The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated

by Cordwainer Smith

  His working method seemed to be to develop several strands of thought and weave them together, or perhaps let them weave themselves together. This is first evident in the genesis of “Scanners,” in which ideas of a future dark age, automatic weapons, the Vomact family, the scanners themselves, and even the Instrumentality suddenly come together. Subsequent stories developed that background. Both “Mark Elf” and the original two-chapter fragment of “The Queen of the Afternoon” backtracked to the end of the Dark Age (the latter made no mention of the underpeople in that version, nor did it hint at any Christian themes). “The Game of Rat and Dragon” took the saga forward to the heroic age of planoforming, and the vision of the far future in “No, No, Not Rogov!” hinted at a secular apotheosis for human history. Both “When the People Fell” and “The Burning of the Brain” are snapshots of different periods in the same history, as well as compelling stories in themselves.

  In 1958, Linebarger began writing a novel called Star-Craving Mad, which was his first attempt at what eventually became Norstrilia. But the initial version of the story is far different from that we know today. There is no Rediscovery of Man, nor any Holy Insurgency. Lord Jestocost and “Arthur McBan CLI” both figure here, but in different guises: Jestocost is simply a cruel but shrewd tyrant, whose name (“cruelty” in Russian) has none of the ironic meaning we now associate with it; while McBan is a man of action who comes to the aid of the underpeople only for the love of C’mell. And the rebellion of the underpeople is nothing more than an uprising of the oppressed, like the French Revolution to which it is compared. The E’telekeli appears, but as a future Jacobite rather than a spiritual sage. Linebarger was developing an ironic theme, but it had to do with true men having inadvertently created a race of supermen in the form of the underpeople.

  Linebarger apparently wasn’t satisfied with the way the story was going, for it was abandoned after a few chapters. Several other false starts over the next year failed to get Star-Craving Mad moving again, and a severe illness which Genevieve Linebarger later remembered as the genesis of Norstrilia may have actually been the genesis of a spiritual rebirth that changed the entire thrust of the Instrumentality saga. As in the case of “Scanners Live in Vain,” however, Paul Linebarger was evidently thinking along several lines at once before they all came together.

  Even in the original draft of Star-Craving Mad there is one hint of the Rediscovery of Man, but it remains only a hint. C’mell’s father C’mackintosh is not an athlete, but a “licensed robber” at a “savage park” in Mississippi: such parks are a means for humanity to “keep the peace within its own troubled and complex soul,” but they are apparently a longstanding institution, not a revolutionary development. In an early false start for “The Ballad of Lost C’mell,” Lord Redlady has unleashed ancient diseases on Earth, but not as part of a spiritual revolution: the idea to discourage invasions by developing immunities among Earthmen to pathogens that can then be used as weapons against outsiders. In another false start, for a story called “Strange Men and Doomed Ladies,” Lord Jestocost proposes to end the policy of euthanasia for “spoiled” people such as the crippled, the sickly, the stupid, and even the overly-brilliant: “Let them be, and let us see.” But this seems to be an isolated idea, unrelated to any grand plan.

  The false start for “The Ballad of Lost C’mell” (“Where Is the Which of the What She Did”) also opens with a prologue that recounts the entire history of Earth. Our times are the Second Ancient Days; they came before the First Ancient Days, but were discovered later. The First Ancient Days came either before or after the Long Nothing (a summary of the chronology contradicts the narrative). Civilization was restored by the Dwellers, who brought the cities back into shape around the ruins left by the Daimoni, including Earthport Gulosan. It was during the time of the Dwellers that humanity discovered Space3 and overcame the rule of the perfect men. But that was all long before the time of C’mell. The Originals, invaders from space, overcame the Dwellers, but were later overthrown by an alliance of true men and underpeople. Then came the Bright, who “did things with music and dance, with picture and word, which had never been done before.” They also built the peace square at An-fang, and (another contradiction) had something to do with the “fall of the perfect men and the temporary rule of Lord Redlady.” Then came a time of troubles, the High Cruel Years, followed by another invasion by the Pure (“men of earth who had been gone too long”), who still rule Earth at the time of the story.

  Although the Dwellers may be the true men of “Mark Elf,” and the rule of the Bright may have something to do with the Bright Empire mentioned in Norstrilia, nothing in the canon of stories we know seems to relate to the Originals or the High Cruel Years or the Pure. Linebarger was apparently reshaping his vision of the far future almost to the moment he wrote “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” in which it all crystallized. (The “Where Is the Which of the What She Did” fragment has the narrator recalling that “the most blessed of computers burned out on Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” but assigns this to the long-past age of the Dwellers.) During the same period, Linebarger was reshaping “The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All,” a then-unpublished story about the discovery of planoforming, into the story of Artyr Rambo’s mystical experience in Space3. The story went through several partial drafts (one titled “Archipelagoes of Stars”), which used different approaches capturing the poetic experience of Arthur Rimbaud. One version quotes Rimbaud’s Le Bateau Ivre itself, as a prophecy of Space3, and asks, “How knew it he, all the fine points of it?…He an ancient was!” Another draft opens, “They put him into a box, a box. They shot him to the end of time…Then, when it was all over, people discovered that another man, also a singer, had written it all down in the Most Ancient World.” The final version, of course, is far more subtle; it was typical of Linebarger to make his stories less straightforward and more allusive in such details.

  Although most of the background for the Instrumentality saga was contained in a notebook that Linebarger accidentally left in a restaurant in Rhodes in 1965, another notebook begun during the last year of his life contains ideas for several stories that were never written. Because they are notes to himself, they can be as cryptic as the lyrics of a David Lynch song. But some are clear enough, as far as they go, including those for “The Robot, the Rat, and the Copt,” which was originally conceived as a single story but later was a cycle of four stories, like the Casher O’Neill series. We know from references in published stories that the Robot, the Rat, and the Copt were to bring back a Christian revelation from Space3, but the notes don’t add much to that, except to confirm that this new dimension is where Christ “had really been and always was experienced.” The rat was to have been named R’obert, however, and there was to have been a Coptic planet. (A list of Coptic names—including Shenuda or “God Lives”—appear in an entirely different notebook, a ring binder titled “New Science Fiction by Cordwainer Smith,” which also includes most of the false starts and first drafts already referred to.)

  Some of the ideas seem relatively trivial: a forlorn suitor has the crushed head of his true love, killed in an accident, regrown on Shayol, and reimplanted with her personality; a Go-Captain who has a mysterious (but unspecified) experience in space is treated as a madman on his conservative homeworld. Another story was to have been set on a remote, prosperous world where one-parents gamble on the futures of their newly-issued children; this would evidently have shed more light on the sequential system of child-raising by one-parents, two-parents, and three-parents alluded to in “Under Old Earth.” Another note is simply a name: the Lord Sto Dva, presumably a successor to the Lord Sto Odin of “Under Old Earth.”

  But the most intriguing note is undoubtedly one for a story called “How the Dream Lords Died.” Set in A.D. 6111, it would have involved the use of 12,000 slave brains by the Dream Lords in an attempt to explore other times telepathically, like the Eighteenth Men of the distant future in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Me
n. The Dream Lords were clearly among the “others in the earth” after the fall of the Ancient World, alluded to in Norstrilia, and this note is the only reference to any story to have been set during that time—well before “Mark Elf.” Coupled with the titling of “The Queen of the Afternoon” (set, like “Mark Elf,” at the very end of the new dark ages), it suggests that a new cycle of stories, “The Lords of the Afternoon,” may have been related to the dark ages. Shortly before his death, Linebarger told his friend Arthur Burns he was planning a story cycle of that name; Burns conjectured that it would take place in the period of “Under Old Earth,” and most timelines have shown the series taking place in that period.

  The year given for “How the Dream Lords Died,” naturally knocks the time-line used in The Best of Cordwainer Smith and The Instrumentality of Mankind into a cocked hat. The dark ages must have lasted much longer than listed there, and the rest of the future history thus must have been compressed into a much shorter time. We will probably never know much more about Linebarger’s intentions; even his wife doesn’t seem to have been privy to them. In “The Saga of the Third Sister,” a (deservedly) unpublished sequel to “The Queen of the Afternoon,” she involved Karla vom Acht in the quest of the Robot, the Rat, and the Copt, even though that story was obviously intended to have come millennia later. In working on Paul’s unfinished manuscript for “The Queen of the Afternoon” itself, she insisted on anachronistic references to underpeople, and softened the characterizations of Juli vom Acht and the true men. Incidentally, it isn’t clear from Paul’s original material whether Juli’s arrival on Earth was actually to have come after Carlotta’s, rather than before.

  But enough of the history behind the history. You already know the story of the Instrumentality is more than history: it is poetry, and romance, and myth, and unlike any other SF series or future history. It is almost impossible to imagine anyone except Linebarger writing stories set in the universe of Cordwainer Smith, as others have written stories about Isaac Asimov’s robots or Larry Niven’s kzinti. It would probably be close to blasphemy, in the realm of the arts, for anyone else to even try. Like the rarest vintage wine, the work of Cordwainer Smith cannot be duplicated. We must be grateful that we can still savor the true vintage of these pages.

  Editor’s Introduction

  This volume contains all the short science fiction written by Cordwainer Smith (Dr. Paul Linebarger). It contains all the stories included in The Best of Cordwainer Smith, The Instrumentality of Mankind, and Quest of the Three Worlds. The latter book, while marketed as a novel, is actually a collection of four short works. This collection also includes the story “Down to a Sunless Sea,” published by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction under the name “Cordwainer Smith,” but actually written by Genevieve Linebarger, Paul’s wife. She was the coauthor with Paul on several other stories, most notably “The Lady Who Sailed The Soul.”

  The current volume contains two previously unpublished short pieces. “Himself in Anachron” was completed by Genevieve Linebarger after Paul’s death, and is also scheduled for publication in The Last Dangerous Visions. “War No. 81-Q,” is a complete rewrite of a story Linebarger wrote while in high school. (The original version was published in The Instrumentality of Mankind and is also included here.)

  In many cases, there were a number of differences between the original magazine version of the story and the versions published later in various collections of Smith’s work. Sometimes, whole sentences or paragraphs were added to the book version. In general, we used the book versions, since these seemed to be the more complete. For the four stories in Quest of the Three Worlds, we also used the versions that appeared in the “novel,” In one case, “Scanners Live in Vain,” we had the original manuscript. We discovered that Fantasy Book, which published the story, dropped several lines and made a number of other minor changes; subsequent publications followed the Fantasy Book version. The text contained here is the first publication of that story with the complete text of the original.

  In addition to the short fiction contained here, Smith produced one SF novel: Norstrilia. Norstrilia was originally published as two short novels, “The Boy Who Bought Old Earth” and “The Store of Heart’s Desire,” which were then reprinted in two volumes, The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople, respectively. Only later were they combined into one volume as Norstrilia. However, unlike the stories that make up Quest of the Three Worlds, these two stories were never intended as shorter works: they are truly a novel split in two, while Quest of the Three Worlds is really four independent stories (which share the same central character), cobbled together to form a novel. Norstrilia, therefore, is not included in this collection.

  One final note on contents: most of Smith’s science fiction is set in a common future, that of the Instrumentality of Mankind. This book is arranged in two sections. In the first section, the Instrumentality stories are arranged in internal chronological order (as best as can be determined from the stories). The second section contains the non-instrumentality stories, arranged in order of original publication.

  James A. Mann

  Northboro, MA

  April 1993

  Acknowledgments

  This book was put together through the efforts of many volunteers. Frank and Lisa Richards scanned in most of the book. Tony Lewis made the contractual arrangements for the stories and the cover. Greg Thokar arranged for printing, provided some stylistic guidance, and gave a thorough consistency check to the final book. Mark Olson helped typeset a number of the stories, proofed parts of the book, and provided general support. George Flynn copy edited almost the entire book, comparing many stories to both book and magazine versions. Priscilla Olson also proofed and copy edited large pieces of the book. Aron Insinga, Tim Szczesuil, Ann Crimmins, and Gay Ellen Dennett proofed several stories. Tom Whitmore provided the original manuscript of “Scanners Live in Vain” and the cover letter reprinted on page 64. Laurie Mann helped enter proof corrections, typed some of the material that could not be scanned, and provided general moral support. Thanks to you all.

  Stories of the

  Instrumentality of

  Mankind

  That golden shape on the golden steps shook and fluttered like a bird gone mad—like a bird imbued with an intellect and a soul, and, nevertheless, driven mad by ecstasies and terrors beyond human understanding—ecstasies drawn momentarily down into reality by the consummation of superlative art. A thousand worlds watched.

  Had the ancient calendar continued this would have been A.D. 13,582. After defeat, after disappointment, after ruin and reconstruction, mankind had leapt among the stars.

  Out of meeting inhuman art, out of confronting non-human dances, mankind had made a superb esthetic effort and had leapt upon the stage of all the worlds.

  The golden steps reeled before the eyes. Some eyes had retinas. Some had crystalline cones. Yet all eyes were fixed upon the golden shape which interpreted The Glory and Affirmation of Man in the Inter-World Dance Festival of what might have been A.D. 13,582.

  Once again mankind was winning the contest. Music and dance were hypnotic beyond the limits of systems, compelling, shocking to human and inhuman eyes. The dance was a triumph of shock—the shock of dynamic beauty.

  The golden shape on the golden steps executed shimmering intricacies of meaning. The body was gold and still human. The body was a woman, but more than a woman. On the golden steps, in the golden light, she trembled and fluttered like a bird gone mad.

  I

  The Ministry of State Security had been positively shocked when they found that a Nazi agent, more heroic than prudent, had almost reached N. Rogov.

  Rogov was worth more to the Soviet armed forces than any two air armies, more than three motorized divisions. His brain was a weapon, a weapon for the Soviet power.

  Since the brain was a weapon, Rogov was a prisoner. He didn’t mind. Rogov was a pure Russian type, broad-faced, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, with whimsey in his smile and amusem
ent in the wrinkles of the tops of his cheeks.

  “Of course I’m a prisoner,” Rogov used to say. “I am a prisoner of State service to the Soviet peoples. But the workers and peasants are good to me. I am an academician of the All Union Academy of Sciences, a major general in the Red Air Force, a professor in the University of Kharkov, a deputy works manager of the Red Flag Combat Aircraft Production Trust. From each of these I draw a salary.”

  Sometimes he would narrow his eyes at his Russian scientific colleagues and ask them in dead earnest, “Would I serve capitalists?”

  The affrighted colleagues would try to stammer their way out of the embarrassment, protesting their common loyalty to Stalin or Beria, or Zhukov, or Molotov, or Bulganin, as the case may have been.

  Rogov would look very Russian: calm, mocking, amused. He would let them stammer.

  Then he’d laugh. Solemnity transformed into hilarity, he would explode into bubbling, effervescent, good-humored laughter. “Of course I could not serve the capitalists. My little Anastasia would not let me.”

  The colleagues would smile uncomfortably and would wish that Rogov did not talk so wildly, or so comically, or so freely.

  Even Rogov might wind up dead. Rogov didn’t think so. They did. Rogov was afraid of nothing.

  Most of his colleagues were afraid of each other, of the Soviet system, of the world, of life, and of death.

  Perhaps Rogov had once been ordinary and mortal like other people, and full of fears.