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Title: On the Gem Planet
Author: Smith, Cordwainer [Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony]
   (1913-1966)
Date of first publication: October 1963
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Galaxy Magazine, October 1963
   [New York: Galaxy Publishing Corporation]
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 11 April 2017
Date last updated: 11 April 2017
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1422

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






  ON THE
  GEM PLANET



  By CORDWAINER SMITH


  He sought help and a great gift
  of weaponry. What he found--but
  could not keep--was love!



Consider the horse. He climbed up through the crevasses of a cliff of
gems; the force which drove him was the love of man.

Consider Mizzer, the resort planet, where the dictator Colonel Wedder
reformed the culture so violently that whatever had been slovenly now
became atrocious.

Consider Genevieve, so rich that she was the prisoner of her own
wealth, so beautiful that she was the victim of her own beauty, so
intelligent that she knew there was nothing, nothing to be done about
her fate.

Consider Casher O'Neill, a wanderer among the planets, thirsting for
justice and yet hoping in his innermost thoughts that "justice" was not
just another word for revenge.

Consider Pontoppidan, that literal gem of a planet, where the people
were too rich and busy to have good food, open air or much fun. All
they had was diamonds, rubies, tourmalines and emeralds.

Add these together and you have one of the strangest stories ever told
from world to world.




I

When Casher O'Neill came to Pontoppidan, he found that the capital city
was appropriately called Andersen.

This was the second century of the Rediscovery of Man.  People
everywhere had taken up old names, old languages, old customs, as fast
as the robots and the underpeople could retrieve the data from the
rubbish of forgotten starlanes or the subsurface ruins of Manhome
itself.

Casher knew this very well, to his bitter cost.  Re-acculturation had
brought him revolution and exile.  He came from the dry, beautiful
planet of Mizzer.  He was himself the nephew of the ruined ex-ruler,
Kuraf, whose collection of objectionable books had at one time been
unmatched in the settled galaxy; he had stood aside, half-assenting,
when the colonels Gibna and Wedder took over the planet in the name of
reform; he had implored the Instrumentality, vainly, for help when
Wedder became a tyrant; and now he traveled among the stars, looking
for men or weapons who might destroy Wedder and make Kaheer again the
luxurious, happy city which it once had been.

He felt that his cause was hopeless when he landed on Pontoppidan.  The
people were warm-hearted, friendly, intelligent, but they had no
motives to fight for, no weapons to fight with, no enemies to fight
against.  They had little public spirit, such as Casher O'Neill had
seen back on his native planet of Mizzer.  They were concerned about
little things.

Indeed, at the time of his arrival, the Pontoppidans were wildly
excited about a horse.

A horse!  Who worries about one horse?

Casher O'Neill himself said so.  "Why bother about a horse?  We have
lots of them on Mizzer.  They are four-handed beings, eight times the
weight of a man, with only one finger on each of the four hands.  The
fingernail is very heavy and permits them to run fast.  That's why our
people have them, for running."

"Why run?" said the Hereditary Dictator of Pontoppidan.  "Why run, when
you can fly?  Don't you have ornithopters?"

"We don't run with them," said Casher indignantly.  "We make them run
against each other and then we pay prizes to the one which runs
fastest."

"But then," said Phillip Vincent, the Hereditary Dictator, "you get a
very illogical situation.  When you have tried out these four-fingered
beings, you know how fast each one goes.  So what?  Why bother?"

His niece interrupted.  She was a fragile little thing, smaller than
Casher O'Neill liked women to be.  She had clear gray eyes, well-marked
eyebrows, a very artificial coiffeur of silver-blonde hair and the most
sensitive little mouth he had ever seen.  She conformed to the local
fashion by wearing some kind of powder or face cream which was
flesh-pink in color but which had overtones of lilac.  On a woman as
old as twenty-two, such a coloration would have made the wearer look
like an old hag, but on Genevieve it was pleasant, if rather startling.
It gave the effect of a happy child playing grown-up and doing the job
joyfully and well.  Casher knew that it was hard to tell ages in these
off-trail planets.  Genevieve might be a grand dame in her third or
fourth rejuvenation.

He doubted it, on second glance.  What she said was sensible, young,
and pert:

"But uncle, they're _animals_!"

"I know that," he rumbled.

"But uncle, don't you see it?"

"Stop saying 'but uncle' and tell me what you mean," growled the
Dictator, very fondly.

"Animals are always _uncertain_."

"Of course," said the uncle.

"That makes it a game, uncle," said Genevieve.  "They're never sure
that any one of them would do the same thing twice.  Imagine the
excitement--the beautiful big beings from earth running around and
around on their four middle fingers, the big fingernails making the
gems jump loose from the ground!"

"I'm not at all sure it's that way.  Besides, Mizzer may be covered
with something valuable, such as earth or sand, instead of gemstones
like the ones we have here on Pontoppidan.  You know your flower-pots
with their rich, warm, wet, soft earth?"

"Of course I do, uncle.  And I know what you paid for them.  You were
very generous.  And still are," she added diplomatically, glancing
quickly at Casher O'Neill to see how the familial piety went across
with the visitor.

"We're not that rich on Mizzer.  It's mostly sand, with farmland along
the Twelve Niles, our big rivers."

"I've seen pictures of rivers," said Genevieve.  "Imagine living on a
whole world full of flowerpot stuff!"

"You're getting off the subject, darling.  We were wondering why anyone
would bring one horse, just one horse, to Pontoppidan.  I suppose you
could race a horse against himself, if you had a stopwatch.  But would
it be fun?  Would you do that, young man?"

Casher O'Neill tried to be respectful.  "In my home we used to have a
lot of horses.  I've seen my uncle time them one by one."

"Your uncle?" said the Dictator interestedly.  "Who was your uncle that
he had all these four-fingered 'horses' running around?  They're all
Earth animals and very expensive."



Casher felt the coming of the low, slow blow he had met so many times
before, right from the whole outside world into the pit of his stomach.
"My uncle--" he stammered--"my uncle--I thought you knew--was the old
Dictator of Mizzer, Kuraf."

Philip Vincent jumped to his feet, very lightly for so well-fleshed a
man.  The young mistress, Genevieve, clutched at the throat of her
dress.

"Kuraf!" cried the old Dictator.  "Kuraf!  We know about him, even
here.  But you were supposed to be a Mizzer patriot, not one of Kuraf's
people."

"He doesn't have any children--" Casher began to explain.

"I should think not, not with those habits!" snapped the old man.

"--so I'm his nephew and his heir.  But I'm not trying to put the
Dictatorship back, even though I should be dictator.  I just want to
get rid of Colonel Wedder.  He has ruined my people, and I am looking
for money or weapons or help to make my home-world free."  This was the
point, Casher O'Neill knew, at which people either started believing
him or did not.  If they did not, there was not much he could do about
it.  If they did, he was sure to get some sympathy.  So far, no help.
Just sympathy.

But the Instrumentality, while refusing to take action against Colonel
Wedder, had given young Casher O'Neill an all-world travel
pass--something which a hundred lifetimes of savings could not have
purchased for the ordinary man.  (His obscene old uncle had gone off to
Sunvale, on Ttioll, the resort planet, to live out his years between
the casino and the beach.)  Casher O'Neill held the conscience of
Mizzer in his hand.  Only he, among the star travelers, cared enough to
fight for the freedom of the Twelve Niles.  Here, now, in this room,
there was a turning point.

"I won't give you anything," said the Hereditary Dictator, but he said
it in a friendly voice.  His niece started tugging at his sleeve.

The older man went on.  "Stop it, girl.  I won't give you anything, not
if you're part of that rotten lot of Kuraf's, not unless--"

"Anything, sir, anything, just so that I get help or weapons to go home
to the Twelve Niles!"

"All right, then.  Unless you open your mind to me.  I'm a good
telepath myself."

"Open my mind!  Whatever for?"  The incongruous indecency of it shocked
Casher O'Neill.  He'd had men and women and governments ask a lot of
strange things from him, but no one before had had the cold impudence
to ask him to open his mind.  "And why you?" he went on, "What would
you get out of it?  There's nothing much in my mind."

"To make sure," said the Hereditary Dictator, "that you are not too
honest and sharp in your beliefs.  If you're positive that you know
what to do, you might be another Colonel Wedder, putting your people
through a dozen torments for a Utopia which never quite comes true.  If
you don't care at all, you might be like your uncle.  He did no real
harm.  He just stole his planet blind and he had some extraordinary
habits which got him talked about between the stars.  He never killed a
man in his life, did he?"

"No, sir," said Casher O'Neill, "he never did."  It relieved him to
tell the one little good thing about his uncle; there was so very, very
little which could be said in Kuraf's favor.

"I don't like slobbering old libertines like your uncle," said Philip
Vincent, "but I don't hate them either.  They don't hurt other people
much.  As a matter of actual fact, they don't hurt anyone but
themselves.  They waste property, though.  Like these horses you have
on Mizzer.  We'd never bring living beings to this world of
Pontoppidan, just to play games with.  And you know we're not poor.
We're no Old North Australia, but we have a good income here."

That, thought Casher O'Neill, is the understatement of the year, but he
was a careful young man with a great deal at stake, so he said nothing.

The Dictator looked at him shrewdly.  He appreciated the value of
Casher's tactful silence.  Genevieve tugged at his sleeve, but he
frowned her interruption away.



"If," said the Hereditary Dictator, "_if_," he repeated, "you pass two
tests, I will give you a green ruby as big as my head.  If my Committee
will allow me to do so.  But I think I can talk them around.  One test
is that you let me peep all over your mind, to make sure that I am not
dealing with one more honest fool.  If you're too honest, you're a fool
and a danger to mankind.  I'll give you a dinner and ship you
off-planet as fast as I can.  And the other test is--solve the puzzle
of this horse.  The one horse on Pontoppidan.  Why is the animal here?
What should we do with it?  If it's good to eat, how should we cook it?
Or can we trade to some other world, like your planet Mizzer, which
seems to set a value on horses?"

"Thank you, sir--" said Casher O'Neill.

"But, uncle--" said Genevieve.

"Keep quiet, my darling, and let the young man speak," said the
Dictator.

"--all I was going to ask, is," said Casher O'Neill, "what's a green
ruby good for?  I didn't even know they came green."

"That, young man, is a Pontoppidan specialty.  We have a geology based
on ultra-heavy chemistry.  This planet was once a fragment from a giant
planet which imploded.  The use is simple.  With a green ruby you can
make a laser beam which will boil away your city of Kaheer in a single
sweep.  We don't have weapons here and we don't believe in them, so I
won't give you a weapon.  You'll have to travel further to find a ship
and to get the apparatus for mounting your green ruby.  If I give it to
you.  But you will be one more step along in your fight with Colonel
Wedder."

"Thank you, thank you, most honorable sir!" cried Casher O'Neill.

"But uncle," said Genevieve, "you shouldn't have picked those two
things because I know the answers."

"You know all about him," said the Hereditary Dictator, "by some means
of your own?"

Genevieve flushed under her lilac-hued foundation cream.  "I know
enough for us to know."

"How do you know it, my darling?"

"I just know," said Genevieve.

Her uncle made no comment, but he smiled widely and indulgently as if
he had heard that particular phrase before.

She stamped her foot.  "And I know about the horse, too.  _All_ about
it."

"Have you seen it?"

"No."

"Have you talked to it?"

"Horses don't talk, uncle."

"Most underpeople do," he said.

"This isn't an underperson, uncle.  It's a plain unmodified old Earth
animal.  It never did talk."

"Then what do you know, my honey?"  The uncle was affectionate, but
there was the crackle of impatience under his voice.

"I taped it.  The whole thing.  The story of the horse of Pontoppidan.
And I've edited it, too.  I was going to show it to you this morning,
but your staff sent that young man in."

Casher O'Neill looked his apologies at Genevieve.

She did not notice him.  Her eyes were on her uncle.

"Since you've done this much, we might as well see it."  He turned to
the attendants.  "Bring chairs.  And drinks.  You know mine.  The young
lady will take tea with lemon.  Real tea.  Will you have coffee, young
man?"

"You have coffee!" cried Casher O'Neill.  As soon as he said it, he
felt like a fool.  Pontoppidan was a _rich_ planet.  On most worlds'
exchanges, coffee came out to about two man-years per kilo.  Here
halftracks crunched their way through gems as they went to load up the
frequent trading vessels.

The chairs were put in place.  The drinks arrived.  The Hereditary
Dictator had been momentarily lost in a brown study, as though he were
wondering about his promise to Casher O'Neill.  He had even murmured to
the young man, "Our bargain stands?  Never mind what my niece says."
Casher had nodded vigorously.  The old man had gone back to frowning at
the servants and did not relax until a tiger-man bounded into the room,
carrying a tray with acrobatic precision.  The chairs were already in
place.

The father held his niece's chair for her as a command that she sit
down.  He nodded Casher O'Neill into a chair on the other side of
himself.

He commanded, "Dim the lights..."

The room plunged into semi-darkness.

Without being told, the people took their places immediately behind the
three main seats and the underpeople perched or sat on benches and
tables behind them.  Very little was spoken.  Casher O'Neill could
sense that Pontoppidan was a well-run place.  He began to wonder if the
Hereditary Dictator had much real work left to do, if he could fuss
that much over a single horse.  Perhaps all he did was boss his niece
and watch the robots load truck-loads of gems into sacks while the
underpeople weighed them, listed them and wrote out the bills for the
customers.




II

There was no screen; this was a good machine.

The planet Pontoppidan came into view, its airless brightness giving
strong hints of the mineral riches which might be found.

Here and there enormous domes, such as the one in which this palace was
located, came into view.

Genevieve's own voice, girlish, impulsive and yet didactic, rang out
with the story of her planet.  It was as though she had prepared the
picture not only for her own father, but for off-world visitors as
well.  (By Joan, that's it! thought Casher O'Neill.  If they don't
raise much food here, outside of the hydroponics, and don't have any
real People Places, they have to trade: that does mean visitors, and
many, many of them.)

The story was interesting but the girl herself was more interesting.
Her face shone in the shifting light which the images--a meter, perhaps
a little more, from the floor--reflected across the room.  Casher
O'Neill thought that he had never before seen a woman who so peculiarly
combined intelligence and charm.  She was girl, girl, girl, all the way
through; but she was also very smart and pleased with being smart.  It
betokened a happy life.  He found himself glancing covertly at her.
Once he caught her glancing, equally covertly, at him.  The darkness of
the scene enabled them both to pass it off as an accident without
embarrassment.

Her viewtape had come to the story of the _dipsies_, enormous canyons
which lay like deep gashes on the surface of the planet.  Some of the
color views were spectacular beyond belief.  Casher O'Neill, as the
"appointed one" of Mizzer, had had plenty of time to wander through the
non-salacious parts of his uncle's collections, and he had seen
pictures of the most notable worlds.

Never had he seen anything like this.  One view showed a sunset against
a six-kilometer cliff of a material which looked like solid emerald.
The peculiar bright sunshine of Pontoppidan's small, penetrating,
lilac-hued sun ran like living water over the precipice of gems.  Even
the reduced image, one meter by one meter, was enough to make him catch
his breath.

The bottom of the dipsy had vapor emerging in curious cylindrical
columns which seemed to erode as they reached two or three times the
height of a man.  The recorded voice of Genevieve was explaining that
the very thin atmosphere of Pontoppidan would not be breathable for
another 2,520 years, since the settlers did not wish to squander their
resources on a luxury like breathing when the whole planet only had
60,000 inhabitants; they would rather go on with masks and use their
wealth in other ways.  After all, it was not as though they did not
have their domed cities, some of them many kilometers in radius.
Besides the usual hydroponics, they had even imported 7.2 hectares of
garden soil, 5.5 centimeters deep, together with enough water to make
the gardens rich and fruitful.  They had bought worms, too, at the
price of eight carats of diamond per living worm, in order to keep the
soil of the gardens loose and living.

Genevieve's transcribed voice rang out with pride as she listed these
accomplishments of her people, but a note of sadness came in when she
returned to the subject of the dipsies.  "... and though we would like
to live in them and develop their atmospheres, we dare not.  There is
too much escape of radioactivity.  The geysers themselves may or may
not be contaminated from one hour to the next.  So we just look at
them.  Not one of them has ever been settled, except for the Hippy
Dipsy, where the horse came from.  Watch this next picture."

The camera sheered up, up, up from the surface of the planet.  Where it
had wandered among mountains of diamonds and valleys of tourmalines, it
now took to the blue-black of near, inner space.  One of the canyons
showed (from high altitude) the grotesque pattern of a human woman's
hips and legs, though what might have been the upper body was lost in a
confusion of broken hills which ended in a bright almost-iridescent
plain to the North.

"That," said the real Genevieve, overriding her own voice on the
screen, "is the Hippy Dipsy.  There, see the blue?  That's the only
lake on all of Pontoppidan.  And here we drop to the hermit's house."



Casher O'Neill almost felt vertigo as the camera plummeted from
off-planet into the depths of that immense canyon.  The edges of the
canyon almost seemed to move like lips with the plunge, opening and
folding inward to swallow him up.

Suddenly they were beside a beautiful little lake.

A small hut stood beside the shore.

In the doorway there sat a man, dead.

His body had been there a long time; it was already mummified.

Genevieve's recorded voice explained the matter: "... in Norstrilian
law and custom, they told him that his time had come.  They told him to
go to the Dying House, since he was no longer fit to live.  In Old
North Australia, they are so rich that they let everyone live as long
as he wants, unless the old person can't take rejuvenation any more,
even with stroon, and unless he or she gets to be a real pest to the
living.  If that happens, they are invited to go to the Dying House,
where they shriek and pant with delirious joy for weeks or days until
they finally die of an overload of sheer happiness and excitement..."
There was a hesitation, even in the recording.  "We never knew why this
man refused.  He stood off-planet and said that he had seen views of
the Hippy Dipsy.  He said it was the most beautiful place on all the
worlds, and that he wanted to build a cabin there, to live alone,
except for his non-human friend.  We thought it was some small pet.
When we told him that the Hippy Dipsy was very dangerous, he said that
this did not matter in the least to him, since he was old and dying
anyhow.  Then he offered to pay us twelve times our planetary income if
we would lease him twelve hectares on the condition of absolute
privacy.  No pictures, no scanners, no help, no visitors.  Just
solitude and scenery.  His name was Perin.  My great-grandfather asked
for nothing more, except the written transfer of credit.  When he paid
it, Perin even asked that he be left alone after he was dead.  Not
even a vault rocket so that he could either orbit Pontoppidan forever
or start a very slow journey to nowhere, the way so many people like
it.  So this is our first picture of him.  We took it when the light
went off in the People Room and one of the tiger-men told us that he
was sure a human consciousness had come to an end in the Hippy Dipsy.

"And we never even thought of the pet.  After all, we had never made a
picture of him.  This is the way he arrived from Perin's shack."



A robot was shown in a control room, calling excitedly in the old
Common Tongue.

"People, people!  Judgment needed!  Moving object coming out of the
Hippy Dipsy.  Object has improper shape.  Not a correct object.  Should
not rise.  Does so anyhow.  People, tell me, people, tell me!  Destroy
or not destroy?  This is an improper object.  It should fall, not rise.
Coming out of the Hippy Dipsy."

A firm click shut off the robot's chatter.  A well-shaped woman took
over.  From the nature of her work and the lithe, smooth tread with
which she walked, Casher O'Neill suspected that she was of cat origin,
but there was nothing in her dress or in her manner to show that she
was underpeople.

The woman in the picture lighted a screen.

She moved her hands in the air in front of her, like a blind person
feeling his way through open day.

The picture on the inner screen came to resolution.

A face showed in it.

What a face!  thought Casher O'Neill, and he heard the other people
around him in the viewing room.

The horse!

Imagine a face like that of a newborn cat, thought Casher.  Mizzer is
full of cats.  But imagine the face with a huge mouth, with big yellow
teeth--a nose long beyond imagination.  Imagine eyes which look
friendly.  In the picture they were rolling back and forth with
exertion, but even there--when they did not feel observed--there was
nothing hostile about the set of the eyes.  They were tame,
companionable eyes.  Two ridiculous ears stood high, and a little tuft
of golden hair showed on the crest of the head between the ears.

The viewed scene was comical, too.  The cat-woman was as astonished as
the viewers.  It was lucky that she had touched the emergency switch,
so that she not only saw the horse, but had recorded herself and her
own actions while bringing him into view.

Genevieve whispered across the chest of the Hereditary Dictator: "Later
we found he was a palomino pony.  That's a very special kind of horse.
And Perin had made him immortal, or almost immortal."

"Sh-h!" said her uncle.

The screen-within-the-screen showed the cat-woman waving her hands in
the air some more.  The view broadened.

The horse had four hands and no legs, or four legs and no hands,
whichever way you want to count them.

The horse was fighting his way up a narrow cleft of rubies which led
out of the Hippy Dipsy.  He panted heavily.  The oxygen bottles on his
sides swung wildly as he clambered.  He must have seen something,
perhaps the image of the cat-woman, because he said a word:

_Whay-yay-yay-yay-whay-yay!_

The cat-woman in the nearer picture spoke very distinctly:

"Give your name, age, species and authority for being on this planet."
She spoke clearly and with the utmost possible authority.

The horse obviously heard her.  His ears tipped forward.  But his reply
was the same as before:

_Whay-yay-yay!_

Casher O'Neill realized that he had followed the mood of the picture
and had seen the horse the way that the people on Pontoppidan would
have seen him.  On second thought, the horse was nothing special, by
the standards of the Twelve Niles or the Little Horse Market in the
city of Kaheer.  It was an old pony stallion, no longer fit for
breeding and probably not for riding either.  The hair had whitened
among the gold; the teeth were worn.  The animal showed many injuries
and burns.  Its only use was to be killed, cut up and fed to the racing
dogs.  But he said nothing to the people around him.  They were still
spellbound by the picture.

The cat-woman repeated:

"Your name isn't Whayayay.  Identify yourself properly; name first."

The horse answered her with the same word in a higher key.

Apparently forgetting that she had recorded herself as well as the
emergency screen, the cat-woman said, "I'll call real people if you
don't answer!  They'll be annoyed at being bothered."

The horse rolled his eyes at her and said nothing.

The cat-woman pressed an emergency button on the side of the room.  One
could not see the other communication screen which lighted up, but her
end of the conversation was plain.

"I want an ornithopter.  Big one.  Emergency."

A mumble from the side screen.

"To go to the Hippy Dipsy.  There's an underperson there, and he's in
so much trouble that he won't talk."  From the screen beside her, the
horse seemed to have understood the sense of the message, if not the
words, because he repeated:

_Whay-yay-whay-yay-yay!_

"See," said the cat-woman to the person in the other screen, "that's
what he's doing.  It's obviously an emergency."

The voice from the other screen came through, tinny and remote by
double recording:

"Fool, yourself, cat-woman!  Nobody can fly an ornithopter into a
dipsy.  Tell your silly friend to go back to the floor of the dipsy and
we'll pick him up by space rocket."

_Whay-yay-yay!_ said the horse impatiently.

"He's not my _friend_," said the cat-woman with brisk annoyance.  "I
just discovered him a couple of minutes ago.  He's asking for help, Any
idiot can see that, even if we don't know his language."

The picture snapped off.



The next scene showed tiny human figures working with searchlights at
the top of an immeasurably high cliff.  Here and there, the beam of the
searchlight caught the cliff face; the translucent faceted material of
the cliff looked almost like rows of eerie windows, their lights
snapping on and off, as the searchlight moved.

Far down there was a red glow.  Fire came from inside the mountain.

Even with telescopic lenses the cameraman could not get the close-up of
the glow.  On one side there was the figure of the horse, his four arms
stretched at impossible angles as he held himself firm in the crevasse;
on the other side of the fire there were the even tinier figures of
men, laboring to fit some sort of sling to reach the horse.

For some odd reason having to do with the techniques of recording, the
voices came through very plainly, even the heavy, tired breathing of
the old horse.  Now and then he uttered one of the special horse-words
which seemed to be the limit of his vocabulary.  He was obviously
watching the men, and was firmly persuaded of their friendliness to
him.  His large, tame, yellow eyes rolled wildly in the light of the
searchlight and every time the horse looked down, he seemed to shudder.

Casher O'Neill found this entirely understandable.  The bottom of the
Hippy Dipsy was nowhere in sight; the horse, even with nothing more
than the enlarged fingernails of his middle fingers to help him climb,
had managed to get about four of the six kilometers' height of the
cliff face behind him.

The voice of a tiger-man sounded clearly from among the shift of men,
underpeople and robots who were struggling on the face of the cliff.

"It's a gamble, but not much of a gamble.  I weigh six hundred kilos
myself, and, do you know, I don't think I've ever had to use my full
strength since I was a kitten.  I know that I can jump across the fire
and help that thing be more comfortable.  I can even tie a rope around
him so that he won't slip and fall after all the work we've done.  And
the work he's done, too," added the tiger-man grimly.  "Perhaps I can
just take him in my arms and jump back with him.  It will be perfectly
safe if you have a safety rope around each of us.  After all, I never
saw a less prehensile creature in my life.  You can't call those
fingers of his 'fingers.'  They look like little boxes of bone,
designed for running around and not much good for anything else."

There was a murmur of other voices and then the command of the
supervisor.  "Go ahead."

No one was prepared for what happened next.

The cameraman got the tiger-man right in the middle of his frame,
showing the attachment of one rope around the tiger-man's broad waist.
The tiger-man was a modified type whom the authorities had not bothered
to put into human cosmetic form.  He still had his ears on top of his
head, yellow and black fur over his face, huge incisors overlapping his
lower jaw and enormous antenna-like whiskers sticking out from his
moustache.  He must have been thoroughly modified inside, however,
because his temperament was calm, friendly and even a little humorous;
he must have had a carefully re-done mouth, because the utterance of
human speech came to him clearly and without distortion.

He jumped--a mighty jump, right through the top edges of the flame.

The horse saw him.

The horse jumped too, almost in the same moment, also through the top
of the flame, going the other way.

The horse had feared the tiger-man more than he did the cliff.

The horse landed right in the group of workers.  He tried not to hurt
them with his flailing limbs, but he did knock one man--a true man, at
that--off the cliff.  The man's scream faded as he crashed into the
impenetrable darkness below.

The robots were quick.  Having no emotions except _on_, _off_, and
_high_, they did not get excited.  They had the horse trussed and,
before the true men and underpeople had ensured their footing, they had
signaled the crane operator at the top of the cliff.  The horse, his
four arms swinging limply, disappeared upward.

The tiger-man jumped back through the flames to the nearer ledge.  The
picture went off.

In the viewing room, the Hereditary Dictator Philip Vincent stood up.
He stretched, looking around.

Genevieve looked at Casher O'Neill expectantly.

"That's the story," said the Dictator mildly.  "Now you solve it."

"Where is the horse now?" said Casher O'Neill.

"In the hospital, of course.  My niece can take you to see him."




III

After a short, painful and very thorough peeping of his own mind by the
Hereditary Dictator, Casher O'Neill and Genevieve set off for the
hospital in which the horse was being kept in bed.  The people of
Pontoppidan had not known what else to do with him, so they had placed
him under strong sedation and were trying to feed him with sugar-water
compounds going directly into his veins.  Genevieve told Casher that
the horse was wasting away.

They walked to the hospital over amethyst pebbles.

Instead of wearing his space-suit, Casher wore a surface helmet which
enriched his oxygen.  His hosts had not counted on his getting spells
of uncontrollable itching from the sharply reduced atmospheric
pressure.  He did not dare mention the matter, because he was still
hoping to get the green ruby as a weapon in his private war for the
liberation of the Twelve Niles from the rule of Colonel Wedder.
Whenever the itching became less than excruciating, he enjoyed the walk
and the company of the slight, beautiful girl who accompanied him
across the fields of jewels to the hospital.  (In later years, he
sometimes wondered what might have happened.  Was the itching a part of
his destiny, which saved him for the freedom of the city of Kaheer and
the planet Mizzer?  Might not the innocent brilliant loveliness of the
girl have otherwise tempted him to forswear his duty and stay forever
on Pontoppidan?)

The girl wore a new kind of cosmetic for outdoor walking--a warm
peachhued powder which let the natural pink of her cheeks show through.
Her eyes, he saw, were a living, deep gray; her eyelashes, long; her
smile, innocently provocative beyond all ordinary belief.  It was a
wonder that the Hereditary Dictator had not had to stop duels and
murders between young men vying for her favor.

They finally reached the hospital, just as Casher O'Neill thought he
could stand it no longer and would have to ask Genevieve for some kind
of help or carriage to get indoors and away from the frightful itching.

The building was underground.

The entrance was sumptuous.  Diamonds and rubies, the size of
building-bricks on Mizzer, had been set to frame the doorway, which was
apparently enameled steel.  Kuraf at his most lavish had never wasted
money on anything like this door-frame.  Genevieve saw his glance.

"It did cost a lot of credits.  We had to bring a blind artist all the
way from Olympia to paint that enamel-work.  The poor man.  He spent
most of his time trying to steal extra gem-stones when he should have
known that we pay justly and never allow anyone to get away with
stealing."

"What do you do?" asked Casher O'Neill.

"We cut thieves up in space, just at the edge of the atmosphere.  We
have more manned boats in orbit than any other planet I know of.  Maybe
Old North Australia has more, but, then, nobody ever gets close enough
to Old North Australia to come back alive and tell."

They went on into the hospital.



A respectful chief surgeon insisted on keeping them in the office and
entertaining them with tea and confectionery, when they both wanted to
go see the horse; common politeness prohibited their pushing through.
Finally they got past the ceremony and into the room in which the horse
was kept.

Close up, they could see how much he had suffered.  There were cuts and
abrasures over almost all of his body.  One of his hooves--the doctor
told them that was the correct name, _hoof_, for the big middle
fingernail on which he walked--was split; the doctor had put a
cadmium-silver bar through it.  The horse lifted his head when they
entered, but he saw that they were just more people, not horsey people,
so he put his head down, very patiently.

"What's the prospect, doctor?" asked Casher O'Neill, turning away from
the animal.

"Could I ask you, sir, a foolish question first?"

Surprised, Casher could only say yes.

"You're an O'Neill.  Your uncle is Kuraf.  How do you happen to be
called 'Casher'?"

"That's simple," laughed Casher.  "This is my young-man-name.  On
Mizzer, everybody gets a baby name, which nobody uses.  Then he gets a
nickname.  Then he gets a young-man-name, based on some characteristic
or some friendly joke, until he picks out his career.  When he enters
his profession, he picks out his own career name.  If I liberate Mizzer
and overthrow Colonel Wedder, I'll have to think up a suitable career
name for myself."

"But why 'Casher,' sir?" persisted the doctor.

"When I was a little boy and people asked me what I wanted, I always
asked for cash.  I guess that contrasted with my uncle's wastefulness,
so they called me Casher."

"But what is cash?  One of your crops?"

It was Casher's time to look amazed.  "Cash is money.  Paper credits.
People pass them back and forth when they buy things."

"Here on Pontoppidan, all the money belongs to me.  All of it," said
Genevieve.  "My uncle is trustee for me.  But I have never been allowed
to touch it or to spend it.  It's all just planet business."

The doctor blinked respectfully.  "Now this horse, sir, if you will
pardon my asking about your name, is a very strange case.
Physiologically he is a pure earth type.  He is suited only for a
vegetable diet, but otherwise he is a very close relative of man.  He
has a single stomach and a very large cone-shaped heart.  That's where
the trouble is.  The heart is in bad condition.  He is dying."

"Dying?" cried Genevieve.

"That's the sad, horrible part," said the doctor.  "He is dying but he
cannot die.  He could go on like this for many years.  Perin wasted
enough stroon on this animal to make a planet immortal.  Now the animal
is worn out but cannot die."

Casher O'Neill let out a long, low, ululating whistle.  Everybody in
the room jumped.  He disregarded them.  It was the whistle he had used
near the stables, back among the Twelve Niles, when he wanted to call a
horse.

The horse knew it.  The large head lifted.  The eyes rolled at him so
imploringly that he expected tears to fall from them, even though he
was pretty sure that horses could not lachrymate.

He squatted on the floor, close to the horse's head, with a hand on its
mane.

"Quick," he murmured to the surgeon.  "Get me a piece of sugar and an
underperson-telepath.  The underperson-telepath must not be of
carnivorous origin."



The doctor looked stupid.  He snapped "Sugar" at an assistant but he
squatted down next to Casher O'Neill and said, "You will have to repeat
that about an underperson.  This is not an underperson hospital at all.
We have very few of them here.  The horse is here only by command of
His Excellency Philip Vincent, who said that the horse of Perin should
be given the best of all possible care.  He even told me," said the
doctor, "that if anything wrong happened to this horse, I would ride
patrol for it for the next eighty years.  So I'll do what I can.  Do
you find me too talkative?  Some people do.  What kind of an
underperson do you want?"

"I need," said Casher, very calmly, "a telepathic underperson, both to
find out what this horse wants and to tell the horse that I am here to
help him.  Horses are vegetarians and they do not like meat-eaters.  Do
you have a vegetarian underperson around the hospital?"

"We used to have some squirrel-men," said the chief surgeon, "but when
we changed the air circulating system the squirrel-men went away with
the old equipment.  I think they went to a mine.  We have tiger-men,
cat-men, and my secretary is a wolf."

"Oh, no!" said Casher O'Neill.  "Can you imagine a sick horse confiding
in a wolf?"

"It's no more than you are doing," said the surgeon, very softly,
glancing up to see if Genevieve were in hearing range, and apparently
judging that she was not.  "The Hereditary Dictators here sometimes cut
suspicious guests to pieces on their way off the planet.  That is,
unless the guests are licensed, regular traders.  You are not.  You
might be a spy, planning to rob us.  How do I know?  I wouldn't give a
diamond chip for your chances of being alive next week.  What do you
want to do about the horse?  That might please the Dictator.  And you
might live."

Casher O'Neill was so staggered by the confidence of the surgeon that
he squatted there thinking about himself, not about the patient.  The
horse licked him, seemingly sensing that he needed solace.

The surgeon had an idea.  "Horses and dogs used to go together, didn't
they, back in the old days of Manhome, when all the people lived on
planet Earth?"

"Of course," said Casher.  "We still run them together in hunts on
Mizzer, but under these new laws of the Instrumentality we've run out
of underpeople-criminals to hunt."

"I have a good dog," said the chief surgeon.  "She talks pretty well,
but she is so sympathetic that she upsets the patients by loving them
too much.  I have her down in the second underbasement tending the
dish-sterilizing machinery."

"Bring her up," said Casher in a whisper.

He remembered that he did not need to whisper about this, so he stood
up and spoke to Genevieve:

"They have found a good dog-telepath who may reach through to the mind
of the horse.  It may give us the answer."

She put her hand on his forearm gently, with the approbatory gesture of
a princess.  Her fingers dug into his flesh.  Was she wishing him well
against her uncle's habitual treachery, or was this merely the impulse
of a kind young girl who knew nothing of the way the world was run?




IV

The interview went extremely well.

The dog-woman was almost perfectly humaniform.  She looked like a
tired, cheerful, worn-out old woman, not valuable enough to be given
the life-prolonging santaclara drug called _stroon_.  Work had been her
life and she had had plenty of it.  Casher O'Neill felt a twinge of
envy when he realized that happiness goes by the petty chances of life
and not by the large destiny.  This dog-woman, with her haggard face
and her stringy gray hair, had more love, happiness and sympathy than
Kuraf had found with his pleasures, Colonel Wedder with his powers, or
himself with his crusade.  Why did life do that?  Was there no justice,
ever?  Why should a worn-out worthless old underwoman be happy when he
was not?

"Never mind," she said, "you'll get over it and then you will be happy."

"Over what?" he said.  "I didn't say anything."

"I'm not going to say it," she retorted, meaning that she was
telepathic.  "You're a prisoner of yourself.  Some day you will escape
to unimportance and happiness.  You're a good man.  You're trying to
save yourself, but you really _like_ this horse."

"Of course I do," said Casher O'Neill.  "He's a brave old horse,
climbing out of that hell to get back to people."

When he said the word _hell_ her eyes widened, but she said nothing.
In his mind, he saw the sign of a fish scrawled on a dark wall and he
felt her think at him, _So you too know something of the "dark
wonderful knowledge" which is not yet to be revealed to all mankind?_

He thought a cross back at her and then turned his thinking to the
horse, lest their telepathy be monitored and strange punishments await
them both.

She spoke in words, "Shall we link?"

"Link," he said.

Genevieve stepped up.  Her clear-cut, pretty, sensitive face was alight
with excitement.  "Could I--could I be cut in?"

"Why not?" said the dog-woman, glancing at him.  He nodded.  The three
of them linked hands and then the dog-woman put her left hand on the
forehead of the old horse.



The sand splashed beneath their feet as they ran toward Kaheer.  The
delicious pressure of a man's body was on their backs.  The red sky of
Mizzer gleamed over them.  There came the shout:

"I'm a horse, I'm a horse, I'm a horse!"

"You're from Mizzer," thought Casher O'Neill, "from Kaheer itself!"

"I don't know names," thought the horse, "but you're from my land.  The
land, the good land."

"What are you doing here?"

"Dying," thought the horse.  "Dying for hundreds and thousands of
sundowns.  The old one brought me.  No riding, no running, no people.
Just the old one and the small ground.  I have been dying since I came
here."

Casher O'Neill got a glimpse of Perin sitting and watching the horse,
unconscious of the cruelty and loneliness which he had inflicted on his
large pet by making it immortal and then giving it no work to do.

"Do you know what dying is?"

Thought the horse promptly: "Certainly.  No-horse."

"Do you know what life is?"

"Yes.  Being a horse."

"I'm not a horse," thought Casher O'Neill, "but I am alive."

"Don't complicate things," thought the horse at him, though Casher
realized it was his own mind and not the horse's which supplied the
words.

"Do you want to die?"

"To no-horse?  Yes, if this room, forever, is the end of things."

"What would you like better?" thought Genevieve, and her thoughts were
like a cascade of newly-minted silver coins falling into all their
minds: brilliant, clean, bright, innocent.

The answer was quick: "Dirt beneath my hooves, and wet air again, and a
man on my back."

The dog-woman interrupted: "Dear horse, you know me?"

"You're a dog," thought the horse.  "Goo-oo-oo-ood dog!"

"Right," thought the happy old slattern, "and I can tell these people
how to take care of you.  Sleep now, and when you waken you will be on
the way to happiness."

She thought the command _sleep_ so powerfully at the old horse that
Casher O'Neill and Genevieve both started to fall unconscious and had
to be caught by the hospital attendants.

As they re-gathered their wits, she was finishing her commands to the
surgeon.  "--and put about 40% supplementary oxygen into the air.
He'll have to have a real person to ride him, but some of your orbiting
sentries would rather ride a horse up there than do nothing.  You can't
repair the heart.  Don't try it.  Hypnosis will take care of the sand
of Mizzer.  Just load his mind with one or two of the drama-cubes
packed full of desert adventure.  Now, don't you worry about me.  I'm
not going to claim any credit, and I'm not going to give you any more
suggestions.  People-man, you!" she laughed.  "You can forgive us dogs
anything, except for being right.  It makes you feel inferior for a few
minutes.  Never mind.  I'm going back downstairs to my dishes.  I love
them, I really do.  Good-by, you pretty thing," she said to Genevieve.
"And good-bye, wanderer!  Good luck to you," she said to Casher
O'Neill.  "You will remain miserable as long as you seek justice, but
when you give up, righteousness will come to you and you will be happy.
Don't worry.  You're young and it won't hurt you to suffer a few more
years.  Youth is an extremely curable disease, isn't it?"

She gave them a full curtsey, like one Lady of the Instrumentality
saying good-by to another.  Her wrinkled old face was lit up with
smiles, in which happiness was mixed with a tiniest bit of playful
mockery.

"Don't mind me, boss," she said to the surgeon.  "Dishes, here I come."
She swept out of the room.

"See what I mean?" said the surgeon.  "She's so horribly happy!  How
can anyone run a hospital if a dishwasher gets all over the place,
making people happy?  We'd be out of jobs.  Her ideas were good,
though."

They were.  They worked.  Down to the last letter of the dog-woman's
instructions.



There was argument from the council.  Casher O'Neill went along to see
them in session.

One councillor, Bashnack, was particularly vociferous in objecting to
any action concerning the horse.  "Sire," he cried, "sire!  We don't
even know the name of the animal!  I must protest this action, when we
don't know--"

"That we don't," assented Philip Vincent.  "But what does a name have
to do with it?"

"The horse has no identity, not even the identity of an animal.  It is
just a pile of meat left over from the estate of Perin.  We should
kill the horse and eat the meat ourselves.  Or, if we do not want to
eat the meat, then we should sell it off-planet.  There are plenty of
peoples around here who would pay a pretty price for genuine earth
meat.  Pay no attention to me, sire!  You are the Hereditary Dictator
and I am nothing.  I have no power, no property, nothing.  I am at your
mercy.  All I can tell you is to follow your own best interests.  I
have only a voice.  You cannot reproach me for using my voice when I am
trying to help you, sire, can you?  That's all I am doing, helping you.
If you spend any credits at all on this animal you will be doing wrong,
wrong, wrong.  We are not a rich planet.  We have to pay for expensive
defenses just in order to stay alive.  We cannot even afford to pay for
air that our children can go out and play.  And you want to spend money
on a horse which cannot even talk!  I tell you, sire, this council is
going to vote against you, just to protect your own interests and the
interests of the Honorable Genevieve as Eventual Title-holder of all
Pontoppidan.  You are not going to get away with this, sire!  We are
helpless before your power, but we will insist on advising you--"

"Hear!  Hear!" cried several of the councillors, not the least dismayed
by the slight frown of the Hereditary Dictator.

"I will take the word," said Philip Vincent himself.

Several had had their hands raised, asking for the floor.  One
obstinate man kept his hand up even when the Dictator announced his
intention to speak.  Philip Vincent took note of him, too:

"You can talk when I am through, if you want to."

He looked calmly around the room, smiled imperceptibly at his niece,
gave Casher O'Neill the briefest of nods, and then announced:

"Gentlemen, it's not the horse which is on trial.  It's Pontoppidan.
It's we who are trying ourselves.  And before whom are we trying
ourselves, gentlemen?  Each of us is before that most awful of courts,
his own conscience.



"If we kill that horse, gentlemen, we will not be doing the horse a
great wrong.  He is an old animal, and I do not think that he will mind
dying very much, now that he is away from the ordeal of loneliness
which he feared more than death.  After all, he has already had his
great triumph--the climb up the cliff of gems, the jump across the
volcanic vent, the rescue by people whom he wanted to find.  The horse
has done so well that he is really beyond us.  We can help him, a
little, or we can hurt him, a little; beside the immensity of his
accomplishment, we cannot really do very much either way.

"No, gentlemen, we are not judging the case of the horse.  We are
judging space.  What happens to man when he moves out into the Big
Nothing?  Do we leave Old Earth behind?  Why did civilization fall?
Will it fall again?  Is civilization a gun or a blaster or a laser or a
rocket?  Is it even a planoforming ship or a pinlighter at his work?
You know as well as I do, gentlemen, that civilization is not what we
can do.  If it had been, there would have been no fall of Ancient Man.
Even in the Dark Ages they had a few fusion bombs, they could make some
small guided missiles and they even had weapons like the Kaskaskia
Effect, which we have never been able to rediscover.  The Dark Ages
weren't dark because people lost techniques or science.  They were dark
because people lost people.  It's a lot of work to be human and it's
work which must be kept up, or it begins to fade.  Gentlemen, the horse
judges us.

"Take the word, gentlemen.  'Civilization' is itself a lady's word.
There were female writers in a country called France who made that word
popular in the third century before space travel.  To be 'civilized'
meant for people to be tame, to be kind, to be polished.  If we kill
this horse, we are wild.  If we treat the horse gently, we are tame.
Gentlemen, I have only one witness and that witness will utter only one
word.  Then you shall vote and vote freely."

There was a murmur around the table at this announcement.  Philip
Vincent obviously enjoyed the excitement he had created.  He let them
murmur on for a full minute or two before he slapped the table gently
and said, "Gentlemen, the witness.  Are you ready?"

There was a murmur of assent.  Bashnack tried to say, "It's still a
question of public funds!" but his neighbors shushed him.  The table
became quiet.  All faces turned toward the Hereditary Dictator.

"Gentlemen, the testimony.  Genevieve, is this what you yourself told
me to say?  Is civilization always a woman's choice first, and only
later a man's?"

"Yes," said Genevieve, with a happy, open smile.

The meeting broke up amid laughter and applause.




V

A month later Casher O'Neill sat in a room in a medium-size
planoforming liner.  They were out of reach of Pontoppidan.  The
Hereditary Dictator had not changed his mind and cut him down with
green beams.  Casher had strange memories, not bad ones for a young man.

He remembered Genevieve weeping in the garden.

"I'm romantic," she cried, and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of his
cape.  "Legally I'm the owner of this planet, rich, powerful, free.
But I can't leave here.  I'm too important.  I can't marry whom I want
to marry.  I'm too important.  My uncle can't do what _he_ wants to
do--he's Hereditary Dictator and he always must do what the Council
decides after weeks of chatter.  I can't love you.  You're a prince and
a wanderer, with travels and battles and justice and strange things
ahead of you.  I can't go.  I'm too important.  I'm too sweet!  I'm too
nice; I hate, hate, hate myself sometimes.  Please, Casher, could you
take a flier and run away with me into space?"

"Your uncle's lasers could cut us to pieces before we got out."

He held her hands and looked gently down into her face.  At this moment
he did not feel the fierce, aggressive, happy glow which an able young
man feels in the presence of a beautiful and tender young woman.  He
felt something much stranger, softer, quieter--an emotion very sweet to
the mind and restful to the nerves.  It was the simple, clear
compassion of one person for another.  He took a chance for her sake,
because the "dark knowledge" was wonderful but very dangerous in the
wrong hands.

He took both her beautiful little hands in hers, so that she looked up
at him and realized that he was not going to kiss her.  Something about
his stance made her realize that she was being offered a more precious
gift than a sky-lit romantic kiss in a garden.  Besides, it was just
touching helmets.

He said to her, with passion and kindness in his voice:

"You remember that dog-woman, the one who works with the dishes in the
hospital?"

"Of course.  She was good and bright and happy, and helped us all."

"Go work with her, now and then.  Ask her nothing.  Tell her nothing.
Just work with her at her machines.  Tell her I said so.  Happiness is
catching.  You might catch it.  I think I did myself, a little."

"I think I understand you," said Genevieve softly.  "Casher, good-by
and good, good luck to you.  My uncle expects us."

Together they went back into the palace.



Another memory was the farewell to Philip Vincent, the Hereditary
Dictator of Pontoppidan.  The calm, clean-shaven, ruddy, well-fleshed
face looked at him with benign regard.  Casher O'Neill felt more
respect for this man when he realized that ruthlessness is often the
price of peace, and vigilance the price of wealth.

"You're a clever young man.  A very clever young man.  You may win back
the power of your uncle Kuraf."

"I don't want that power!" cried Casher O'Neill.

"I have advice for you," said the Hereditary Dictator, "and it is good
advice or I would not be here to give it.  I have learned the political
arts well: otherwise I would not be alive.  Do not refuse power.  Just
take it and use it wisely.  Do not hide from your wicked uncle's name.
Obliterate it.  Take the name yourself and rule so well that, in a few
decades, no one will remember your uncle.  Just you.  You are young.
You can't win now.  But it is in your fate to grow and to triumph.  I
know it.  I am good at these things.  I have given you your weapon.  I
am not tricking you.  It is packed safely and you may leave with it."

Casher O'Neill was breathing softly, believing it all, and trying to
think of words to thank the stout, powerful older man when the dictator
added, with a little laugh in his voice:

"Thank you, too, for saving me money.  You've lived up to your name,
Casher."

"Saved you money?"

"The alfalfa.  The horse wanted alfalfa."

"Oh, that idea!" said Casher O'Neill.  "It was obvious.  I don't
deserve much credit for that."

"_I_ didn't think of it," said the Hereditary Dictator, "and my staff
didn't either.  We're not stupid.  That shows you are bright.  You
realized that Perin must have had a food converter to keep the horse
alive in the Hippy Dipsy.  All we did was set it to alfalfa and we
saved ourselves the cost of a shipload of horse food twice a year.
We're glad to save that credit.  We're well off here, but we don't like
to waste things.  You may bow to me now, and leave."

Casher O'Neill had done so, with one last glance at the lovely
Genevieve, standing fragile and beautiful beside her uncle's chair.



His last memory was very recent.

He had paid two hundred thousand credits for it, right on this liner.
He had found the Stop-Captain, bored now that the ship was in flight
and the Go-Captain had taken over.

"Can you get me a telepathic fix on a horse?"

"What's a horse?" said the Go-Captain.  "Where is it?  Do you want to
pay for it?"

"A horse," said Casher O'Neill patiently, "is an unmodified earth
animal.  Not underpeople.  A big one, but quite intelligent.  This one
is in orbit right around Pontoppidan.  And I will pay the usual price."

"A million Earth credits," said the Stop-Captain.

"Ridiculous!" cried Casher O'Neill.

They settled on two hundred thousand credits for a good fix and ten
thousand for the use of the ship's equipment even if there were
failure.  It was not a failure.  The technician was a snake-man: he was
deft, cool, and superb at his job.  In only a few minutes he passed the
headset to Casher O'Neill, saying politely, "This is it, I think."

It was.  He had reached right into the horse's mind.

The endless sands of Mizzer swam before Casher O'Neill.  The long lines
of the Twelve Niles converged in the distance.  He galloped steadily
and powerfully.  There were other horses nearby, other riders, other
things, but he himself was conscious only of the beat of the hooves
against the strong moist sand, the firmness of the appreciative rider
upon his back.  Dimly, as in a hallucination, Casher O'Neill could also
see the little orbital ship in which the old horse cantered in mid-air,
with an amused cadet sitting on his back.  Up there, with no weight,
the old worn-out heart would be good for many, many years.  Then he saw
the horse's paradise again.  The flash of hooves threatened to overtake
him, but he outran them all.  There was the expectation of a stable at
the end, a rubdown, good succulent green food, and the glimpse of a
filly in the morning.

The horse of Pontoppidan felt extremely wise.  He had trusted
_people_--people, the source of all kindness, all cruelty, all power
among the stars.  And the people had been good.  The horse felt very
much horse again.  Casher felt the old body course along the river's
edge like a dream of power, like a completion of service, like an
ultimate fulfilment of companionship.






[End of On the Gem Planet, by Cordwainer Smith]
