When the People Fell

by Cordwainer Smith

  Final surrender was brought by their strongest telepath, a very wise old male who had been hidden inside a deep mountain.

  "You have come, people. We surrender. Some of us have always known the truth. We are Earth-born, too. A cargo of chickens settled here unimaginable times ago. A time-twist tore us out of our convoy and threw us here. That's why, when we sensed you far across space, we caught the relationship of eat-and-eaten. Only, our brave ones had it wrong. You eat us: we don't eat you. You are the masters now. We will serve you forever. Do you seek our death?"

  "No, no," said Folly. "We came only to avert a danger, and we have done that. Live on, and on, but plan no war and make no weapons. Leave that to the Instrumentality."

  "Blessed is the Instrumentality, whoever that may be. We accept your terms. We belong to you."

  When this was done, the war was over.

  Strange things began to happen.

  Wild voices sang from within Folly and Samm, voices not their own. Mission gone. Work finished. Go to hill with cube. Go and rejoice!

  Samm and Folly hesitated. They had left Finsternis where they landed, halfway around the planet.

  The singing voices became more urgent. Go. Go. Go now. Go back to the cube. Tell the chicken-people to plant a lawn and a grove of trees. Go, go, go now to the good reward!

  They told the telepaths what had been said to them and voyaged wearily up out of the atmosphere and back down for a landing at the original point of contact, a long low hill which had been planted with huge patches of green turf and freshly transplanted trees even in the hours in which they flew off the world and back on it again. The bird-telepaths must have had strong and quick commands.

  The singing became pure music as they landed, chorales of reward and rejoicing, with the hint of martial marches and victory fugues woven in.

  Alan, stand up, said the voices to Samm.

  Samm stood on the ridge of the hill. He stood like a colossus against the red-dawning sky. A friendly, quiet crowd of the chicken-people fell back.

  Alan, put your hand to your right forehead, sang the voices.

  Samm obeyed. He did not know why the voices called him "Alan."

  Ellen, land, sang the rejoicing voices to Folly. Folly, herself a little ship, landed at Samm's feet. She was bewildered with happy confusion and a great deal of pain which did not seem to matter much.

  Alan, come forth, sang the voices. Samm felt a sharp pain as his forehead—his huge metal forehead, two hundred meters above the ground—burst open and closed again. There was something pink and helpless in his hand.

  The voices commanded, Alan, put your hand gently on the ground.

  Samm obeyed and put his hand on the ground. The little pink toy fell on the fresh turf. It was a tiny miniature of a man.

  Ellen, stand forth, sang the voices again. The ship named Folly opened a door and a naked young woman fell out.

  Alma, wake up. The cube named Finsternis turned darker than charcoal. Out of the dark side, there stumbled a black-haired girl. She ran across the hill-slope to the figure named Ellen. The man-body named Alan was struggling to his feet.

  The three of them stood up.

  The voices spoke to them: This is our last message. You have done your work. You are well. The boat named Folly contains tools, medicine, and the other equipment for a human colony. The giant named Samm will stand forever as a monument to human victory. The cube named Finsternis will now dissolve. Alan! Ellen! Treat Alma lovingly and well. She is now a forgetty.

  The three naked people stood bewildered in the dawn.

  Good-bye and a great high thanks from the Instrumentality. This is a pre-coded message, effective only if you won. You have won. Be happy. Live on!

  Ellen took Alma—who had been Finsternis—and held her tight. The great cube dissolved into a shapeless slag-heap. Alan, who had been Samm, looked up at his former body dominating the skyline.

  For reasons which the travelers did not understand until many years had passed, the bird-people around them broke into ululant hymns of peace, welcome, and joy.

  "My house," said Ellen, pointing at the little ship which had spat forth her body just minutes ago, "is now a home for all of us."

  They climbed into the successful little ship which had been called Folly. They knew, somehow, that they would find clothes and food. And wisdom, too. They did.

  VI

  Ten years later, they had the proof of happiness playing in the yard before their house—a substantial building, made of stone and brick, which the local people had built under Alan's directions. (They had changed their whole technology in the process of learning from him, and—thanks to the efficiency and power of the telepathic priestly caste—things learned at any one spot on the planet were swiftly disseminated to the whole group of races on the planet.) The proof of happiness consisted of the thirty-five human children playing in the yard. Ellen had had nine, four sets of twins and a single. Alma had had twelve, two sets of quintuplets and a pair of twins. The other fourteen had been bottle-grown from ova and sperm which they found in the ship, the frozen donations of complete strangers who had done their bit for the offworld settling of the human race. Thanks to the careful genetic coding of both the womb-children and the bottle-children, there was a variety of types, suitable for natural breeding over many generations to come.

  Alan came to the door. He measured the time by the place where the great shadow fell. It was hard to realize that the gigantic, indestructible statue which loomed above them all had once been his own self. A small glacier was beginning to form around the feet of Samm and the night was getting cold.

  "I'm bringing the children in already," said Ch-tikkik, one of the local nurses they had hired to help with the huge brood of human babies. She, in return, got the privilege of hatching her eggs on the warm shelf behind the electric stove; she turned them every hour, eagerly awaiting the time that sharp little mouths would break the shell and humanlike little hands would tear an opening from which a humanlike baby would emerge, oddly-pretty-ugly like a gnome, and unusual only in that it could stand upright from the moment of birth.

  One little boy was arguing with Ch-tikkik. He wore a warm robe of vegetable-fiber veins knitted to serve as a base for a feather cloak. He was pointing out that with such a robe he could survive a blizzard and claiming, quite justly, that he did not have to be in the house in order to stay warm. Was that Rupert? thought Alan.

  He was about to call the child when his two wives came to the door, arm in arm, flushed with the heat of the kitchen where they had been cooking the two dinners together—one dinner for the humans, now numbering thirty-eight, and the other for the bird-people, who were tremendously appreciative of getting cooked food, but who had odd requirements in the recipes, such as "one quart of finely ground granite gravel to each gallon of oatmeal, sugared to taste and served with soybean milk."

  Alan stood behind his wives and put a hand on the shoulder of each.

  "It's hard to think," he said, "that a little over ten years ago, we didn't even know that we were still people. Now look at us, a family, and a good one."

  Alma turned her face up to be kissed, and Ellen, who was less sentimental, lifted her face to be kissed, too, so that her co-wife would not be embarrassed at being babied separately. The two liked each other very much. Alma came out of the cube Finsternis as a forgetty, conditioned to remember nothing of her long sad psychotic life before the Instrumentality had sent her on a wild mission among the stars. When she had joined Alan and Ellen, she knew the words of the Old Common Tongue, but very little else.

  Ellen had had some time to teach her, to love her, and to mother her before any of the babies were born, and the relationship between the two of them was warm and good.

  The three parents stood aside as the bird-women, wearing their comfortable and pretty feather cloaks, herded the children into the house. The smallest children had already been brought in from their sunning and were being given their bottles by bird-girls who neve
r got tired of watching the cuteness and helplessness of the human infant.

  "It's hard to think of that time at all," said Ellen, who had been "Folly." "I wanted beauty and fame and a perfect marriage and nobody even told me that they didn't go together. I have had to come to the end of the stars to get what I wanted, to be what I might become."

  "And me," said Alma, who had been "Finsternis," "I had a worse problem. I was crazy. I was afraid of life. I didn't even know how to be a woman, a sweetheart, a female, a mother. How could I ever guess that I needed a sister and wife, like the one you have been, to make my life whole? Without you to show me, Ellen, I could never have married our husband. I thought I was carrying murder among the stars, but I was carrying my own solution as well. Where else could I turn out to be me?"

  "And I," said Alan, who had been "Samm," "became a metal giant between the stars because my first wife was dead and my own children forgot me and neglected me. Nobody can say I'm not a father now. Thirty-five, and more than half of them mine. I'll be more of a father than any other man of the human race has ever been."

  There was a change in the shadow as the enormous right arm swung heavily toward the sky as a prelude to the sharp robotic call that nightfall, calculated with astronomical precision, had indeed come to the place where he stood.

  The arm reached its height, pointing straight up.

  "I used to do that," said Alan.

  The cry came, something like a silent pistol-shot which all of them heard, but a shot without echoes, without reverberations.

  Alan looked around. "All the children are in. Even Rupert. Come in, my darlings, and let us have dinner together." Alma and Ellen went ahead of him and he barred the heavy doors behind them.

  This was peace and happiness; that at last was goodness. They had no obligation but to live and to be happy. The threat and the promise of victory were far, far behind.

  Down to a Sunless Sea

  High, oh, high, oh, they jingle in the sky oh! Bright how bright the light of those twin moons of Xanadu, Xanadu the lost, Xanadu the lovely, Xanadu the seat of pleasure. Pleasure of the senses, body, mind, soul. Soul? Who said anything about soul?

  I

  Where they were standing the wind whispered softly. From time to time Madu in an ageless feminine gesture tugged at her tiny silver skirt or adjusted her equally nominal open sleeveless jacket. Not that she was cold. Her abbreviated costume was appropriate to Xanadu's equable climate.

  She thought: "I wonder what he will be like, this Lord of the Instrumentality? Will he be old or young, fair or dark, wise or foolish?" She did not think "handsome or ugly." Xanadu was noted for the physical perfection of its inhabitants, and Madu was too young to expect anything less.

  Lari, waiting beside her, was not thinking of the Space Lord. His mind was seeing again the video tapes of the dancing, the intricate steps and beautiful frenzy of movement of the group from ancient days of Manhome, the group labeled "Bawl-shoy." "Someday," he thought, "oh, perhaps someday I too can dance like that . . ."

  Kuat thought: "Who do they think they're fooling? In all the years I've been governor of Xanadu this is the first time a Lord has been here. War hero of the battle of Styron IV indeed! Why, that's been over substantive months ago. . . . He's had plenty of time to recover if it's really true he was wounded. No, there's something more . . . they know or suspect something . . . Well, we'll keep him busy. Shouldn't be hard to do here with all the pleasures Xanadu has to offer . . . and there's Madu. No, he can't complain or he'll blow his cover. . . ."

  And all the while, as the ornithopter neared, their destiny was approaching. He did not know that he was to be their destiny; he did not intend to be their destiny, and their destiny had not been predetermined.

  The passenger in the descending ornithopter reached out with his mind to try to perceive the place, to sense it. It was hard, terribly hard . . . there seemed to be a thick cloud-like cover—a mist—between his mind and the minds he tried to feel. Was it himself, his mind damage from the war? Or was it something more, the atmosphere of the planet—something to deter or prevent telepathy?

  Lord bin Permaiswari shook his head. He was so full of self-doubt, so confused. Ever since the battle . . . the mind-scarring probes of the fear machines . . . how much permanent damage had they done? Perhaps here on Xanadu he could rest and forget.

  As he stepped from the ornithopter Lord bin Permaiswari felt an even greater sense of bewilderment. He had known that Xanadu had no sun, but he was unprepared for the soft shadowless light which greeted him. The twin moons hung, seemingly, side by side, while their light was reflected by millions of mirrors. In the near distance li after li of white sand beaches stretched, while farther on stood chalk cliffs with the jet-black sea foaming on their bases. Black, white, silver, the colors of Xanadu.

  Kuat approached him without delay. Kuat's sense of apprehension had diminished appreciably at the first glimpse of the Space Lord. The visitor did indeed look ill and confused; correspondingly, Kuat's amiability increased without conscious effort on his part.

  "Xanadu extends you welcome, oh Lord bin Permaiswari. Xanadu and all that Xanadu contains is yours." The traditional greeting sounded strange in his rough tones. The Space Lord saw before him a huge man, tall and correspondingly heavy, muscles gleaming, his longish reddish hair and beard showing magenta in the light of the moons and mirrors.

  "It gives me pleasure, Governor Kuat, merely to be in Xanadu, and I return the planet and its contents to you," replied Lord Kemal bin Permaiswari.

  Kuat turned and gestured toward his two companions.

  "This is Madu, a distant relative, and so my ward. And this is Lari, my brother, son of my father's fourth wife—she who drowned herself in the Sunless Sea." The Space Lord winced at Kuat's laugh, but the young people appeared not to notice it.

  Gentle Madu hid her disappointment and greeted the Lord with becoming modesty. She had expected (hoped for?) a shining figure, a blazing armor, or perhaps simply an aura which proclaimed "I am a hero." Instead she saw an intellectual-looking man, tired, looking somehow older than his substantive thirty years. She wondered what he had done, how this man could be the talk of the Instrumentality as the savior of human culture in the battle of Styron IV.

  Lari, because he was a male, knew more of the facts of the battle than Madu, and he greeted Lord bin Permaiswari with grave respect. In his dream world, second only to dancers and runners of easy grace, Lari looked up to intelligence. This was the man who had dared to pit himself, his living mind, his intellect against the dread fear machines . . . and won! The price was evident in his face, but he had WON. Lari placed his hands together and held them to his forehead in a gesture of homage.

  The Lord reached out in a gesture which won Lari's heart forever. He touched Lari's hand and said, "My friends call me Kemal." Then he turned to include Madu and, almost as an afterthought, Kuat.

  Kuat did not notice the near omission. He had turned and was walking toward what appeared to be a huge lump of yellow and black striped fur. He made a peculiar hissing sound, and at once the lump separated into four enormous cats. Each cat was saddled, and each saddle was equipped with a holding ring, but there was no apparent means of guiding the cats.

  Kuat answered Kemal's question. "No, of course there's no way to guide them. They're pure cat, you know, unmodified except for size. No underpeople here! I think we're the only planet in the Instrumentality that doesn't have underpeople—except for Norstrilia, of course. But the reasons for Norstrilia and Xanadu are at the opposite ends of the spectrum. We enjoy our senses . . . none of that nonsense about hard work building character like the Norstrilians believe. We don't believe in austerity and all that malarkey. We just get more sensual pleasure out of our unmodified animals. We have robots to do the dirty work."

  Kemal nodded. After all, wasn't that what he was here for? To allow his senses to repair his damaged mind?

  Nonetheless, the man who had faced the fear machines with scarcely a
tremble did not know how to approach the cat which was designated as his.

  Madu saw his hesitation. "Griselda is perfectly friendly," she said. "Just wait a minute till I scratch her ears; she'll lie down and you can mount."

  Kemal glanced up and caught an expression of disgust in Kuat's eyes. It did not help in his search for self-mending.

  Madu, oblivious to Kuat's displeasure, had coaxed the great cat to kneeling position and smiled up at Kemal.

  Kemal felt something like pain stab him at her glance. She was so beautiful and so innocent; her vulnerability wrenched at his heart. He remembered the Lady Ru's quotation of an ancient sage: "Innocence within is armor without," but a web of fear settled on his mind. He brushed it aside and mounted the cat.

  As he lay dying nearly three centuries later, he remembered that ride. It was as thrilling as his first space jump. The leap into nothingness and then the sudden realization that he was traveling, traveling, traveling without volition, with no personal control over the direction his body might take. Before fear had the opportunity to assert itself it was converted into a visceral, almost orgasmic excitement, a gush of pleasure almost too strong to bear.

  Lank dark hair flying in his face, the Lord bin Permaiswari would have been unrecognizable to the Lords and Ladies who gathered at the Bell on Old Earth in time of crisis. They would not have recognized the boyish glee in a face which they were accustomed to seeing as grave and preoccupied. He laughed in the wind and tightened his knees against Griselda's flanks, holding the saddle ring with one hand as he turned back to wave at the others who were somewhat behind.

  Griselda seemed to sense his pleasure at her long effortless bounds. Suddenly the ride took on a new proportion. Overhead the ornithopter which had brought the Space Lord to Xanadu passed by on its way back to the spaceport. At once Griselda left the pride and leapt futilely after the ascending ornithopter. As she attempted to bat at it, Kemal was forced to use both hands on the holding ring in order not to fall off ignominiously. She continued to leap and bat hopelessly in its direction until it disappeared from sight. Then she sat down to lick herself and, inadvertently, her passenger.