We the Underpeople

We the Underpeople Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: We the Underpeople Read Online Free PDF
Author: Cordwainer Smith
Tags: Science-Fiction
Elaine.

    "If there were a door," said the Lady Panc Ashash, "you wouldn't need me to tell you to go through it. And you do need me."

    "Why?" said Elaine.

    "Because I've waited for you hundreds of years, that's why."

    "That's no answer!" snapped Elaine.

    "It is so an answer," smiled the woman, and her lack of hostility was not robotlike at all. It was the kindliness and composure of a mature human being. She looked up into Elaine's eyes and spoke emphatically and softly. "I know because I do know. 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?"

    "No," said Elaine, "no, I don't." But she reached out her hand to the sweet old woman. The lady took her hand. The touch was warm and very human.

    "You don't have to understand it. Just do it. 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. "How will I get through the door?"

    "I'll open it," smiled the lady, releasing Elaine's hand, "and you'll know your lover when he sings you the poem."

    "Which poem?" said Elaine, stalling for time and frightened by a door which did not even exist.

    "It starts, 'I knew you and loved you, and won you, in Kalma . . .' You'll know it. Go on in. It'll be bothersome at first, but when you meet the Hunter, it will all seem different."

    "Have you ever been in there, yourself?"

    "Of course not," said the dear old lady. "I'm a machine. 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. And you will. Here's the door."

    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.

    "Here, now," said the Lady Panc Ashash, and pushed.

    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. Poets later tried to describe Elaine at the door with a verse which begins,
 
There were brown ones and blue ones
And white ones and whiter,
In the hidden and forbidden
Downtown of Clown Town.
There were horrid ones and horrider
In the brown and yellow corridor.
 

    The truth was much simpler.

    Trained witch, born witch that she was, she perceived the truth immediately. All these people, all she could see, at least, were sick. They needed help. They needed herself.

    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. Underpeople. Dirt.

    And she was conditioned to the bone never to help them.

    She did not know why the muscles of her legs made her walk forward, but they did.

    There are many pictures of that scene.

    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.

    She stared at the underpeople.

    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
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