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

by Cordwainer Smith

  The drinking-tube thrust past her lips and teeth. Automatically she sucked at it. The fluid was something like soup, but it had a medicinal taste too.

  The face had a voice. “Wake up,” he said, “wake up. It doesn’t do any good to hold back now. You need some exercise as soon as you can manage it.”

  She let the tube slip from her mouth and gasped. “Who are you?”

  “Trece,” he said, “and that’s Talatashar over there. We’ve been up for two months, rescuing the robots. We need your help.”

  “Help,” she murmured, “my help?”

  Trece’s face wrinkled and crinkled in a delightful grin. “Well, we sort of needed you. We really do need a third mind to watch the robots when we think we’ve fixed them. And besides, we’re lonely. Talatashar and I aren’t much company to each other. We looked over the list of reserve crew and we decided to wake you.” He reached out a friendly hand to her.

  When she sat up she saw the other man, Talatashar. She immediately recoiled: she had never seen anyone so ugly. His hair was gray and cropped. Piggy little eyes peered out of eye-sockets which looked flooded with fat. His cheeks hung down in monstrous jowls on either side. On top of all that, his face was lopsided. One side seemed wide awake but the other was twisted in an endless spasm which looked like agony. She could not help putting her hand to her mouth. And it was with the back of her hand against her lips that she spoke.

  “I thought—I thought everybody on this ship was supposed to be handsome.”

  One side of Talatashar’s face smiled at her while the other half stayed with its expression of frozen hurt.

  “We were,” his voice rumbled, and it was not of itself an unpleasant voice, “we all were. Some of us always get spoiled in the freezing. It will take you a while to get used to me.” He laughed grimly. “It took me a while to get used to me. In two months, I’ve managed. Pleased to meet you. Maybe you’ll be pleased to meet me, after a while. What do you think of that, eh, Trece?”

  “What?” said Trece, who had watched them both with friendly worry.

  “The girl. So tactful. The direct diplomacy of the very young. Was I handsome, she said. No, say I. What is she, anyhow?”

  Trece turned to her. “Let me help you sit,” he said.

  She sat up on the edge of her box.

  Wordlessly he passed the skin of fluid to her with its drinking tube, and she went back to sucking her broth. Her eyes peered up at the two men like the eyes of a small child. They were as innocent and troubled as the eyes of a kitten which has met worry for the first time.

  “What are you?” said Trece.

  She took her lips away from the tube for a moment. “A girl,” she said.

  Half of Talatashar’s face smiled a sophisticated smile. The other half moved a little with muscular drag, but expressed nothing. “We see that,” said he, grimly.

  “He means,” said Trece conciliatorily, “what have you been trained for?”

  She took her mouth away again. “Nothing,” said she.

  The men laughed—both of them. First, Trece laughed with all the evil in the world in his voice. Then Talatashar laughed, and he was too young to laugh his own way. His laughter, too, was cruel. There was something masculine, mysterious, threatening, and secret in it, as though he knew all about things which girls could find out only at the cost of pain and humiliation. He was as alien, for the moment, as men have always been from women: filled with secret motives and concealed desires, driven by bright sharp thoughts which women neither had nor wished to have. Perhaps more than his body had spoiled.

  There was nothing in Veesey’s own life to make her fear that laugh, but the instinctive reaction of a million years of womanhood behind her was to disregard the evil, go on the alert for more trouble, and hope for the best at the moment. She knew, from books and tapes, all about sex. This laugh had nothing to do with babies or with love. There was contempt and power and cruelty in it—the cruelty of men who are cruel merely because they are men. For an instant she hated both of them, but she was not alarmed enough to set off the trigger of the protective devices which the psychological guard had built into her mind itself. Instead, she looked down the cabin, ten meters long and four meters wide.

  This was home now, perhaps forever. There were sleepers somewhere, but she did not see their boxes. All she had was this small space and the two men—Trece with his warm smile, his nice voice, his interesting gray-blue eyes; and Talatashar, with his ruined face. And their laughter. That wretchedly mysterious masculine laughter, hostile and laughing-at in its undertones.

  Life’s life, she thought, and I must live it. Here.

  Talatashar, who had finished laughing, now spoke in a very different voice.

  “There will be time for the fun and games later. First, we have to get the work done. The photonic sails aren’t picking up enough starlight to get us anywhere. The mainsail is ripped by a meteor. We can’t repair it, not when it’s twenty miles across. So we have to jury-rig the ship—that’s the right old word.”

  “How does it work?” asked Veesey sadly, not much interested in her own question. The aches and pains of the long freeze were beginning to bedevil her.

  Talatashar said, “It’s simple. The sails are coated. We were put into orbit by rockets. The pressure of light is bigger on one side than on the other. With some pressure on one side and virtually no pressure on the other, the ship has to go somewhere. Interstellar matter is very fine and does not give us enough drag to slow us down. The sails pull away from the brightest source of light at any time. For the first eighty years it was the sun. Then we began trying to get both the sun and some bright patches of light behind it. Now we have more light coming at us than we want, and we will be pulled away from our destination if we do not point the blind side of the sails at the goal and the pushing sides at the next best source. The sailor died, for some reason we can’t figure out. The ship’s automatic mechanism woke us up and the navigation board explained the situation to us. Here we are. We have to fix the robots.”

  “But what’s the matter with them? Why don’t they do it themselves? Why did they have to wake up people? They’re supposed to be so smart.” She particularly wondered, Why did they have to wake up me? But she suspected the answer—that the men had done it, not the robots—and she did not want to make them say it. She still remembered how their masculine laughter had turned ugly.

  “The robots weren’t programmed to tear up sails—only to fix them. We’ve got to condition them to accept the damage that we want to leave, and to go ahead with the new work which we are adding.”

  “Could I have something to eat?” asked Veesey.

  “Let me get it!” cried Trece.

  “Why not?” said Talatashar.

  While she ate, they went over the proposed work in detail, the three of them talking it out calmly. Veesey felt more relaxed. She had the sensation that they were taking her in as a partner.

  By the time they completed their work schedules, they were sure it would take between thirty-five and forty-two normal days to get the sails stiffened and re-hung. The robots did the outside work, but the sails were seventy thousand miles long by twenty thousand miles wide.

  Forty-two days!

  The work was not forty-two days at all.

  It was one year and three days before they finished.

  The relationships in the cabin had not changed much. Talatashar left her alone except to make ugly remarks. Nothing he had found in the medicine cabinet had made him look any better, but some of the things drugged him so that he slept long and well.

  Trece had long since become her sweetheart, but it was such an innocent romance that it might have been conducted on grass, under elms, at the edge of an Earthside silky river.

  Once she had found them fighting and had exclaimed:

  “Stop it! Stop it! You can’t!”

  When they did stop hitting each other, she said wonderingly:

  “I thought you couldn’t. Those boxes.
Those safeguards. Those things they put in with us.”

  And Talatashar said, in a voice of infinite ugliness and finality, “That’s what they thought. I threw those things out of the ship months ago. Don’t want them around.”

  The effect on Trece was dramatic, as bad as if he had walked into one of the Ancient Unselfing Grounds unaware. He stood utterly still, his eyes wide and his voice filled with fear when, at last, he did speak.

  “So—that’s—why—we—fought!”

  “You mean the boxes? They’re gone, all right.”

  “But,” gasped Trece, “each was protected by each one’s box. We were all protected—from ourselves. God help us all!”

  “What is God?” said Talatashar.

  “Never mind. It’s an old word. I heard it from a robot. But what are we going to do? What are you going to do?” said he accusingly to Talatashar.

  “Me,” said Talatashar, “I’m doing nothing. Nothing has happened.” The working side of his face twisted in a hideous smile.

  Veesey watched both of them.

  She did not understand it, but she feared it, that unspecific danger.

  Talatashar gave them his ugly, masculine laugh, but this time Trece did not join him. He stared open-mouthed at the other man.

  Talatashar put on a show of courage and indifference. “Shift’s up.” he said, “and I’m turning in.”

  Veesey nodded and tried to say good night but no words came. She was frightened and inquisitive. Of the two, feeling inquisitive was worse. There were thirty-odd thousand people all around her, but only these two were alive and present. They knew something which she did not know.

  Talatashar made a brave show of it by bidding her, “Mix up something special for the big eating tomorrow. Mind you do it, girl.”

  He climbed into the wall.

  When Veesey turned toward Trece, it was he who fell into her arms.

  “I’m frightened,” he said. “We can face anything in space, but we can’t face us. I’m beginning to think that the sailor killed himself. His psychological guard broke down too. And now we’re all alone with just us.”

  Veesey looked instinctively around the cabin. “It’s all the same as before. Just the three of us, and this little room, and the Up-and-Out outside.”

  “Don’t you see it, darling?” He grabbed her by the shoulders. “The little boxes protected us from ourselves. And now there aren’t any. We are helpless. There isn’t anything here to protect us from us. What hurts man like man? What kills people like people? What danger to us could be more terrible than ourselves?”

  She tried to pull away. “It’s not that bad.”

  Without answering he pulled her to him. He began tearing at her clothes. The jacket and shorts, like his own, were omni-textile and fitted tight. She fought him off but she was not the least bit frightened. She was sorry for him, and at this moment the only thing that worried her was that Talatashar might wake up and try to help her. That would be too much.

  Trece was not hard to stop.

  She got him to sit down and they drifted into the big chair together.

  His face was as tear-stained as her own.

  That night, they did not make love.

  In whispers, in gasps, he told her the story of Old Twenty-two. He told her that people poured out among the stars and that the ancient things inside people woke up, so that the deeps of their minds were more terrible than the blackest depth of space. Space never committed crimes. It just killed. Nature could transmit death, but only man could carry crime from world to world. Without the boxes, they looked into the bottomless depths of their own unknown selves.

  She did not really understand, but she tried as well as she possibly could.

  He went to sleep—it was long after his shift should have ended—murmuring over and over again:

  “Veesey, Veesey, protect me from me! What can I do now, now, now, so that I won’t do something terrible later on? What can I do? Now I’m afraid of me, Veesey, and afraid of Old Twenty-two. Veesey, Veesey, you’ve got to save me from me. What can I do now, now, now…?”

  She had no answer and after he slept, she slept. The yellow lights burned brightly on them both. The robot-board, reading that no human being was in the “on” position, assumed complete control of the ship and sails.

  Talatashar woke them in the morning.

  No one that day, nor any of the succeeding days, said anything about the boxes. There was nothing to say.

  But the two men watched each other like unrelated beasts and Veesey herself began watching them in turn. Something wrong and vital had come into the room, some exuberance of life which she had never known existed. It did not smell; she could not see it; she could not reach it with her fingers. It was something real, nevertheless. Perhaps it was what people once called danger.

  She tried to be particularly friendly to both the men. It made the feeling diminish within her. But Trece became surly and jealous and Talatashar smiled his untruthful lopsided smile.

  IV

  Danger came to them by surprise.

  Talatashar’s hands were on her, pulling her out of her own sleeping-box.

  She tried to fight but he was as remorseless as an engine.

  He pulled her free, turned her around, and let her float in the air. She would not touch the floor for a minute or two, and he obviously counted on getting control of her again. As she twisted in the air, wondering what had happened, she saw Trece’s eyes rolling as they followed her movement. Only a fraction of a second later did she realize that she saw Trece too. He was tied up with emergency wire, and the wire which bound him was tied to one of the stanchions in the wall. He was more helpless than she.

  A cold deep fear came upon her.

  “Is this a crime?” she whispered to the empty air. “Is this what crime is, what you are doing to me?”

  Talatashar did not answer her, but his hands took a firm terrible grip on her shoulders. He turned her around. She slapped at him. He slapped her back, hitting so hard that her jaw felt like a wound.

  She had hurt herself accidentally a few times; the doctor-robots had always hurried to her aid. But no other human being had ever hurt her. Hurting people—why, that wasn’t done, except for the games of men! It wasn’t done. It couldn’t happen. It did.

  All in a rush she remembered what Trece had told her about Old Twenty-two, and about what happened to people when they lost their own outsides in space and began making up evil from the people-insides which, after a million and more years of becoming human, still followed them everywhere—even into space itself.

  This was crime come back to man.

  She managed to say it to Talatashar. “You are going to commit crimes? On this ship? With me?”

  His expression was hard to read, with half of his face frozen in a perpetual rictus of unfulfilled laughter. They were facing each other now. Her face was feverish from the pain of his slap, but the good side of his face showed no corresponding imprint of pain from having been struck by her. It showed nothing but strength, alertness, and a kind of attunement which was utterly and unimaginably wrong.

  At last he answered her, and it was as if he wandered among the wonders of his own soul.

  “I’m going to do what I please. What I please. Do you understand?”

  “Why don’t you just ask us?” she managed to say. “Trece and I will do anything you want. We’re all alone in this little ship, millions of miles from nowhere. Why shouldn’t we do what you want? Let him go. And talk to me. We’ll do what you want. Anything. You have rights too.”

  His laugh was close to a crazy scream.

  He put his face close to her and hissed at her so sharply that droplets of his spittle sprayed against her cheek and ear.

  “I don’t want rights!” he shouted at her. “I don’t want what’s mine. I don’t want to do right. Do you think I haven’t heard the two of you, night after night, making soft loving sounds when the cabin has gone dark? Why do you think I threw the cubes out
of the ship? Why do you think I needed power?”

  “I don’t know.” she said, sadly and meekly. She had not given up hope. As long as he was talking he might talk himself out and become reasonable again. She had heard of robots blowing their circuits, so that they had to be hunted down by other robots. But she had never thought that it might happen to people too.

  Talatashar groaned. The history of man was in his groan—the anger at life, which promises so much and gives so little, and despair about time, which tricks man while it shapes him. He sat back on the air and let himself drift toward the floor of the cabin, where the magnetic carpeting drew the silky iron filaments in their clothing.

  “You’re thinking he’ll get over this, aren’t you?” said he, speaking of himself.

  She nodded.

  “You’re thinking he’ll get reasonable and let both of us alone, aren’t you?”

  She nodded again.

  “You’re thinking—Talatashar, he’ll get well when we arrive at Wereld Schemering, and the doctors will fix his face, and then we’ll all be happy again. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

  She still nodded. Behind her she heard Trece give a loud groan against his gag, but she did not dare take her eyes off Talatashar and his spoiled, horrible face.

  “Well, it won’t be that way, Veesey,” he said. The finality in his voice was almost calm.

  “Veesey, you’re not going to get there. I’m going to do what I have to do. I’m going to do things to you that no one ever did in space before, and then I’m going to throw your body out the disposal door. But I’ll let Trece watch it all before I kill him too. And then, do you know what I’ll do?”

  Some strange emotion—it was probably fear—began tightening the muscles in her throat. Her mouth had become dry. She barely managed to croak, “No, I don’t know what you’ll do then…”

  Talatashar looked as though he were staring inward.