From Emigration Port they go to their pods, sealed in. The pods go to the rockets and these to the sailing ship. That’s the old way of doing it.
The new way is better. All a person does now is visit a pleasant lounge, or play a game of cards, or eat a meal or two. All he needs is half the wealth of a planet, or a couple hundred years’ seniority marked “excellent” without a single break.
The photonic sails were different. Everyone took chances.
A young man, bright of skin and hair, merry at heart, set out for a new world. An older man, his hair touched with gray, went with him. So, too, did thirty thousand others. And also, the most beautiful girl on Earth.
Earth could have kept her, but the new worlds needed her.
She had to go.
She went by light-sail ship. And she had to cross space—space, where the danger always waits.
Space sometimes commands strange tools to its uses—the screams of a beautiful child, the laminated brain of a long-dead mouse, the heartbroken weeping of a computer. Most space offers no respite, no relay, no rescue, no repair. All dangers must be anticipated; otherwise they become mortal. And the greatest of all hazards is the risk of man himself.
“She’s beautiful,” said the first technician.
“She’s just a child,” said the second.
“She won’t look like much of a child when they’re two hundred years out,” said the first.
“But she is a child,” said the second, smiling, “a beautiful doll with blue eyes, just going tiptoe into the beginnings of grown-up life.” He sighed.
“She’ll be frozen,” said the first.
“Not all the time,” said the second. “Sometimes they wake up. They have to wake up. The machines defreeze them. You remember the crimes on the Old Twenty-two. Nice people, but the wrong combinations. And everything went wrong, dirtily, brutally wrong.”
They both remembered Old Twenty-two. The hell-ship had drifted between the stars for a long time before its beacon brought rescue. Rescue was much too late.
The ship was in immaculate condition. The sails were set at a correct angle. The thousands of frozen sleepers, strung out behind the ship in their one-body adiabatic pods, would have been in excellent condition, but they had merely been left in open space too long and most of them had spoiled. The inside of the ship—there was the trouble. The sailor had failed or died. The reserve passengers had been awakened. They did not get on well with one another. Or else they got on too horribly well, in the wrong way. Out between the stars, encased only by a frail limited cabin, they had invented new crimes and committed them upon each other—crimes which a million years of Earth’s old wickedness had never brought to the surface of man before.
The investigators of Old Twenty-two had become very sick, reconstructing the events that followed the awakening of the reserve crew; two of them had asked for blanking and had obviously retired from service.
The two technicians knew all about Old Twenty-two as they watched the fifteen-year-old woman sleeping on the table. Was she a woman? Was she a girl? What would happen to her if she did wake up on the flight?
She breathed delicately.
The two technicians looked across her figure at one another and then the first one said:
“We’d better call the psychological guard. It’s a job for him.”
“He can try,” said the second.
The psychological guard, a man whose number-name ended in the digits Tiga-belas, came cheerfully into the room a half-hour later. He was a dreamy-looking old man, sharp and alert, probably in his fourth rejuvenation. He looked at the beautiful girl on the table and inhaled sharply,
“What’s this for—a ship?”
“No,” said the first technician, “it’s a beauty contest.”
“Don’t be a fool,” said the psychological guard. “You mean they are really sending that beautiful child into the Up-and-Out?”
“It’s stock,” said the second technician. “The people out on Wereld Schemering are running dreadfully ugly, and they flashed a sign to the Big Blink that they had to have better-looking people. The Instrumentality is doing right by them. All the people on this ship are handsome or beautiful.”
“If she’s that precious, why don’t they freeze her and put her in a pod? That way she would either get there or she would not. A face as pretty as that,” said Tiga-belas, “could start trouble anywhere. Let alone a ship. What’s her name-number?”
“On the board there,” said the first technician. “It’s all on the board there. You’ll want the others too. They’re listed, too, and ready to go on the board.”
“Veesey-koosey,” read the psychological guard, saying the words aloud, “or five-six. That’s a silly name, but it’s rather cute.” With one last look back at the sleeping girl, he bent to his work of reading the case histories of the people added to the reserve crew. Within ten lines, he saw why the girl was being kept ready for emergencies, instead of sleeping the whole trip through. She had a Daughter Potential of 999.999, meaning that any normal adult of either sex could and would accept her as a daughter after a few minutes of relationship. She had no skill in herself, no learning, no trained capacities. But she could remotivate almost anyone older than herself, and she showed a probability of making that remotivated person put up a gigantic fight for life. For her sake. And secondarily the adopter’s.
That was all, but it was special enough to put her in the cabin. She had tested out into the literal truth of the ancient poetic scrap, “the fairest of the daughters of old, old Earth.”
When Tiga-belas finished taking his notes from the records, the working time was almost over. The technicians had not interrupted him. He turned around to look one last time at the lovely girl. She was gone. The second technician had left and the first was cleaning his hands.
“You haven’t frozen her?” cried Tiga-belas. “I’ll have to fix her too, if the safeguard is to work.”
“Of course you do,” said the first technician. “We’ve left you two minutes for it.”
“You give me two minutes,” said Tiga-belas, “to protect a trip of four hundred and fifty years!”
“Do you need more,” said the technician, and it was not even a question, except in form.
“Do I?” said Tiga-belas. He broke into a smile. “No, I don’t. That girl will be safe long after I am dead.”
“When do you die?” said the technician, socially.
“Seventy-three years, two months, four days,” said Tiga-belas agreeably. “I’m a fourth-and-last.”
“I thought so,” said the technician. “You’re smart. Nobody starts off that way. We all learn. I’m sure you’ll take care of that girl.”
They left the laboratory together and ascended to the surface and the cool restful night of Earth.
II
Late the next day, Tiga-belas came in, very cheerful indeed. In his left hand he held a drama spool, full commercial size. In his right hand there was a black plastic cube with shimmering silver contact-points gleaming on its sides. The two technicians greeted him politely.
The psychological guard could not hide his excitement and his pleasure.
“I’ve got that beautiful child taken care of. The way she is going to be fixed, she’ll keep her Daughter Potential, but it’s going to be a lot closer to one thousand point double zero than it was with all those nines. I’ve used a mouse-brain.”
“If it’s frozen,” said the first technician, “we won’t be able to put it in the computer. It will have to go forward with the emergency stores.”
“This brain isn’t frozen,” said Tiga-belas indignantly. “It’s been laminated. We stiffened it with celluprime and then we veneered it down, about seven thousand layers. Each one has plastic of at least two molecular thicknesses. This mouse can’t spoil. As a matter of fact, this mouse is going to go on thinking forever. He won’t think much, unless we put the voltage on him, but he’ll think. And he can’t spoil. This is ceramic plastic, and it
would take a major weapon to break it.”
“The contacts…?” said the second technician.
“They don’t go through,” said Tiga-belas. “This mouse is tuned into that girl’s personality, up to a thousand meters. You can put him anywhere in the ship. The case has been hardened. The contacts are just attached on the outside. They feed to nickel-steel counterpart contacts on the inside. I told you, this mouse is going to be thinking when the last human being on the last known planet is dead. And it’s going to be thinking about that girl. Forever.”
“Forever is an awfully long time,” said the first technician, with a shiver. “We only need a safety period of two thousand years. The girl herself would spoil in less than a thousand years, if anything did go wrong.”
“Never you mind,” said Tiga-belas, “that girl is going to be guarded whether she is spoiled or not.” He spoke to the cube. “You’re going along with Veesey, fellow, and if she is an Old Twenty-two you’ll turn the whole thing into a toddle-garden frolic complete with ice cream and hymns to the West Wind.” Tiga-belas looked up at the other men and said, quite unnecessarily, “He can’t hear me.”
“Of course not,” said the first technician, very dryly.
They all looked at the cube. It was a beautiful piece of engineering. The psychological guard had reason to be proud of it.
“Do you need the mouse any more?” said the first technician.
“Yes,” said Tiga-belas. “One-third of a millisecond at forty megadynes. I want him to get her whole life printed on his left cortical lobe. Particularly her screams. She screamed badly at ten months. Something she got in her mouth. She screamed at ten when she thought the air had stopped in her drop-shaft. It hadn’t, or she wouldn’t be here. They’re in her record. I want the mouse to have those screams. And she had a pair of red shoes for her fourth birthday. Give me the full two minutes with her. I’ve printed the key on the complete series of Marcia and the Moon Men—that was the best box drama for teen-age girls that they ran last year. Veesey saw it. This time she’ll see it again, but the mouse will be tied in. She won’t have the chance of a snowball in hell of forgetting it.”
Said the first technician, “What was that?”
“Huh?” said Tiga-belas.
“What was that you just said, that, at the end?”
“Are you deaf?”
“No,” said the technician huffily. “I just didn’t understand what you meant.”
“I said that she would not have the chance of a snowball in hell of forgetting it.”
“That’s what I thought you said,” replied the technician. “What is a snowball? What is hell? What sort of chances do they make?”
The second technician interrupted eagerly. “I know,” he explained. “Snowballs are ice formations on Neptune. Hell is a planet out near Khufu VII. I don’t know how anybody would get them together.”
Tiga-belas looked at them with the weary amazement of the very old. He did not feel like explaining, so he said gently:
“Let’s leave the literature till another time. All I meant was. Veesey will be safe when she’s cued into this mouse. The mouse will outlast her and everybody else, and no teen-age girl is going to forget Marcia and the Moon Men. Not when she saw every single episode twice over. This girl did.”
“She’s not going to render the other passengers ineffectual? That wouldn’t help,” said the first technician.
“Not a bit,” said Tiga-belas.
“Give me those strengths again,” said the first technician.
“Mouse—one-third millisecond at forty megadynes.”
“They’ll hear that way beyond the moon,” said the technician. “You can’t put that sort of stuff into people’s heads without a permit. Do you want us to get a special permit from the Instrumentality?”
“For one-third of a millisecond?”
The two men faced each other for a moment; then the technician began creasing his forehead, his mouth began to smile, and they both laughed. The second technician did not understand it and Tiga-belas said to him:
“I’m putting the girl’s whole lifetime into one-third of a millisecond at top power. It will drain over into the mouse-brain inside this cube. What is the normal human reaction within one-third millisecond?”
“Fifteen milliseconds—” The second technician started to speak and stopped himself.
“That’s right,” said Tiga-belas. “People don’t get anything at all in less than fifteen milliseconds. This mouse isn’t only veneered and laminated; he’s fast. The lamination is faster than his own synapses ever were. Bring on the girl.”
The first technician had already gone to get her.
The second technician turned back for one more question. “Is the mouse dead?”
“No. Yes. Of course not. What do you mean? Who knows?” said Tiga-belas all in one breath.
The younger man stared but the couch with the beautiful girl had already rolled into the room. Her skin had chilled down from pink to ivory and her respiration was no longer visible to the naked eye, but she was still beautiful. The deep freezing had not yet begun.
The first technician began to whistle. “Mouse—forty megadynes, one-third of a millisecond. Girl, output maximum, same time. Girl input, two minutes, what volume?”
“Anything.” said Tiga-belas. “Anything. Whatever you use for deep personality engraving.”
“Set,” said the technician.
“Take the cube,” said Tiga-belas.
The technician took it and fitted it into the coffinlike box near the girl’s head.
“Good-bye, immortal mouse,” said Tiga-belas. “Think about the beautiful girl when I am dead and don’t get too tired of Marcia and the Moon Men when you’ve seen it for a million years…”
“Record,” said the second technician. He took it from Tiga-belas and put it into a standard drama-shower, but one with output cables heavier than any home had ever installed.
“Do you have a code word?” said the first technician.
“It’s a little poem,” said Tiga-belas. He reached in his pocket. “Don’t read it aloud. If any of us misspoke a word, there is a chance she might hear it and it would heterodyne the relationship between her and the laminated mouse.”
The two looked at a scrap of paper. In clear, archaic writing there appeared the lines:
Lady if a man
Tries to bother you, you can
Think blue,
Count two,
And look for a red shoe.
The technicians laughed warmly. “That’ll do it,” said the first technician.
Tiga-belas gave them an embarrassed smile of thanks.
“Turn them both on,” he said. “Good-bye, girl,” he murmured to himself. “Good-bye, mouse. Maybe I’ll see you in seventy-four years.”
The room flashed with a kind of invisible light inside their heads.
In moon orbit a navigator wondered about his mother’s red shoes.
Two million people on Earth started to count “one-two” and then wondered why they had done so.
A bright young parakeet, in an orbital ship, began reciting the whole verse and baffled the crew as to what the meaning might be.
Apart from this, there were no side-effects.
The girl in the coffin arched her body with terrible strain. The electrodes had scorched the skin at her temples. The scars stood bright red against the chilled fresh skin of the girl.
The cube showed no sign from the dead-live live-dead mouse.
While the second technician put ointment on Veesey’s scars, Tiga-belas put on a headset and touched the terminals of the cube very gently without moving it from the snap-in position it held in the coffin-shaped box.
He nodded, satisfied. He stepped back.
“You’re sure the girl got it?”
“We’ll read it back before she goes to deep-freeze.”
“Marcia and the Moon Men, what?”
“Can’t miss it,” said the first technician.
“I’ll let you know if there’s anything missing. There won’t be.”
Tiga-belas took one last look at the lovely, lovely girl. Seventy-three years, two months, three days, he thought to himself. And she, beyond Earth rules, may be awarded a thousand years. And the mouse-brain has got a million years.
Veesey never knew any of them—neither the first technician, nor the second technician, nor Tiga-belas, the psychological guard.
To the day of her death, she knew that Marcia and the Moon Men had included the most wonderful blue lights, the hypnotic count of “one-two, one-two” and the prettiest red shoes that any girl had seen on or off Earth.
III
Three hundred and twenty-six years later she had to wake up.
Her box had opened.
Her body ached in every muscle and nerve.
The ship was screaming emergency and she had to get up.
She wanted to sleep, to sleep, or to die.
The ship kept screaming.
She had to get up.
She lifted an arm to the edge of her coffin-bed. She had practiced getting in and out of the bed in the long training period before they sent her underground to be hypnotized and frozen. She knew just what to reach for, just what to expect. She pulled herself over on her side. She opened her eyes.
The lights were yellow and strong. She closed her eyes again.
This time a voice sounded from somewhere near her. It seemed to be saying, “Take the straw in your mouth.”
Veesey groaned.
The voice kept on saying things.
Something scratchy pressed against her mouth.
She opened her eyes.
The outline of a human head had come between her and the light.
She squinted, trying to see if it might be one more of the doctors. No, this was the ship.
The face came into focus.
It was the face of a very handsome and very young man. His eyes looked into hers. She had never seen anyone who was both handsome and sympathetic, quite the way that he was. She tried to see him clearly, and found herself beginning to smile.
The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated Page 19
