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

by Cordwainer Smith

  “I don’t either,” said he, “except that it’s not something I want to do. I don’t want to do it at all. It’s cruel and messy and when I get through I won’t have you and him to talk to. But this is something I have to do. It’s justice, in a strange way. You’ve got to die because you’re bad. And I’m bad too; but if you die, I won’t be so bad.”

  He looked up at her brightly, almost as though he were normal. “Do you know what I’m talking about? Do you understand any of it?”

  “No. No. No,” Veesey stammered, but she could not help it.

  Talatashar stared not at her but at the invisible face of his crime-to-come and said, almost cheerfully:

  “You might as well understand. It’s you who will die for it, and then him. Long ago you did me a wrong, a dirty, intolerable wrong. It wasn’t the you who’s sitting here. You’re not big enough or smart enough to do anything as awful as the things that were done to me. It wasn’t this you who did it, it was the real, true you instead. And now you are going to be cut and burned and choked and brought back with medicines and cut and choked and hurt again, as long as your body can stand it. And when your body stops, I’m going to put on an emergency suit and shove your dead body out into space with him. He can go out alive, for all I care. Without a suit, he’ll last two gasps. And then part of my justice will be done. That’s what people have called crime. It’s just justice, private justice that comes out of the deep insides of man. Do you understand, Veesey?”

  She nodded. She shook her head. She nodded again. She didn’t know how to respond.

  “And then there are more things which I’ll have to do,” he went on, with a sort of purr. “Do you know what there is outside this ship, waiting for my crime?”

  She shook her head, and so he answered himself.

  “There are thirty thousand people following in their pods behind this ship. I’ll pull them in by two and two and I will get young girls. The others I’ll throw loose in space. And with the girls I’ll find out what it is—what it is I’ve always had to do, and never knew. Never knew, Veesey, till I found myself out in space with you.”

  His voice almost went dreamy as he lost himself in his own thoughts. The twisted side of his face showed its endless laugh, but the mobile side looked thoughtful and melancholy, so that she felt there was something inside him which might be understood, if only she had the quickness and the imagination to think of it.

  Her throat still dry, she managed to half-whisper at him:

  “Do you hate me? Why do you want to hurt me? Do you hate girls?”

  “I don’t hate girls,” he blazed, “I hate me. Out here in space I found it out. You’re not a person. Girls aren’t people. They are soft and pretty and cute and cuddly and warm, but they have no feelings. I was handsome before my face spoiled, but that didn’t matter. I always knew that girls weren’t people. They’re something like robots. They have all the power in the world and none of the worry. Men have to obey, men have to beg, men have to suffer, because they are built to suffer and to be sorry and to obey. All a girl has to do is to smile her pretty smile or to cross her pretty legs, and the man gives up everything he has ever wanted and fought for, just to be her slave. And then the girl”—and at this point he got to screaming again, in a high shrill shout—“and then the girl gets to be a woman and she has children, more girls to pester men, more men to be the victims of girls, more cruelty and more slaves. You’re so cruel to me, Veesey! You’re so cruel that you don’t even know you’re cruel. If you’d known how I wanted you, you’d have suffered like a person. But you didn’t suffer. You’re a girl. Well, you’re going to find out now. You will suffer and then you will die. But you won’t die until you know how men feel about women.”

  “Tala,” she said, using the nickname they had so rarely used to him, “Tala, that’s not so. I never meant you to suffer.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” he snapped. “Girls don’t know what they do. That’s what makes them girls. They’re worse than snakes, worse than machines.” He was mad, crazy-mad, in the outer deep of space. He stood up so suddenly that he shot through the air and had to catch himself on the ceiling.

  A noise in the side of the cabin made them both turn for a moment. Trece was trying to break loose from his bonds. It did no good. Veesey flung herself toward Trece, but Talatashar caught her by the shoulder. He twisted her around. His eyes blazed at her out of his poor, misshapen face.

  Veesey had sometime wondered what death would be like. She thought:

  This is it.

  Her body still fought Talatashar, there in the spaceboat cabin. Trece groaned behind his shackles and his gag. She tried to scratch at Talatashar’s eyes, but the thought of death made her seem far away. Far away, inside herself.

  Inside herself, where other people could not reach, ever—no matter what happened.

  Out of that deep nearby remoteness, words came into her head:

  Lady if a man

  Tries to bother you, you can

  Think blue,

  Count two,

  And look for a red shoe…

  Thinking blue was not hard. She just imagined the yellow cabin lights turning blue. Counting “one-two” was the simplest thing in the world. And even with Talatashar straining to catch her free hand, she managed to remember the beautiful, beautiful red shoes which she had seen in Marcia and the Moon Men.

  The lights dimmed momentarily and a huge voice roared at them from the control board.

  “Emergency, top emergency! People! People out of repair!”

  Talatashar was so astonished that he let her go.

  The board whined at them like a siren. It sounded as though the computer had become flooded with weeping.

  In an utterly different voice from his impassioned talkative rage, Talatashar looked directly at her and asked, very soberly, “Your cube. Didn’t I get your cube too?”

  There was a knocking on the wall. A knocking from the millions of miles of emptiness outside. A knocking out of nowhere.

  A person they had never seen before stepped into the ship, walking through the double wall as though it had been nothing more than a streamer of mist.

  It was a man. A middle-aged man, sharp of face, strong in torso and limbs, clad in very old-style clothes. In his belt he had a whole collection of weapons, and in his hand a whip.

  “You there,” said the stranger to Talatashar, “untie that man.”

  He gestured with the whip-butt toward Trece, still bound and gagged.

  Talatashar got over his surprise.

  “You’re a cube-ghost. You’re not real!”

  The whip hissed in the air and a long red welt appeared on Talatashar’s wrist. The drops of blood began to float beside him in the air before he could speak again.

  Veesey could say nothing; her mind and body seemed to be blanking out.

  As she sank to the floor, she saw Talatashar shake himself, walk over to Trece, and begin untying the knots.

  When Talatashar got the gag out of Trece’s mouth, Trece spoke—not to him, but to the stranger:

  “Who are you?”

  “I do not exist,” said the stranger, “but I can kill you, any of you, if I wish. You had better do as I say. Listen carefully. You too,” he added, turning halfway around and looking at Veesey. “You listen too, because it’s you who called me.”

  All three listened. The fight was gone out of them. Trece rubbed his wrists and shook his hands to get the circulation going in them again.

  The stranger turned, in courtly and elegant fashion, so that he spoke most directly to Talatashar.

  “I derive from the young lady’s cube. Did you notice the lights dim? Tiga-belas left a false cube in her freeze-box but he hid me in the ship. When she thought the key notions at me, there was a fraction of a microvolt which called for more power at my terminals. I am made from the brain of some small animal, but I bear the personality and the strength of Tiga-belas. I shall last a billion years. When the current came on full po
wer, I became operative as a distortion in your minds. I do not exist,” said he, specifically addressing himself to Talatashar, “but if I needed to take out my imaginary pistol and to shoot you in the head with it, my control is so strong that your bone would comply with my command. The hole would appear in your head and your blood and your brains would pour out, just as much as blood is pouring from your hand just now. Look at your hand and believe me, if you wish.”

  Talatashar refused to look.

  The stranger went on in a very deliberate tone. “No bullet would come from my pistol, no ray, no blast, nothing. Nothing at all. But your flesh would believe me, even if your thoughts did not. Your bone structure would believe me, whether you thought so or not. I am communicating to every separate single cell in your body, to everything which I feel to be alive. If I think bullet at you, your bone will pull aside for the imaginary wound. Your skin will part, your blood will pour out, your brains will splash. They will not do it by physical force but by communication from me. Communication direct, you fool. That may not be real violence, but it serves my purpose just as well. Now do you understand me? Look at your wrist.”

  Talatashar did not avert his eyes from the stranger. In an odd cold voice he said, “I believe you. I guess I am crazy. Are you going to kill me?”

  “I don’t know,” said the stranger.

  Trece said, “Please, are you a person or machine?”

  “I don’t know,” said the stranger to him too.

  “What’s your name?” asked Veesey. “Did you get a name when they made you and sent you with us?”

  “My name,” said the stranger, with a bow to her, “is Sh’san.”

  “Glad to meet you, Sh’san,” said Trece, holding out his own hand.

  They shook hands.

  “I felt your hand,” said Trece. He looked at the other two in amazement. “I felt his hand, I really did. What were you doing out in space all this time?”

  The stranger smiled. “I have work to do, not talk to make.”

  “What do you want us to do,” said Talatashar, “now that you’ve taken over?”

  “I haven’t taken over,” said Sh’san, “and you will do what you have to do. Isn’t that the nature of people?”

  “But, please—” said Veesey.

  The stranger had vanished and the three of them were alone in the spaceboat cabin again. Trece’s gag and bindings had finally drifted down to the carpet but Tala’s blood hung gently in the air beside him.

  Very heavily, Talatashar spoke. “Well, we’re through that. Would you say I was crazy?”

  “Crazy?” said Veesey. “I don’t know the word.”

  “Damaged in the thinking,” explained Trece to her. Turning to Talatashar he began to speak seriously. “I think that—” He was interrupted by the control board. Little bells rang and a sign lighted up. They all saw it. Visitors expected, said the glowing sign.

  The storage door opened and a beautiful woman came into the cabin with them. She looked at them as though she knew them all. Veesey and Trece were inquisitive and startled, but Talatashar turned white, dead white.

  V

  Veesey saw that the woman wore a dress of the style which had vanished a generation ago—a style now seen only in the story-boxes. There was no back to it. The lady had a bold cosmetic design fanning out from her spinal column. In front, the dress hung from the usual magnet tabs which had been inserted into the shallow fatty area of the chest, but in her case the tabs were above the clavicles, so that the dress rose high, with an air of old-fashioned prudishness. Magnet tabs were at the usual place just below the ribcage, holding the half-skirt, which was very full, in a wide sweep of unpressed pleats. The lady wore a necklace and matching bracelet of off-world coral. The lady did not even look at Veesey. She went straight to Talatashar and spoke to him with peremptory love.

  “Tal, be a good boy. You’ve been bad.”

  “Mama,” gasped Talatashar. “Mama, you’re dead!”

  “Don’t argue with me,” she snapped. “Be a good boy. Take care of the little girl. Where is the little girl?” She looked around and saw Veesey. “That little girl,” she added, “be a good boy to that little girl. If you don’t, you will break your mother’s heart, you will ruin your mother’s life, you will break your mother’s heart, just like your father did. Don’t make me tell you twice.”

  She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, and it seemed to Veesey that both sides of the man’s face were equally twisted, for that moment.

  She stood up, looked around, nodded politely at Trece and Veesey, and walked back into the storage room, closing the door after her.

  Talatashar plunged after her, opening the door with a bang and shutting it with a slam. Trece called after him:

  “Don’t stay in there too long. You’ll freeze.”

  Trece added, speaking to Veesey, “This is something your cube is doing. That Sh’san, he’s the most powerful warden I ever saw. Your psychological guard must have been a genius. And you know what’s the matter with him?” He nodded at the closed door. “He told me once, just in general. His own mother raised him. He was born in the asteroid belt and she didn’t turn him in.”

  “You mean, his very own mother?” said Veesey.

  “Yes, his genealogical mother.” said Trece.

  “How dirty!” said Veesey. “I never heard of anything like it.”

  Talatashar came back into the room and said nothing to either of them.

  The mother did not reappear.

  But Sh’san, the eidetic man imprinted in the cube, continued to assert his authority over all three of them.

  Three days later Marcia herself appeared, talked to Veesey for half an hour about her adventures with the Moon Men, and then disappeared again. Marcia never pretended that she was real. She was too pretty to be real. A thick cascade of yellow hair crowned a well-formed head; dark eyebrows arched over vivid brown eyes; and an enchantingly mischievous smile pleased Veesey. Trece, and Talatashar. Marcia admitted that she was the imaginary heroine of a dramatic series from the story-boxes. Talatashar had calmed down completely after the apparition of Sh’san followed by that of his mother. He seemed anxious to get to the bottom of the phenomena. He tried to do it by asking Marcia.

  She answered his questions willingly.

  “What are you?” he demanded. The friendly smile on the good side of his face was more frightening than a scowl would have been.

  “I’m a little girl, silly,” said Marcia.

  “But you’re not real,” he insisted.

  “No,” she admitted, “but are you?” She laughed a happy girlish laugh—the teen-ager tying up the bewildered adult in his own paradox.

  “Look,” he persisted, “you know what I mean. You’re just something that Veesey saw in the story-boxes and you’ve come to give her imaginary red shoes.”

  “You can feel the shoes after I’ve left,” said Marcia.

  “That means the cube has made them out of something on this ship,” said Talatashar, very triumphantly.

  “Why not?” said Marcia. “I don’t know about ships, I guess he does.”

  “But even if the shoes are real, you’re not,” said Talatashar. “Where do you go when you ‘leave’ us?”

  “I don’t know,” said Marcia. “I came here to visit Veesey. When I go away I suppose that I will be where I was before I came.”

  “And where was that?”

  “Nowhere,” said Marcia, looking solid and real.

  “Nowhere? So you admit you’re nothing?”

  “I will if you want me to,” said Marcia, “but this conversation doesn’t make much sense to me. Where were you before you were here?”

  “Here? You mean in this boat? I was on Earth,” said Talatashar.

  “Before you were in this universe, where were you?”

  “I wasn’t born, so I didn’t exist.”

  “Well,” said Marcia, “it’s the same with me, only a little bit different. Before I existed I didn�
��t exist. When I exist, I’m here. I’m an echo out of Veesey’s personality and I’m helping her to remember that she is a pretty young girl, I feel as real as you feel. So there!”

  Marcia went back to talking about her adventures with the Moon Men and Veesey was fascinated to hear all the things they had had to leave out of the story-box version. When Marcia was through, she shook hands with the two men, gave Veesey a little peck of a kiss on her left cheek, and walked through the hull into the gnawing emptiness of space, marked only by the starless rhomboids of the sails which cut off part of the heavens from view.

  Talatashar pounded his fist in his other, open hand. “Science has gone too far. They will kill us with their precautions.”

  Trece said, deadly calm, “And what might you have done?”

  Talatashar fell into a gloomy silence.

  And on the tenth day after the apparitions began, they ended. The power of the cube drew itself into a whole thunderbolt of decision. Apparently the cube and the ship’s computers had somehow filled in each other’s data.

  The person who came in this time was a space captain, gray, wrinkled, erect, tanned by the radiation of a thousand worlds.

  “You know who I am,” he said.

  “Yes, sir, a captain,” said Veesey.

  “I don’t know you,” said Talatashar, “and I’m not sure I believe in you.”

  “Has your hand healed?” asked the captain, grimly.

  Talatashar fell silent.

  The captain called them to attention. “Listen. You are not going to live long enough to get to the stars on your present course. I want Trece to set the macro-chronography for intervals of ninety-five years, and then I want to watch while he gives two of you at a time five years on watch. That will do to set the sails, check the tangling of the pod lines, and send out report beacons. This ship should have a sailor, but there is not enough equipment to turn one of you into a sailor, so we’ll have to take a chance on the robot controls while all three of you sleep in your freeze-beds. Your sailor died of a blood clot and the robots pushed him out of the cabin before they woke you—”