand. Nor underpeople either," he added with a chuckle. I mean, where did she get the funny name?

It doesn't have a number in it. It's as bad as your names. Or my own," said Elaine. The Hunter can go through the rooms and the slaughterhouses of the Instrumentality, but could you?

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