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

by Cordwainer Smith

  “We’re here to get you loaded on board ship, not to discuss what other officers do or do not do. Sometimes we think it good to have a female companion on the ship with the commander, even if she is imaginary. If you ever found anything among the stars which took on female form, you’d be mighty vulnerable to it.”

  “Females, among the stars? Bosh!” said Suzdal.

  “Strange things have happened,” said the official.

  “Not that,” said Suzdal. “Pain, craziness, distortion, panic without end, a craze for food—yes, those I can look for and face. They will be there. But females, no. There aren’t any. I love my wife. I won’t make females up out of my own mind. After all, I’ll have the turtle-people aboard, and they will be bringing up their young. I’ll have plenty of family to watch and to take part in. I can even give Christmas parties for the young ones.”

  “What kind of parties are those?” asked the official.

  “Just a funny little ancient ritual that I heard about from an outer pilot. You give all the young things presents, once every local-subjective year.”

  “It sounds nice,” said the official, his voice growing tired and final. “You still refuse to have a cube-woman on board. You wouldn’t have to activate her unless you really needed her.”

  “You haven’t flown, yourself, have you?” asked Suzdal.

  It was the official’s turn to flush. “No.” he said, flatly.

  “Anything that’s in that ship, I’m going to think about. I’m a cheerful sort of man, and very friendly. Let me just get along with my turtle-people. They’re not lively, but they are considerate and restful. Two thousand or more years, local-subjective, is a lot of time. Don’t give me additional decisions to make. It’s work enough, running the ship. Just leave me alone with my turtle-people. I’ve gotten along with them before.”

  “You, Suzdal, are the commander,” said the loading official. “We’ll do as you say.”

  “Fine,” smiled Suzdal. “You may get a lot of queer types on this run, but I’m not one of them.”

  The two men smiled agreement at one another and the loading of the ship was completed.

  The ship itself was managed by turtle-men, who aged very slowly, so that while Suzdal coursed the outer rim of the galaxy and let the thousands of years—local count—go past while he slept in his frozen bed, the turtle-men rose generation by generation, trained their young to work the ship, taught the stories of the Earth that they would never see again, and read the computers correctly, to awaken Suzdal only when there was a need for human intervention and for human intelligence. Suzdal awakened from time to time, did his work and then went back. He felt that he had been gone from Earth only a few months.

  Months indeed! He had been gone more than a subjective ten thousand years, when he met the siren capsule.

  It looked like an ordinary distress capsule. The kind of thing that was often shot through space to indicate some complication of the destiny of man among the stars. This capsule had apparently been flung across an immense distance, and from the capsule Suzdal got the story of Arachosia.

  The story was false. The brains of a whole planet—the wild genius of a malevolent, unhappy race—had been dedicated to the problem of ensnaring and attracting a normal pilot from Old Earth. The story which the capsule sang conveyed the rich personality of a wonderful woman with a contralto voice. The story was true, in part. The appeals were real, in part. Suzdal listened to the story and it sank, like a wonderfully orchestrated piece of grand opera, right into the fibers of his brain. It would have been different if he had known the real story.

  Everybody now knows the real story of Arachosia, the bitter terrible story of the planet which was a paradise, which turned into a hell. The story of how people got to be something different from people. The story of what happened way out there in the most dreadful place among the stars.

  He would have fled if he knew the real story. He couldn’t understand what we now know:

  Mankind could not meet the terrible people of Arachosia without the people of Arachosia following them home and bringing to mankind a grief greater than grief, a craziness worse than mere insanity, a plague surpassing all imaginable plagues. The Arachosians had become unpeople, and yet, in their innermost imprinting of their personalities, they remained people. They sang songs which exalted their own deformity and which praised themselves for what they had so horribly become, and yet, in their own songs, in their own ballads, the organ tones of the refrain rang out:

  And I mourn Man!

  They knew what they were and they hated themselves. Hating themselves, they pursued mankind.

  Perhaps they are still pursuing mankind.

  The Instrumentality has by now taken good pains that the Arachosians will never find us again, has flung networks of deception out along the edge of the galaxy to make sure that those lost ruined people cannot find us. The Instrumentality knows and guards our world and all the other worlds of mankind against the deformity which has become Arachosia. We want nothing to do with Arachosia. Let them hunt for us. They won’t find us.

  How could Suzdal know that?

  This was the first time someone had met the Arachosians, and he met them only with a message in which an elfin voice sang the elfin song of ruin, using perfectly clear words in the old common tongue to tell a story so sad, so abominable, that mankind has not forgotten it yet. In its essence the story was very simple. This is what Suzdal heard, and what people have learned ever since then.

  The Arachosians were settlers. Settlers could go out by sail-ship, trailing behind them the pods. That was the first way.

  Or they could go out by planoform ship, ships piloted by skillful men, who went into Space2 and came out again and found man.

  Or for very long distances indeed, they could go out in the new combination. Individual pods packed into an enormous shell-ship, a gigantic version of Suzdal’s own ship. The sleepers frozen, the machines waking, the ship fired to and beyond the speed of light, flung below space, coming out at random and homing on a suitable target. It was a gamble, but brave men took it. If no target was found, their machines might course space forever, while the bodies, protected by freezing as they were, spoiled bit by bit, and while the dim light of life went out in the individual frozen brains.

  The shell-ships were the answers of mankind to an overpopulation which neither the old planet Earth nor its daughter planets could quite respond to. The shell-ships took the bold, the reckless, the romantic, the willful, sometimes the criminals out among the stars. Mankind lost track of these ships, over and over again. The advance explorers, the organized Instrumentality, would stumble upon human beings, cities and cultures, high or low, tribes or families, where the shell-ships had gone on, far, far beyond the outermost limits of mankind, where the instruments of search had found an Earthlike planet, and the shell-ship, like some great dying insect, had dropped to the planet, awakened its people, broken open, and destroyed itself with its delivery of newly reborn men and women, to settle a world.

  Arachosia looked like a good world to the men and women who came to it. Beautiful beaches, with cliffs like endless rivieras rising above. Two bright big moons in the sky, a sun not too far away. The machines had pretested the atmosphere and sampled the water, had already scattered the forms of Old Earth life into the atmosphere and in the seas so that as the people awakened they heard the singing of Earth birds and they knew that Earth fish had already been adapted to the oceans and flung in, there to multiply. It seemed a good life, a rich life. Things went well.

  Things went very, very well for the Arachosians.

  This is the truth.

  This was, thus far, the story told by the capsule.

  But here they diverged.

  The capsule did not tell the dreadful, pitiable truth about Arachosia. It invented a set of plausible lies. The voice which came telepathically out of the capsule was that of a mature, warm happy female—some woman of early middle age with a superb speaking contralt
o.

  Suzdal almost fancied that he talked to it, so real was the personality. How could he know that he was being beguiled, trapped?

  It sounded right, really right.

  “And then,” said the voice, “the Arachosian sickness has been hitting us. Do not land. Stand off. Talk to us. Tell us about medicine. Our young die, without reason. Our farms are rich, and the wheat here is more golden than it was on Earth, the plums more purple, the flowers whiter. Everything does well—except people.

  “Our young die…” said the womanly voice, ending in a sob.

  “Are there any symptoms?” thought Suzdal, and almost as though it had heard his question, the capsule went on.

  “They die of nothing. Nothing which our medicine can test, nothing which our science can show. They die. Our population is dropping. People, do not forget us! Man, whoever you are, come quickly, come now, bring help! But for your own sake, do not land. Stand off-planet and view us through screens so that you can take word back to the home of man about the lost children of mankind among the strange and outermost stars!”

  Strange, indeed!

  The truth was far stranger, and very ugly indeed.

  Suzdal was convinced of the truth of the message. He had been selected for the trip because he was good-natured, intelligent, and brave; this appeal touched all three of his qualities.

  Later, much later, when he was arrested, Suzdal was asked, “Suzdal, you fool, why didn’t you test the message? You’ve risked the safety of all the mankinds for a foolish appeal!”

  “It wasn’t foolish!” snapped Suzdal. “That distress capsule had a sad, wonderful womanly voice and the story checked out true.”

  “With whom?” said the investigator, flatly and dully.

  Suzdal sounded weary and sad when he replied to the point. “It checked out with my books. With my knowledge.” Reluctantly he added, “And with my own judgment…”

  “Was your judgment good?” said the investigator.

  “No,” said Suzdal, and let the single word hang on the air as though it might be the last word he would ever speak.

  But it was Suzdal himself who broke the silence when he added, “Before I set course and went to sleep, I activated my security officers in cubes and had them check the story. They got the real story of Arachosia, all right. They cross-ciphered it out of patterns in the distress capsule and they told me the whole real story very quickly, just as I was waking up.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I did what I did. I did that for which I expect to be punished. The Arachosians were already walking around the outside of my hull by then. They had caught my ship. They had caught me. How was I to know that the wonderful, sad story was true only for the first twenty full years that the woman told about. And she wasn’t even a woman. Just a klopt. Only the first twenty years…”

  Things had gone well for the Arachosians for the first twenty years. Then came disaster, but it was not the tale told in the distress capsule.

  They couldn’t understand it. They didn’t know why it had to happen to them. They didn’t know why it waited twenty years, three months, and four days. But their time came.

  We think it must have been something in the radiation of their sun. Or perhaps a combination of that particular sun’s radiation and the chemistry, which even the wise machines in the shell-ship had not fully analyzed, which reached out and was spread from within. The disaster hit. It was a simple one and utterly unstoppable.

  They had doctors. They had hospitals. They even had a limited capacity for research.

  But they could not research fast enough. Not enough to meet this disaster. It was simple, monstrous, enormous.

  Femininity became carcinogenic.

  Every woman on the planet began developing cancer at the same time, on her lips, in her breasts, in her groin, sometimes along the edge of her jaw, the edge of her lip, the tender portions of her body. The cancer had many forms, and yet it was always the same. There was something about the radiation which reached through, which reached into the human body, and which made a particular form of desoxycorticosterone turn into a subform—unknown on earth—of pregnandiol, which infallibly caused cancer. The advance was rapid.

  The little baby girls began to die first. The women clung weeping to their fathers, their husbands. The mothers tried to say goodbye to their sons.

  One of the doctors, herself, was a woman, a strong woman.

  Remorselessly, she cut live tissue from her living body, put it under the microscope, took samples of her own urine, her blood, her spit, and she came up with the answer: There is no answer. And yet there was something better and worse than an answer.

  If the sun of Arachosia killed everything which was female, if the female fish floated upside down on the surface of the sea, if the female birds sang a shriller, wilder song as they died above the eggs which would never hatch, if the female animals grunted and growled in the lairs where they hid away with pain, female human beings did not have to accept death so tamely. The doctor’s name was Astarte Kraus.

  The Magic of the Klopts

  The human female could do what the animal female could not. She could turn male. With the help of equipment from the ship, tremendous quantities of testosterone were manufactured, and every single girl and woman still surviving was turned into a man. Massive injections were administered to all of them. Their faces grew heavy, they all returned to growing a little bit, their chests flattened out, their muscles grew stronger, and in less than three months they were indeed men.

  Some lower forms of life had survived because they were not polarized clearly enough to the forms of male and female, which depended on that particular organic chemistry for survival. With the fish gone, plants clotted the oceans, the birds were gone but the insects survived; dragonflies, butterflies, mutated versions of grasshoppers, beetles, and other insects swarmed over the planet. The men who had lost women worked side by side with the men who had been made out of the bodies of women.

  When they knew each other, it was unutterably sad for them to meet. Husband and wife, both bearded, strong, quarrelsome, desperate, and busy. The little boys somehow realizing that they would never grow up to have sweethearts, to have wives, to get married, to have daughters.

  But what was a mere world to stop the driving brain and the burning intellect of Dr. Astarte Kraus? She became the leader of her people, the men and the men-women. She drove them forward, she made them survive, she used cold brains on all of them.

  (Perhaps, if she had been a sympathetic person, she would have let them die. But it was the nature of Dr. Kraus not to be sympathetic—just brilliant, remorseless, implacable against the universe which had tried to destroy her.)

  Before she died, Dr. Kraus had worked out a carefully programmed genetic system. Little bits of the men’s tissues could be implanted by a surgical routine in the abdomens, just inside the peritoneal wall, crowding a little bit against the intestines, an artificial womb and artificial chemistry and artificial insemination by radiation, by heat made it possible for men to bear boy children.

  What was the use of having girl children if they all died? The people of Arachosia went on. The first generation lived through the tragedy, half insane with the grief and disappointment. They sent out message capsules and they knew that their messages would reach Earth in six million years.

  As new explorers, they had gambled on going further than other ships went. They had found a good world, but they were not quite sure where they were. Were they still within the familiar galaxy, or had they jumped beyond to one of the nearby galaxies? They couldn’t quite tell. It was a part of the policy of Old Earth not to over-equip the exploring parties for fear that some of them, taking violent cultural change or becoming aggressive empires, might turn back on Earth and destroy it. Earth always made sure that it had the advantages.

  The third and fourth and fifth generations of Arachosians were still people. All of them were male. They had the human memory, they had human
books, they knew the words mama, sister, sweetheart, but they no longer really understood what these terms referred to.

  The human body, which had taken four million years on Earth to grow, has immense resources within it, resources greater than the brain, or the personality, or the hopes of the individual. And the bodies of the Arachosians decided things for them. Since the chemistry of femininity meant instant death, and since an occasional girl baby was born dead and buried casually, the bodies made the adjustment. The men of Arachosia became both men and women. They gave themselves the ugly nickname “klopt.” Since they did not have the rewards of family life, they became strutting cockerels, who mixed their love with murder, who blended their songs with duels, who sharpened their weapons, and who earned the right to reproduce within a strange family system which no decent Earth-man would find comprehensible.

  But they did survive.

  And the method of their survival was so sharp, so fierce, that it was indeed a difficult thing to understand.

  In less than four hundred years the Arachosians had civilized into groups of fighting clans. They still had just one planet, around just one sun. They lived in just one place. They had a few spacecraft they had built themselves. Their science, their art, and their music moved forward with strange lurches of inspired neurotic genius, because they lacked the fundamentals in the human personality itself, the balance of male and female, the family, the operations of love, of hope, of reproduction. They survived, but they themselves had become monsters and did not know it.

  Out of their memory of old mankind they created a legend of Old Earth. Women in that memory were deformities, who should be killed. Misshapen beings, who should be erased. The family, as they recalled it, was filth and abomination which they were resolved to wipe out if they should ever meet it.

  They, themselves, were bearded homosexuals, with rouged lips, ornate earrings, fine heads of hair, and very few old men among them. They killed off their men before they became old; the things they could not get from love or relaxation or comfort, they purchased with battle and death. They made up songs proclaiming themselves to be the last of the old men and the first of the new, and they sang their hate to mankind when they should meet, and they sang, “Woe is Earth that we should find it,” and yet something inside them made them add to almost every song a refrain which troubled even them: