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

by Cordwainer Smith

  And I mourn Man!

  They mourned mankind and yet they plotted to attack all of humanity.

  The Trap

  Suzdal had been deceived by the message capsule. He put himself back in the sleeping compartment and he directed the turtle-men to take the cruiser to Arachosia, wherever it might be. He did not do this crazily or wantonly. He did it as a matter of deliberate judgment. A judgment for which he was later heard, tried, judged fairly, and then put to something worse than death.

  He deserved it.

  He sought for Arachosia without stopping to think of the most fundamental rule: How could he keep the Arachosians, singing monsters that they were, from following him home to the eventual ruin of Earth? Might not their condition be a disease which could be contagious, or might not their fierce society destroy the other societies of men and leave Earth and all of men’s other worlds in ruin? He did not think of this, so he was heard, and tried and punished much later. We will come to that.

  The Arrival

  Suzdal awakened in orbit off Arachosia. And he awakened knowing he had made a mistake. Strange ships clung to his shell-ship like evil barnacles from an unknown ocean, attached to a familiar water craft. He called to his turtle-men to press the controls and the controls did not work.

  The outsiders, whoever they were, man or woman or beast or god, had enough technology to immobilize his ship. Suzdal immediately realized his mistake. Naturally, he thought of destroying himself and the ship, but he was afraid that if he destroyed himself and missed destroying the ship completely there was a chance that his cruiser, a late model with recent weapons, would fall into the hands of whoever it was walking on the outer dome of his own cruiser. He could not afford the risk of mere individual suicide. He had to take a more drastic step. This was not time for obeying Earth rules.

  His security officer—a cube ghost wakened to human form—whispered the whole story to him in quick intelligent gasps:

  “They are people, sir.

  “More people than I am.

  “I’m a ghost, an echo working out of a dead brain.

  “These are real people, Commander Suzdal, but they are the worst people ever to get loose among the stars. You must destroy them, sir!”

  “I can’t,” said Suzdal, still trying to come fully awake. “They’re people.”

  “Then you’ve got to beat them off. By any means, sir. By any means whatever. Save Earth. Stop them. Warn Earth.”

  “And I?” asked Suzdal, and was immediately sorry that he had asked the selfish, personal question.

  “You will die or you will be punished,” said the security officer sympathetically, “and I do not know which one will be worse.”

  “Now?”

  “Right now. There is no time left for you. No time at all.”

  “But the rules…?”

  “You have already strayed far outside of rules.”

  There were rules, but Suzdal left them all behind.

  Rules, rules for ordinary times, for ordinary places, for understandable dangers.

  This was a nightmare cooked up by the flesh of man, motivated by the brains of man. Already his monitors were bringing him news of who these people were, these seeming maniacs, these men who had never known women, these boys who had grown to lust and battle, who had a family structure which the normal human brain could not accept, could not believe, could not tolerate. The things on the outside were people, and they weren’t. The things on the outside had the human brain, the human imagination, and the human capacity for revenge, and yet Suzdal, a brave officer, was so frightened by the mere nature of them that he did not respond to their efforts to communicate.

  He could feel the turtle-women among his crew aching with fright itself, as they realized who was pounding on their ship and who it was that sang through loud announcing machines that they wanted in, in, in.

  Suzdal committed a crime. It is the pride of the Instrumentality that the Instrumentality allows its officers to commit crimes or mistakes or suicide. The Instrumentality does the things for mankind that a computer can not do. The Instrumentality leaves the human brain, the human choice in action.

  The Instrumentality passes dark knowledge to its staff, things not usually understood in the inhabited world, things prohibited to ordinary men and women because the officers of the Instrumentality, the captains and the subchiefs and the chiefs, must know their jobs. If they do not, all mankind might perish.

  Suzdal reached into his arsenal. He knew what he was doing. The larger moon of Arachosia was habitable. He could see that there were earth plants already on it, and earth insects. His monitors showed him that the Arachosian men-women had not bothered to settle on the planet. He threw an agonized inquiry at his computers and cried out:

  “Read me the age it’s in!”

  The machine sang back, “More than thirty million years.”

  Suzdal had strange resources. He had twins or quadruplets of almost every Earth animal. The earth animals were carried in tiny capsules no larger than a medicine capsule and they consisted of the sperm and the ovum of the higher animals, ready to be matched for sowing, ready to be imprinted; he also had small life-bombs which could surround any form of life with at least a chance of survival.

  He went to the bank and he got cats, eight pairs, sixteen earth cats, Felis domesticus, the kind of cat that you and I know, the kind of cat which is bred, sometimes for telepathic uses, sometimes to go along on the ships and serve as auxiliary weapons when the minds of the pinlighters direct the cats to fight off dangers.

  He coded these cats. He coded them with messages just as monstrous as the messages which had made the men-women of Arachosia into monsters. This is what he coded:

  Do not breed true.

  Invent new chemistry.

  You will serve man.

  Become civilized.

  Learn speech.

  You will serve man.

  When man calls you will serve man.

  Go back, and come forth.

  Serve man.

  These instructions were no mere verbal instructions. They were imprints on the actual molecular structure of the animals. They were changes in the genetic and biological coding which went with these cats. And then Suzdal committed his offense against the laws of mankind. He had a chronopathic device on board the ship. A time distorter, usually to be used for a moment or a second or two to bring the ship away from utter destruction.

  The men-women of Arachosia were already cutting through the hull.

  He could hear their high, hooting voices screaming delirious pleasure at one another as they regarded him as the first of their promised enemies that they had ever met, the first of the monsters from Old Earth who had finally overtaken them. The true, evil people on whom they, the men-women of Arachosia, would be revenged.

  Suzdal remained calm. He coded the genetic cats. He loaded them into life-bombs. He adjusted the controls of his chronopathic machine illegally, so that instead of reaching one second for a ship of eighty thousand tons, they reached two million years for a load of less than four kilos. He flung the cats into the nameless moon of Arachosia.

  And he flung them back in time.

  And he knew he did not have to wait.

  He didn’t.

  The Catland Suzdal Made

  The cats came. Their ships glittered in the naked sky above Arachosia. Their little combat craft attacked. The cats who had not existed a moment before, but who had then had two million years in which to follow a destiny printed into their brains, printed down their spinal cords, etched into the chemistry of their bodies and personalities. The cats had turned into people of a kind, with speech, intelligence, hope, and a mission. Their mission was to reach Suzdal, to rescue him, to obey him, and to damage Arachosia.

  The cat ships screamed their battle warnings.

  “This is the day of the year of the promised age. And now come cats!”

  The Arachosians had waited for battle for four thousand years and now they go
t it. The cats attacked them. Two of the cat craft recognized Suzdal, and the cats reported,

  “Oh Lord, oh God, oh Maker of all things, oh Commander of Time, oh Beginner of Life, we have waited since Everything began to serve You, to serve Your Name, to obey Your Glory! May we live for You, may we die for You. We are Your people.”

  Suzdal cried and threw his message to all the cats.

  “Harry the klopts but don’t kill them all!”

  He repeated, “Harry them and stop them until I escape.” He flung his cruiser into nonspace and escaped.

  Neither cat nor Arachosian followed him.

  And that’s the story, but the tragedy is that Suzdal got back. And the Arachosians are still there and the cats are still there. Perhaps the Instrumentality knows where they are, perhaps the Instrumentality does not. Mankind does not really want to find out. It is against all law to bring up a form of life superior to man. Perhaps the cats are. Perhaps somebody knows whether the Arachosians won and killed the cats and added the cat science to their own and are now looking for us somewhere, probing like blind men through the stars for us true human beings to meet, to hate, to kill. Or perhaps the cats won.

  Perhaps the cats are imprinted by a strange mission, by weird hopes of serving men they don’t recognize. Perhaps they think we are all Arachosians and should be saved only for some particular cruiser commander, whom they will never see again. They won’t see Suzdal, because we know what happened to him.

  The Trial of Suzdal

  Suzdal was brought to trial on a great stage in the open world. His trial was recorded. He had gone in when he should not have gone in. He had searched for the Arachosians without waiting and asking for advice and reinforcements. What business was it of his to relieve a distress ages old? What business indeed?

  And then the cats. We had the records of the ship to show that something came out of that moon. Spacecraft, things with voices, things that could communicate with the human brain. We’re not even sure, since they transmitted directly into the receiver computers, that they spoke an Earth language. Perhaps they did it with some sort of direct telepathy. But the crime was, Suzdal had succeeded.

  By throwing the cats back two million years, by coding them to survive, coding them to develop civilization, coding them to come to his rescue, he had created a whole new world in less than one second of objective time.

  His chronopathic device had flung the little life-bombs back to the wet earth of the big moon over Arachosia and in less time than it takes to record this, the bombs came back in the form of a fleet built by a race, an Earth race, though of cat origin, two million years old.

  The court stripped Suzdal of his name and said, “You will not be named Suzdal any longer.”

  The court stripped Suzdal of his rank.

  “You will not be a commander of this or any other navy, neither imperial nor of the Instrumentality.”

  The court stripped Suzdal of his life. “You will not live longer, former commander, and former Suzdal.”

  And then the court stripped Suzdal of death.

  “You will go to the planet Shayol, the place of uttermost shame from which no one ever returns. You will go there with the contempt and hatred of mankind. We will not punish you. We do not wish to know about you any more. You will live on, but for us you will have ceased to exist.”

  That’s the story. It’s a sad, wonderful story. The Instrumentality tries to cheer up all the different kinds of mankind by telling them it isn’t true, it’s just a ballad.

  Perhaps the records do exist. Perhaps somewhere the crazy klopts of Arachosia breed their boyish young, deliver their babies, always by Caesarean, feed them always by bottle, generations of men who have known fathers and who have no idea of what the word mother might be. And perhaps the Arachosians spend their crazy lives in endless battle with intelligent cats who are serving a mankind that may never come back.

  That’s the story.

  Furthermore, it isn’t true.

  Golden the Ship Was—Oh! Oh! Oh!

  Aggression started very far away.

  War with Raumsog came about twenty years after the great cat scandal which, for a while, threatened to cut the entire planet Earth from the desperately essential santaclara drug. It was a short war and a bitter one.

  Corrupt, wise, weary old Earth fought with masked weapons, since only hidden weapons could maintain so ancient a sovereignty—sovereignty which had long since lapsed into a titular paramountcy among the communities of mankind. Earth won and the others lost, because the leaders of Earth never put other considerations ahead of survival. And this time, they thought, they were finally and really threatened.

  The Raumsog war was never known to the general public except for the revival of wild old legends about golden ships.

  I

  On Earth the Lords of the Instrumentality met. The presiding chairman looked about and said, “Well, gentlemen, all of us have been bribed by Raumsog. We have all been paid off individually. I myself received six ounces of stroon in pure form. Will the rest of you show better bargains?”

  Around the room, the councilors announced the amounts of their bribes.

  The chairman turned to the secretary. “Enter the bribes in the record and then mark the record off-the-record.”

  The others nodded gravely.

  “Now we must fight. Bribery is not enough. Raumsog has been threatening to attack Earth. It’s been cheap enough to let him threaten, but obviously we don’t mean to let him do it.”

  “How are you going to stop him, Lord Chairman?” growled a gloomy old member. “Get out the golden ships?”

  “Exactly that.” The chairman looked deadly serious.

  There was a murmurous sigh around the room. The golden ships had been used against an inhuman life-form many centuries before. They were hidden somewhere in nonspace and only a few officials of Earth knew how much reality there was to them. Even at the level of the Lords of the Instrumentality the council did not know precisely what they were.

  “One ship,” said the chairman of the Lords of the Instrumentality, “will be enough.”

  It was.

  II

  The dictator Lord Raumsog on his planet knew the difference some weeks later.

  “You can’t mean that,” he said. “You can’t mean it. There is no such ship that size. The golden ships are just a story. No one ever saw a picture of one.”

  “Here is a picture, my Lord,” said the subordinate.

  Raumsog looked at it. “It’s a trick. Some piece of trick photography. They distorted the size. The dimensions are wrong. Nobody has a ship that size. You could not build it, or if you did build it, you could not operate it. There just is not any such thing—” He babbled on for a few more sentences before he realized that his men were looking at the picture and not at him.

  He calmed down.

  The boldest of the officers resumed speaking. “That one ship is ninety million miles long, Your Highness. It shimmers like fire, but moves so fast that we cannot approach it. But it came into the center of our fleet almost touching our ships, stayed there twenty or thirty thousandths of a second. There it was, we thought. We saw the evidence of life on board: light beams waved; they examined us and then, of course, it lapsed back into nonspace. Ninety million miles, Your Highness. Old Earth has some stings yet and we do not know what the ship is doing.”

  The officers stared with anxious confidence at their overlord.

  Raumsog sighed. “If we must fight, we’ll fight. We can destroy that too. After all, what is size in the spaces between the stars? What difference does it make whether it is nine miles or nine million or ninety million?” He sighed again. “Yet I must say ninety million miles is an awful big size for a ship. I don’t know what they are going to do with it.”

  He did not.

  III

  It is strange—strange and even fearful—what the love of Earth can do to men. Tedesco, for example.

  Tedesco’s reputation was far-flung
. Even among the Go-Captains, whose thoughts were rarely on such matters, Tedesco was known for his raiment, the foppish arrangement of his mantle of office, and his bejeweled badges of authority. Tedesco was known too for his languid manner and his luxurious sybaritic living. When the message came, it found Tedesco in his usual character.

  He was lying on the air-draft with his brain pleasure centers plugged into the triggering current. So deeply lost in pleasure was he that the food, the women, the clothing, the books of his apartments were completely neglected and forgotten. All pleasure save the pleasure of electricity acting on the brain was forgotten.

  So great was the pleasure that Tedesco had been plugged into the current for twenty hours without interruption—a manifest disobedience of the rule which set six hours as maximum pleasure.

  And yet, when the message came—relayed to Tedesco’s brain by the infinitesimal crystal set there for the transmittal of messages so secret that even thought was too vulnerable to interception—when the message came Tedesco struggled through layer after layer of bliss and unconsciousness.

  The ships of gold—the golden ships—for Earth is in danger.

  Tedesco struggled. Earth is in danger. With a sigh of bliss he made the effort to press the button which turned off the current. And with a sigh of cold reality he took a look at the world about him and turned to the job at hand. Quickly he prepared to wait upon the Lords of the Instrumentality.