“I know the voice,” said Jestocost. “It comes to me as in a great dream. But I shall not ask to see the face.”

“Your friend down here has gone where only underpeople go,” said the E’telekeli, “and we are disposing of his fate in more ways than one, my Lord, subject to your gracious approval.”

“My approval does not seem to have been needed much,” snorted Jestocost, with a little laugh.

“I would like to talk to you. Do you have any intelligent underperson near you?”

“I can call C’mell. She’s always somewhere around.”

“This time, my lord, you cannot. She’s here.”

“There, with you? I never knew she went there.” The amazement showed on the face of the Lord Jestocost.

“She is here, nevertheless. Do you have some other underperson?”

Rod felt like a dummy, standing in the visiphone while the two voices, unseen by one another, talked past him. But he felt, very truly, that they both wished him well. He was almost nervous in anticipation of the strange happiness which had been offered to him and C’mell, but he was a respectful enough young man to wait until the great ones got through their business.

“Wait a moment,” said Jestocost.

On the screen, in the depths, Rod could see the Lord of the Instrumentality work the controls of other, secondary screens. A moment later Jestocost answered:

“B’dank is here. He will enter the room in a few minutes.”

’Twenty minutes from now, my Sir and Lord, will you hold hands with your servant B’dank as you once did with C’mell? I have the problem of this young man and his return. There are things which you do not know, and I would rather not put them on the wires.”

Jestocost hesitated only for the slightest of moments. “Good, then,” he laughed. “I might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.”

The E’telekeli stood aside. Someone handed Rod a mask which hid his cat-man features and still left his eyes and hands exposed. The brain print was gotten through the eyes.

The recordings were made.

Rod went back to the bench and table. He helped himself to another drink of water from the carafe. Someone threw a wreath of fresh flowers around his shoulders. Fresh flowers! In such a place… He wondered. Three rather pretty undergirls, two of them of cat origin and one of them derived from dogs, were loading a freshly dressed C’mell toward him. She wore the simplest and most modest of all possible white dresses. Her waist was cinched by a broad golden belt. She laughed, stopped laughing and then blushed as they led her to Rod.

Two seats were arranged on the bench. Cushions were disposed so that both of them would be comfortable. Silky metallic caps, like the pleasure caps used in surgeries, were fitted on their heads. Rod felt his sense of smell explode within his brain; it came alive richly and suddenly. He took C’mell by the hand and began walking through an immemorial Earth forest, with a temple older than time shining in the clear soft light cast by Earth’s old moon. He knew that he was already dreaming. C’mell caught his thought and said,

“Rod, my master and lover, this is a dream. But I am in it with you…”

Who can measure a thousand years of happy dreaming — the travels, the hunts, the picnics, the visits to forgotten and empty cities, the discovery of beautiful views and strange places? And the love, and the sharing, and the re-reflection of everything wonderful and strange by two separate, distinct and utterly harmonious personalities. C’mell the c’girl and C’roderick the c’man: they seemed happily doomed to be with one another. Who can live whole centuries of real bliss and then report it in minutes? Who can tell the full tale of such real lives — happiness, quarrels, reconciliations, problems, solutions and always sharing, happiness, and more sharing… ?

When they awakened Rod very gently, they let C’mell sleep on. He looked down at himself and expected to find himself old. But he was a young man still, in the deep forgotten underground of the E’telekeli, and he could not even smell. He reached for the thousand wonderful years as he watched C’mell, young again, lying on the bench, but the dream-years had started fading even as he reached for them.

Rod stumbled on his feet. They led him to a chair. The E’telekeli sat in adjacent chair, at the same table. He seemed weary.

“My Mister and Owner McBan, I monitored your dreamsharing, just to make sure it stayed in the right general direction. I hope you are satisfied.”

Rod nodded, very slowly, and reached for the carafe of water, which someone had refilled while he slept.

“While you slept, Mister McBan,” said the great E’man, “I had a telepathic conference with the Lord Jestocost, who has been your friend, even though you do not know him. You have heard of the new automatic planoform ships.”

“They are experimental,” said Rod.

“So they are,” said the E’telekeli, “but perfectly safe. And the best ‘automatic’ ones are not automatic at all. They have snake-men pilots. My pilots. They can outperform any pilots of the Instrumentality.”

“Of course,” said Rod, “because they are dead.”

“No more dead than I” laughed the white calm bird of the underground. “I put them in cataleptic trances, with the help of my son the doctor E’ikasus, whom you first knew as the monkey-doctor A’gentur. On the ships they wake up. One of them can take you to Norstrilia in a single long fast jump. And my son can work on you right here. We have a good medical workshop in one of those rooms. After all, it was he who restored you under the supervision of Doctor Vomact on Mars. It will seem like a single night to you, though it will be several days in objective time. If you say goodbye to me now, and if you are ready to go, you will wake up in orbit just outside the Old North Australian subspace net. I have no wish for one of my underpeople to tear himself to pieces if he meets Mother Hitton’s dreadful little kittons, whatever they may be. Do you happen to know?”

“I don’t,” said Rod quickly, “and if I did, I couldn’t tell you. It’s the Queen’s secret.”

“The Queen?”

“The Absent Queen. We use it to mean the Commonwealth government. Anyhow, Mister bird, I can’t go now. I’ve got to go back up to the surface of Earth. I want to say goodbye to the Catmaster. And I’m not going to leave this planet and abandon Eleanor. And I want my stamp that the Catmaster gave me. And the books. And maybe I should report about the death of Tostig Amaral.”

“Do you trust me, Mister and Owner McBan?” The white giant rose to his feet; his eyes shone like fire.

The underpeople spontaneously chorused, “Put your trust in the joyful lawful, put your trust in the loyal-awful bright blank power of the under-bird!”

“I’ve trusted you with my life and my fortune, so far,” said Rod, a little sullenly, “but you’re not going to make me leave Eleanor. No matter how much I want to get home. And I have an old enemy at home that I want to help. Houghton Syme the Hon. Sec. There might be something on Old Earth which I could take back to him.”

“I think you can trust me a little further,” said the E’telekeli. “Would it solve the problem of the Hon. Sec. if you gave him a dreamshare with someone he loved, to make up his having a short life?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I can,” said the master of the underpeople, “have his prescription made up. It will have to be mixed with plasma from his blood before he takes it. It would be good for about three thousand years of subjective life. We have never let this out of our own undercity before, but you are the Friend of Earth, and you shall have it.”

Rod tried to stammer his thanks, but he mumbled something about Eleanor instead: he just couldn’t leave her.

The white giant took Rod by the arm and led him back to the visiphone, still oddly out of place in this forgotten room, so far underground.