Page 125. “Old North Australia, Administrative Offices of the Commonwealth, The Same Day.” As noted above, this section appears in the “Epilogue and Coda” to The Planet Buyer. The remainder of this chapter is in The Underpeople, with the following omissions: pages 127-128, from “Aunt Doris started to get up…” to the end of the section: pages 129-131, all of the two sections “The Assistant Commissioner’s Office, Top of Earthport, Four Hours Later” and “Antechamber of the Bell and Bank, The Same Time.” And on page 133, the text from “He started to explain who Redlady was…” through “But go back to your story.” is replaced by:
…of all the civilized worlds. Directed and calculated by the ancient McBan family computer which, when asked by its new Mister and Owner how he could escape the sick enmity of Norstrilia’s Onseck, had answered that the only way was to become the richest man in the Universe—and, in four hours, had brought it about. He unrolled as much as was necessary of the thread of Rod McBan’s swift yet complex dispatch to Old Earth, overseen by the disgraced Lord Redlady—the disguise as a cat-man, and the nine Rod-doubles, the servant Eleanor and eight robots, to confuse thieves, kidnappers, and anyone else who might feel an unwholesome interest in the wealthiest man of all time…
Page 141. “The trip was a vivid, quick dream.” Here the text of the magazine version rejoins that of the books. “The Store of Heart’s Desire” begins with the following prefatory section:
The animal-derived underpeople talked about it for hundreds of years thereafter. The story became a part of their legend, their balladry. Real people, walking innocently around on the surface of the Earth, some kilometers above, never heard anything about it. To most of them, Downdeep-downdeep was a place where robots and underpeople worked to provide the luxuries, comforts and pleasures of mankind. They knew nothing of the mysterious Aitch Eye or of its weird leader, the E’telekeli, and if they had known, they would have been very surprised to find out that a true man had penetrated the uttermost depths and had conferred with the Aitch Eye itself.
Very surprised.
But not interested.
Why should they care? Curiosity had died out a long time ago and the attempted Rediscovery of Man was awakening it only very slowly. A few officials knew or suspected the whole story, but then officials never talked much.
Only the underpeople cared and they were startled indeed.
A true man in Downdeep-downdeep?
How had that happened?
What could have gone wrong?
Nothing went wrong.
C’mell took him, and took him at the bidding of the E’telekeli himself. He was an offworlder. He had the odd pompous name of Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan the hundred and fifty-first and he was the richest sheep-owner from the richest planet in the galaxy, Old North Australia, which most people just called Norstrilia. He had gambled wildly, grotesquely, with help from his family’s old computer, and he had won the largest fortune in the known or suspected universe. With this, he had bought Earth.
The name didn’t mean much. He was no crabbed financier, no empire-builder in civilian clothes. He was a boy, blond, tall, athletic. His shortname was Rod McBan. Though he was a Mister and Owner and a full-franchise landholder in Norstrilia, he had been driven to adventure by mischance; he had not sought it for lust of power.
He didn’t even go to Downdeep-downdeep in true-man form. The traps would have killed him if he had.
He had gone down disguised as a cat-man.
The cat-man disguise was not for the sake of Downdeep; it was to keep him alive while all the thieves in space and Earth were looking for him. He had escaped death from the weapons of an old enemy, the Hon. Sec. in Norstrilia; he had bought Earth; he had abandoned his cousin-sweetheart Lavinia on Norstrilia, at the urgent insistence of his own government; and he had arrived on Earth in a cat-body as the unwelcome but honored guest of the Instrumentality. The Instrumentality, which always ruled and never reigned, had even provided him the undergirl C’mell as his consort and escort for his time on Earth; and C’mell was the most brilliant, the most beautiful, and the most enticing of the girlygirls of Earth.
Knowing C’mell had been adventure incarnate. She had led him to things which he had not even imagined, including a knowledge of himself and of others. He had been places in the wet rich air of Earth, on the old streets and the complex cities, which no Norstrilian at home would ever believe; he had faced dangers, and now Rod knew that his time was drawing to a close. At last she was asking something of him and he could not refuse. All the time he had known her—days which seemed as long and busy as years—she had been giving; of herself, her time, the risk of her life. Now, for the first time, it was she who asked. He could not refuse.
He went with her down to a store. A commissary, run by a wonderful person called the Catmaster. Five hundred years old, and still allowed to live, and still allowed to run his store.
It was called the Department Store of Hearts’ Desires.
Page 152. “The next section stopped him breathless.” The text from here through the last poem on page 154 does not appear in “The Store of Heart’s Desire,” which also omits the text from “Rod cried out…” on page 156 through “Go on in.” on page 157, and the text from “Thinking very carefully…” on page 162 to the end of the chapter.
Page 163. “Everybody’s Fond of Money.” None of this chapter appears in “The Store of Heart’s Desire.”
Page 185. “Rod McBan was too weary to protest…” In “The Store of Heart’s Desire,” the first two paragraphs here are replaced by:
Rod McBan went from the room of the stinkman to a place where a doctor gave him new smells to experience, smells of chemistry and of medicine and of heat and cold. The doctor’s name was Vomact, and Rod would have enjoyed his company if he had not wondered where C’mell was and what she was doing.
This is followed by the two paragraphs from pages 95-96 (beginning with “Vomact was a small man…”) describing the other Doctor Vomact (subsequent references to whom are also omitted in the magazine text).
Page 206. “Rod tried to stammer his thanks…” In “The Store of Heart’s Desire,” the text between here and “Rod made no move to leave.” on page 208 is replaced by the following:
Rod tried to stammer his thanks.
The white giant took Rod by the arm and led him back to the visiphone, still trembling with the connection for Earth’s surface, many kilometers above.
Rod trembled. Odd shards of dream-memory, coming out of his recently dreamed “life” with C’mell, pulsed through his mind.
The bird-giant showed him the surface of the Earth by borrowing a spying eye through the visiphone. They swooped through the streets of Earth one last time. Rod saw his rare postage stamps—Cape triangles, they were, printed before the beginning of time—being packed carefully into a metal box which had his formal address printed on it, very proper indeed:
Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan CLI
“The Station of Doom”
c-o Any Lawful Entry-port
Planet of Old North Australia
At last the E’telekeli sighed and Rod sighed with him.
“Enough?” asked the pale bird-giant.
“Enough,” said Rod. He started to leave the visiphone and then stopped.
Page 211. “He waited for Lavinia instead.” “The Store of Heart’s Desire” ends here.
In addition, there were several places where text that appeared only in the magazine version appears to be necessary; the story makes more sense with it. In these locations (described below), the text has been reinserted into the body of Norstrilia. This text is reproduced below. The text that has been added is shown in square brackets.
Page 71. Note that this is the only place where Fisher states his title, yet after this point Rod knows it.
“You don’t know who I am?” said Fisher.
[“Silly games!” thought Rod. He said nothing but smiled diml
y. Hunger began to stir inside him.
“Commonwealth Financial Secretary, that’s me,” said Fisher.] “I handle the books and the credits for the government.”
Page 86. This text appears necessary to explain A’gentur’s “hearing his name mentioned.”
“Wait a moment,” said the Lord Redlady. “Take your colleague.”
[“Colleague?” said the giant.
“A’gentur,” said Redlady. “It’ll be he who puts Rod together again.”]
“Of course,” said the doctor.
The monkey had jumped out of his basket when he heard his name mentioned.
Page 159. This speech appears needed for continuity.
The father was saying, “It’s no use. Doris can watch him while we’re gone, but if he isn’t any better, we’ll turn him in.”
[“Kill him?” shrieked the woman. “Kill my baby? Oh, no! No!”]
The calm, loving, horrible voice of the man, “Darling, spiek to him yourself. He’ll never hier. Can that be a Rod McBan?”
Cordwainer Smith was a pseudonym for Dr. Paul Linebarger. Linebarger was born in Milwaukee in 1913, but grew up in Japan, China, France and Germany. He was the godson of Sun Yat-Sen, the President of China. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from Johns Hopkins when he was 23.
His first professional science fiction story, “Scanners Live in Vain,” was published in Fantasy Book in 1950. (Before turning to science fiction, he wrote three mainstream/thriller novels Atomsk, Ria and Carolla, and was the author of Psychological Warfare, an early text in its field.) It wasn’t until the mid-fifties, though, that Frederik Pohl encouraged Smith to write more. Most of his science fiction was written between 1955 and 1966. He died in 1966.
Norstrilia was Smith’s only SF novel. It was originally published in two pieces. The first, The Planet Buyer, was published before his death, and the second, The Underpeople was published posthumously. When Smith disassembled Norstrilia for publication, he wrote nearly a chapter of new bridging material. This NESFA Press edition of Norstrilia follows Smith’s original text, but includes the added bridging material as an appendix.
The NESFA Press editions of Norstrilia and The Rediscovery of Man (NESFA Press 1993) bring back into print in long-lasting hardbound editions all of Cordwainer Smith’s science fiction.
Norstrilia - Illustrated Page 32
