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

by Cordwainer Smith

Trece winced, “I thought he had committed suicide.”

  “Not a bit,” said the captain. “Now listen. You’ll get through in about three sleeps if you obey orders. If you don’t, you’ll never get there.”

  “It doesn’t matter about me,” said Talatashar, “but this little girl has got to get to Wereld Schemering while she still has some life. One of your blasted apparitions told me to take care of her, but the idea is a good one, anyhow.”

  “Me too,” said Trece. “I didn’t realize that she was just a kid until I saw her talking to that other kid Marcia. Maybe I’ll have a daughter like her some day.”

  The captain said nothing to these comments but gave them the full, happy smile of an old, wise man.

  An hour later they were through with the checkup of the boat. The three were ready to go to their separate freeze-beds. The captain was getting ready to make his farewell.

  Talatashar spoke up. “Sir, I can’t help asking it, but who are you?”

  “A captain,” said the captain promptly.

  “You know what I mean,” said Tala wearily.

  The captain seemed to be looking inside himself. “I am a temporary, artificial personality created out of your minds by the personality which you call Sh’san. Sh’san is on the ship, but hidden from you, so that you will do him no harm. Sh’san was imprinted with the personality of a man, a real man, by the name of Tiga-belas. Sh’san was also imprinted with the personalities of five or six good space officers, just in case those skills might be needed. A small amount of static electricity keeps Sh’san on the alert, and when he is in the right position, he has a triggering mechanism which can call for more current from the ship’s supply.”

  “But what is he? What are you?” Talatashar kept on, almost pleading. “I was about to commit a terrible crime and you ghosts came in and saved me. Are you imaginary? Are you real?”

  “That’s philosophy. I’m made by science. I wouldn’t know,” said the captain.

  “Please,” said Veesey, “could you tell us what it seems like to you? Not what it is. What it seems like.”

  The captain sagged, as though the discipline had gone out of him—as though he suddenly felt terribly old. “When I’m talking and doing things, I suppose that I feel about like any other space captain. If I stop to think about it, I find myself pretty upsetting. I know that I’m just an echo in your minds, combined with the experience and wisdom which has gone into the cube. So I guess that I do what real people do. I just don’t think about it very much. I mind my business.” He stiffened and straightened and was himself again. “My own business,” he repeated.

  “And Sh’san,” said Trece, “how do you feel about him?”

  A look of awe—almost a look of terror—came upon the captain’s face. “He? Oh, him.” The tone of wonder enriched his voice and made it echo in the small cabin of the spaceboat. “Sh’san. He is the thinker of all thinking, the ‘to be’ of being, the doer of doings. He is powerful beyond your strongest imagination. He makes me come living out of your living minds. In fact,” said the captain with a final snarl, “he is a dead mouse-brain laminated with plastic and I have no idea at all of who I am. Good night to you all!”

  The captain set his cap on his head and walked straight through the hull. Veesey ran to a viewpoint but there was nothing outside the ship. Nothing. Certainly no captain.

  “What can we do,” said Talatashar, “but obey?”

  They obeyed. They climbed into their freeze-beds. Talatashar attached the correct electrodes to Veesey and to Trece before he went to his bed and attached his own. They called to each other pleasantly as the lids came down.

  They slept.

  VI

  At destination, the people of Wereld Schemering did the ingathering of pods, sails, and ship themselves. They did not wake the sleepers till they had them all assured of safety on the ground.

  They woke the three cabinmates together. Veesey, Trece, and Talatashar were so busy answering questions about the dead sailor, about the repaired sails, and about their problems on the trip that they did not have time to talk to each other. Veesey saw that Talatashar seemed to be very handsome. The port doctors had done something to restore his face, so that he seemed a strangely dignified young-old man. At last Trece had a chance to talk to her.

  “Good-bye, kid,” he said. “Go to school for a while here and then find yourself a good man. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?” she said, a terrible fear rising within her.

  “For smooching around with you before that trouble came. You’re just a kid. But you’re a good kid.” He ran his fingers through her hair, turned on his heel, and was gone.

  She stood, utterly forlorn, in the middle of the room. She wished that she could weep. What use had she been on the trip?

  Talatashar had come up to her unnoticed.

  He held out his hand. She took it.

  “Give it time, child,” said he.

  Is it child again? she thought to herself. To him she said, politely, “Maybe we’ll see each other again. This is a pretty small world.”

  His face lit up in an oddly agreeable smile. It made such a wonderful difference for the paralysis to be gone from one side. He did not look old at all, not really old.

  His voice took on urgency. “Veesey, remember that I remember. I remember what almost happened. I remember what we thought we saw. Maybe we did see all those things. We won’t see them on the ground. But I want you to remember this. You saved us all. Me too. And Trece, and the thirty thousand out behind.”

  “Me?” she said. “What did I do?”

  “You tuned in help. You let Sh’san work. It all came through you. If you hadn’t been honest and kind and friendly, if you hadn’t been terribly intelligent, no cube could have worked. That wasn’t any dead mouse working miracles on us. It was your mind and your own goodness that saved us. The cube just added the sound effects. I tell you, if you hadn’t been along, two dead men would be sailing off into the Big Nothing with thirty thousand spoiling bodies trailing along behind. You saved us all. You may not know how you did it, but you did.”

  An official tapped him on the arm; Tala said, firmly but politely, to him, “Just a moment.”

  “That’s it, I guess,” he said to her.

  A contrary spirit seized her; she had to speak, though she risked unhappiness by talking. “And what you said about girls…then…that time?”

  “I remember it.” His face twisted almost back to its old ugliness for a moment. “I remember it. But I was wrong. Wrong.”

  She looked at him and she thought in her own mind about the blue sky, about the two doors behind them, and about the red shoes in her luggage. Nothing miraculous happened. No Sh’san, no voices, no magic cubes.

  Except that he turned around, came back to her, and said, “Look. Let’s make sure that we see each other next week. These people at the desk can tell us where we are going to be, so that we’ll find each other. Let’s pester them.”

  Together they went to the immigration desk.

  The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All

  I. The Naked and Alone

  We looked through the peephole of the hospital door.

  Colonel Harkening had torn off his pajamas again and lay naked face down on the floor.

  His body was rigid.

  His face was turned sharply to the left so that the neck muscles showed. His right arm stuck out straight from the body. The elbow formed a right angle, with the forearm and hand pointing straight upward. The left arm also pointed straight out, but in this case the hand and forearm pointed downward in line with the body.

  The legs were in the grotesque parody of a running position.

  Except that Colonel Harkening wasn’t running.

  He was lying flat on the floor.

  Flat, as though he were trying to squeeze himself out of the third dimension and to lie in two planes only. Grosbeck stood back and gave Timofeyev his turn at the peephole.

  “I st
ill say he needs a naked woman,” said Grosbeck. Grosbeck always went in for the elementals.

  We had atropine, surgital, a whole family of the digitalinids, assorted narcotics, electrotherapy, hydrotherapy, subsonictherapy, temperature shock, audiovisual shock, mechanical hypnosis, and gas hypnosis.

  None of these had had the least effect on Colonel Harkening.

  When we picked the colonel up he tried to lie down.

  When we put clothes on him he tore them off.

  We had already brought his wife to see him. She had wept because the world had acclaimed her husband a hero, dead in the vast, frightening emptiness of space. His miraculous return had astonished seven continents on Earth and the settlements on Venus and Mars.

  Harkening had been test pilot for the new device which had been developed by a team at the Research Office of the Instrumentality.

  They called it a chronoplast, though a minority held out for the term planoform.

  The theory of it was completely beyond me, though the purpose was simple enough. Crudely stated, the theory sought to compress living, material bodies into a two-dimensional frame while skipping the living body and its material adjuncts through two dimensions only to some inconceivably remote point in space. As our technology now stood it would have taken us a century at the least to reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest star.

  Desmond, the Harkening, who held the titular rank of colonel under the Chiefs of the Instrumentality, was one of the best space navigators we had. His eyes were perfect, his mind cool, his body superb, his experience first-rate: What more could we ask?

  Humanity had sent him out in a minute spaceship not much larger than the elevator in an ordinary private home. Somewhere between Earth and the Moon with millions of televideo watchers following his course, he had disappeared.

  Presumably he had turned on the chronoplast and had been the first man to planoform.

  We never saw his craft again.

  But we found the colonel, all right.

  He lay naked in the middle of Central Park in New York, which lay about a hundred miles west of the Ancient Ruins.

  He lay in the grotesque position in which we had just observed him in the hospital cell, forming a sort of human starfish.

  Four months had passed and we had made very little progress with the colonel.

  It was not much trouble keeping him alive since we fed him by massive rectal and intravenous administrations of the requisites of medical survival. He did not oppose us. He did not fight except when we put clothes on him or tried to keep him too long out of the horizontal plane.

  When kept upright too long he would awaken just enough to go into a mad, silent, gloating rage, fighting the attendants, the straitjacket, and anything else that got in his way.

  We had had one hellish time in which the poor man suffered for an entire week, bound firmly in canvas and struggling every minute of the week to get free and to resume his nightmarish position.

  The wife’s visit last week had done no more good than I expected Grosbeck’s suggestion to do this week.

  The colonel paid no more attention to her than he paid to us doctors.

  If he had come back from the stars, come back from the cold beyond the Moon, come back from all the terrors of the Up-and-Out, come back by means unknown to any man living, come back in a form not himself and nevertheless himself, how could we expect the crude stimuli of previous human knowledge to awaken him?

  When Timofeyev and Grosbeck turned back to me after looking at him for the some-thousandth time, I told them I did not think we could make any progress with the case by ordinary means.

  “Let’s start all over again. This man is here. He can’t be here because nobody can come back from the stars, mother-naked in his own skin, and land from outer space in Central Park so gently that he shows not the slightest abrasion from a fall. Therefore, he isn’t in that room, you and I aren’t talking about anything, and there isn’t any problem. Is that right?”

  “No,” they chorused simultaneously.

  I turned on Grosbeck as the more obdurate of the two. “Have it your way then. He is there, major premise. He can’t be there, minor premise. We don’t exist. Q.E.D. That suit you any better?”

  “No, sir and doctor, Chief and Leader,” said Grosbeck, sticking to the courtesies even though he was angry. “You are trying to destroy the entire context of this case, and, by doing so, are trying to lead us even further into unorthodox methods of treatment. Lord and Heaven, sir! We can’t go any further that way. This man is crazy. It doesn’t matter how he got into Central Park. That’s a problem for the engineers. It’s not a medical problem. His craziness is a medical problem. We can try to cure it, or we can try not to cure it. But we won’t get anywhere if we mix the medicine with the engineering—”

  “It’s not that had,” interjected Timofeyev gently.

  As the older of my associates he had the right to address me by my short title. He turned to me. “I agree with you, sir and doctor Anderson, that the engineering is mixed up with this man’s mental and physical state. After all, he is the first person to go out in a chronoplast and neither we nor the engineers nor anybody else has the faintest idea of what happened to him. The engineers can’t find the machine, and we can’t find his consciousness. Let’s leave the machine to the engineers, but let’s persevere on the medical side of the case.”

  I said nothing, waiting for them to let off steam until they were prepared to reason with me and not just shout at me in their desperation.

  They looked at me, keeping their silence grudgingly, and trying to make me take the initiative in the unpleasant case.

  “Open the cell door,” I said. “He’s not going to run away in that position. All he wants to do is be flat.”

  “Flatter than a Scotch pancake in a Chinese hell,” said Grosbeck, “and you’re not going to get anywhere by leaving him in his flatness. He was a human being once and the only way to make a human being be a human being is to appeal to the human being side of him, not to some imaginary flat side that got thrown into him while he was out—wherever he was.”

  Grosbeck himself smiled a lopsided grin; he was capable of seeing the humor of his own vehemence at times. “Shall we say he was out underneath space, sir and doctor, Chief and Leader?”

  “That’s a good way to put it,” I said. “You can try your naked woman idea later on, but I frankly don’t think it’s going to do any good. That man isn’t corticating at a level above that of the simplest invertebrates except when he’s in that grotesque position. If he’s not thinking, he’s not seeing. If he’s not seeing, he won’t see a woman any more than anything else. There’s nothing wrong with the body. The trouble lies in the brain. I still see it as a problem of getting into the brain.”

  “Or the soul,” breathed Timofeyev, whose full name was Herbert Hoover Timofeyev, and who came from the most religious part of Russia. “You can’t leave the soul out sometimes, doctor…”

  We had entered the cell and stood there looking helplessly at the naked man.

  The patient breathed very quietly. His eyes were open; we had not been able to make the eyes blink, even with a photoflash. The patient acquired a grotesque and elementary humanity when he was taken out of his flat position. His mind reached, intellectually speaking, a high point no higher than that of a terrorized, panicked, momentarily deranged squirrel. When clothed or out of position he fought madly, hitting indiscriminately at objects and persons.

  Poor Colonel Harkening! We three were supposed to be the best doctors on Earth, and we could do nothing for him.

  We had even tried to study his way of fighting to see whether the muscular and eye movements involved in the struggle revealed where he had been or what experiences he had undergone. Even that was fruitless. He fought something after the fashion of a nine-month-old infant, using his adult strength, but using it indiscriminately.

  We never got a sound out of him.

  He breathed hard as he fought. His sputum bubb
led. Froth appeared on his lips. His hands made clumsy movements to tear away the shirts and robes and walkers which we put on him. Sometimes his fingernails or toenails tore his own skin as he got free of gloves or shoes.

  He always went back to the same position:

  On the floor.

  Face down.

  Arms and legs in swastika form.

  There he was back from outer space. He was the first man to return, and yet he had not really returned.

  As we stood there helpless, Timofeyev made the first serious suggestion we had gotten that day.

  “Do you dare to try a secondary telepath?”

  Grosbeck looked shocked.

  I dared to give the subject thought. Secondary telepaths were in bad repute because they were supposed to come into the hospitals and have their telepathic capacities removed once it had been proved that they were not true telepaths with a real capacity for complete interchange.

  Under the Ancient Law many of them could and did elude us.

  With their dangerous part-telepathic capacities they took up charlatanism and fakery of the worst kind, pretending to talk with the dead, precipitating neurotics into psychotics, healing a few sick people and bungling ten other cases for each case that they did heal, and, in general, disturbing the good order of society.

  And yet, if everything else had failed…

  II. The Secondary Telepath

  A day later we were back in Harkening’s hospital cell, almost in the same position.

  The three of us stood around the naked body on the floor.

  There was a fourth person with us, a girl.

  Timofeyev had found her. She was a member of his own religious group, the Post-Soviet Orthodox Eastern Quakers. You could tell when they spoke Anglic because they used the word “thou” from the Ancient English Language instead of the word “thee.”

  Timofeyev looked at me.

  I nodded at him very quietly.

  He turned to the girl. “Canst thou help him, sister?”

  The child was scarcely more than twelve. She was a little girl with a long, lean face, a soft, mobile mouth, quick gray-green eyes, a mop of tan hair that fell over her shoulders. She had expressive, tapering hands. She showed no shock at all at the sight of the naked man lost in the depths of his insanity.