The chairman of the Lords of the Instrumentality sent out the Lord Admiral Tedesco to command the golden ship. The ship itself, larger than most stars, was an incredible monstrosity. Centuries before it had frightened away nonhuman aggressors from a forgotten corner of the galaxies.
The Lord Admiral walked back and forth on his bridge. The cabin was small, twenty feet by thirty. The control area of the ship measured nothing over a hundred feet. All the rest was a golden bubble of the feinting ship, nothing more than thin and incredibly rigid foam with tiny wires cast across it so as to give the illusion of a hard metal and strong defenses.
The ninety million miles of length were right. Nothing else was.
The ship was a gigantic dummy, the largest scarecrow ever conceived by the human mind.
Century after century it had rested in nonspace between the stars, waiting for use. Now it proceeded helpless and defenseless against a militant and crazy dictator Raumsog and his horde of hard-fighting and very real ships.
Raumsog had broken the disciplines of space. He had killed the pinlighters. He had emprisoned the Go-captains. He had used renegades and apprentices to pillage the immense interstellar ships and had armed the captive vessels to the teeth. In a system which had not known real war, and least of all war against Earth, he had planned well.
He had bribed, he had swindled, he had propagandized. He expected Earth to fall before the threat itself. Then he launched his attack.
With the launching of the attack, Earth itself changed. Corrupt rascals became what they were in title: the leaders and the defenders of mankind.
Tedesco himself had been an elegant fop. War changed him into an aggressive captain, swinging the largest vessel of all time as though it were a tennis bat.
He cut in on the Raumsog fleet hard and fast.
Tedesco shifted his ship right, north, up, over.
He appeared before the enemy and eluded them—down, forward, right, over.
He appeared before the enemy again. One successful shot from them could destroy an illusion on which the safety of mankind itself depended. It was his business not to allow them that shot.
Tedesco was not a fool. He was fighting his own strange kind of war, but he could not help wondering where the real war was proceeding.
IV
Prince Lovaduck had obtained his odd name because he had had a Chinesian ancestor who did love ducks, ducks in their Peking form—succulent duck skins brought forth to him ancestral dreams of culinary ecstasy.
His ancestress, an English lady, had said, “Lord Lovaduck, that fits you!”—and the name had been proudly taken as a family name. Lord Lovaduck had a small ship. The ship was tiny and had a very simple and threatening name: Anybody.
The ship was not listed in the space register and he himself was not in the Ministry of Space Defense. The craft was attached only to the Office of Statistics and Investigation—under the listing, “vehicle”—for the Earth treasury. He had very elementary defenses. With him on the ship went one chronopathic idiot essential to his final and vital maneuvers.
With him also went a monitor. The monitor, as always, sat rigid, catatonic, unthinking, unaware—except for the tape recorder of his living mind which unconsciously noted every imminent mechanical movement of the ship and was prepared to destroy Lovaduck, the chronopathic idiot, and the ship itself should they attempt to escape the authority of Earth or should they turn against Earth. The life of a monitor was a difficult one but was far better than execution for crime, its usual alternative. The monitor made no trouble. Lovaduck also had a very small collection of weapons, weapons selected with exquisite care for the atmosphere, the climate, and the precise conditions of Raumsog’s planet.
He also had a psionic talent, a poor crazy little girl who wept, and whom the Lords of the Instrumentality had cruelly refused to heal, because her talents were better in unshielded form than they would have been had she been brought into the full community of mankind. She was a class-three etiological interference.
V
Lovaduck brought his tiny ship near the atmosphere of Raumsog’s planet. He had paid good money for his captaincy to this ship and he meant to recover it. Recover it he would, and handsomely, if he succeeded in his adventurous mission.
The Lords of the Instrumentality were the corrupt rulers of a corrupt world, but they had learned to make corruption serve their civil and military ends, and they were in no mind to put up with failures. If Lovaduck failed he might as well not come back at all. No bribery could save him from this condition. No monitor could let him escape. If he succeeded, he might be almost as rich as an Old North Australian or a stroon merchant.
Lovaduck materialized his ship just long enough to hit the planet by radio. He walked across the cabin and slapped the girl. The girl became frantically excited. At the height of her excitement he slapped a helmet on her head, plugged in the ship’s communication system, and flung her own peculiar emotional psionic radiations over the entire planet.
She was a luck-changer. She succeeded: for a few moments, at every place on that planet, under the water and on it, in the sky and in the air, luck went wrong just a little. Quarrels did occur, accidents did happen, mischances moved just within the limits of sheer probability. They all occurred within the same minute. The uproar was reported just as Lovaduck moved his ship to another position. This was the most critical time of all. He dropped down into the atmosphere. He was immediately detected. Ravening weapons reached for him, weapons sharp enough to scorch the very air and to bring every living being on the planet into a condition of screaming alert.
No weapons possessed by Earth could defend against such an attack.
Lovaduck did not defend. He seized the shoulders of his chronopathic idiot. He pinched the poor defective; the idiot fled, taking the ship with him. The ship moved back three, four seconds in time to a period slightly earlier than the first detection. All the instruments on Raumsog’s planet went off. There was nothing on which they could act.
Lovaduck was ready. He discharged the weapons. The weapons were not noble.
The Lords of the Instrumentality played at being chivalrous and did love money, but when life and death were at stake, they no longer cared much about money, or credit, or even about honor. They fought like the animals of Earth’s ancient past—they fought to kill. Lovaduck had discharged a combination of organic and inorganic poisons with a high dispersion rate. Seventeen million people, nine hundred and fifty thousandths of the entire population, were to die within that night.
He slapped the chronopathic idiot again. The poor freak whimpered. The ship moved back two more seconds in time.
As he unloaded more poison, he could feel the mechanical relays reach for him.
He moved to the other side of the planet, moving backward one last time, dropped a final discharge of virulent carcinogens, and snapped his ship into nonspace, into the outer reaches of nothing. Here he was far beyond the reach of Raumsog.
VI
Tedesco’s golden ship moved serenely toward the dying planet, Raumsog’s fighters closing on it. They fired—it evaded, surprisingly agile for so immense a craft, a ship larger than any sun seen in the heavens of that part of space. But while the ships closed in their radios reported:
“The capital has blanked out.”
“Raumsog himself is dead.”
“There is no response from the north.”
“People are dying in the relay stations.”
The fleet moved, intercommunicated, and began to surrender. The golden ship appeared once more and then it disappeared, apparently forever.
VII
The Lord Tedesco returned to his apartments and to the current for plugging into the centers of pleasure in his brain. But as he arranged himself on the air-jet his hand stopped on its mission to press the button which would start the current. He realized, suddenly, that he had pleasure. The contemplation of the golden ship and of what he had accomplished—alone, deceptive, without the praise of
all the worlds for his solitary daring—gave even greater pleasure than that of the electric current. And he sank back on the jet of air and thought of the golden ship, and his pleasure was greater than any he had ever experienced before.
VIII
On Earth, the Lords of the Instrumentality gracefully acknowledged that the golden ship had destroyed all life on Raumsog’s planet. Homage was paid to them by the many worlds of mankind. Lovaduck, his idiot, his little girl, and the monitor were taken to hospitals. Their minds were erased of all recollection of their accomplishments.
Lovaduck himself appeared before the Lords of the Instrumentality. He felt that he had served on the golden ship and he did not remember what he had done. He knew nothing of a chronopathic idiot. And he remembered nothing of his little “vehicle.” Tears poured down his face when the Lords of the Instrumentality gave him their highest decorations and paid him an immense sum of money. They said: “You have served well and you are discharged. The blessings and the thanks of mankind will forever rest upon you…”
Lovaduck went back to his estates wondering that his service should have been so great. He wondered, too, in the centuries of the rest of his life, how any man—such as himself—could be so tremendous a hero and never quite remember how it was accomplished.
IX
On a very remote planet, the survivors of a Raumsog cruiser were released from internment. By special orders, direct from Earth, their memories had been discoordinated so that they would not reveal the pattern of defeat. An obstinate reporter kept after one spaceman. After many hours of hard drinking the survivor’s answer was still the same:
“Golden the ship was—oh! oh! oh! Golden the ship was—oh! oh! oh!”
The Dead Lady of Clown Town
I
You already know the end—the immense drama of the Lord Jestocost, seventh of his line, and how the cat-girl C’mell initiated the vast conspiracy. But you do not know the beginning, how the first Lord Jestocost got his name, because of the terror and inspiration which his mother, Lady Goroke, obtained from the famous real-life drama of the dog-girl D’joan. It is even less likely that you know the other story—the one behind D’joan. This story is sometimes mentioned as the matter of the “nameless witch,” which is absurd, because she really had a name. The name was “Elaine,” an ancient and forbidden one.
Elaine was a mistake. Her birth, her life, her career were all mistakes. The ruby was wrong. How could that have happened?
Go back to An-fang, the Peace Square at An-fang, the Beginning Place at An-fang, where all things start. Bright it was. Red Square, dead square, clear square, under a yellow sun.
This was Earth Original, Manhome itself, where Earthport thrusts its way up through hurricane clouds that are higher than the mountains.
An-fang was near a city, the only living city with a pre-atomic name. The lovely meaningless name was Meeya Meefla, where the lines of ancient roadways, untouched by a wheel for thousands of years, forever paralleled the warm, bright, clear beaches of the Old South East.
The headquarters of the People Programmer was at An-fang, and there the mistake happened:
A ruby trembled. Two tourmaline nets failed to rectify the laser beam. A diamond noted the error. Both the error and the correction went into the general computer.
The error assigned, on the general account of births for Fomalhaut III, the profession of “lay therapist, female, intuitive capacity for correction of human physiology with local resources.” On some of the early ships they used to call these people witch-women, because they worked unaccountable cures. For pioneer parties, these lay therapists were invaluable; in settled post-Riesmannian societies, they became an awful nuisance. Sickness disappeared with good conditions, accidents dwindled down to nothing, medical work became institutional.
Who wants a witch, even a good witch, when a thousand-bed hospital is waiting with its staff eager for clinical experience…and only seven out of its thousand beds filled with real people? (The remaining beds were filled with lifelike robots on which the staff could practice, lest they lose their morale. They could, of course, have worked on underpeople—animals in the shape of human beings, who did the heavy and the weary work which remained as the caput mortuum of a really perfected economy—but it was against the law for animals, even when they were underpeople, to go to a human hospital. When underpeople got sick, the Instrumentality took care of them—in slaughterhouses. It was easier to breed new underpeople for the jobs than it was to repair sick ones. Furthermore, the tender, loving care of a hospital might give them ideas. Such as the idea that they were people. This would have been bad, from the prevailing point of view. Therefore the human hospitals remained almost empty while an underperson who sneezed four times or who vomited once was taken away, never to be ill again. The empty beds kept on with the robot patients, who went through endless repetitions of the human patterns of injury or disease.) This left no work for witches, bred and trained.
Yet the ruby had trembled; the program had indeed made a mistake; the birth-number for a “lay therapist, general, female, immediate use” had been ordered for Fomalhaut III.
Much later, when the story was all done down to its last historic detail, there was an investigation into the origins of Elaine. When the laser had trembled, both the original order and the correction were fed simultaneously into the machine. The machine recognized the contradiction and promptly referred both papers to the human supervisor, an actual man who had been working on the job for seven years.
He was studying music, and he was bored. He was so close to the end of his term that he was already counting the days to his own release. Meanwhile he was rearranging two popular songs. One was The Big Bamboo, a primitive piece which tried to evoke the original magic of man. The other was about a girl. Elaine, Elaine, whom the song asked to refrain from giving pain to her loving swain. Neither of the songs was important; but between them they influenced history, first a little bit and then very much.
The musician had plenty of time to practice. He had not had to meet a real emergency in all his seven years. From time to time the machine made reports to him, but the musician just told the machine to correct its own errors, and it infallibly did so.
On the day that the accident of Elaine happened, he was trying to perfect his finger work on the guitar, a very old instrument believed to date from the pre-space period. He was playing The Big Bamboo for the hundredth time.
The machine announced its mistake with an initial musical chime. The supervisor had long since forgotten all the instructions which he had so worrisomely memorized seven long years ago. The alert did not really and truly matter, because the machine invariably corrected its own mistakes whether the supervisor was on duty or not.
The machine, not having its chime answered, moved into a second-stage alarm. From a loudspeaker set in the wall of the room, it shrieked in a high, clear human voice, the voice of some employee who had died thousands of years earlier:
“Alert, alert! Emergency. Correction needed. Correction needed!”
The answer was one which the machine had never heard before, old though it was. The musician’s fingers ran madly, gladly over the guitar strings and he sang clearly, wildly back to the machine a message strange beyond any machine’s belief:
Beat, beat the Big Bamboo!
Beat, beat, beat the Big Bamboo for me…!
Hastily the machine set its memory banks and computers to work, looking for the code reference to “bamboo,” trying to make that word fit the present context. There was no reference at all. The machine pestered the man some more.
“Instructions unclear. Instructions unclear. Please correct.”
“Shut up,” said the man.
“Cannot comply,” stated the machine. “Please state and repeat, please state and repeat, please state and repeat.”
“Do shut up,” said the man, but he knew the machine would not obey this. Without thinking, he turned to his other tune and sang the first two li
nes twice over:
Elaine, Elaine,
go cure the pain!
Elaine, Elaine,
go cure the pain!
Repetition had been inserted as a safeguard into the machine, on the assumption that no real man would repeat an error. The name “Elaine” was not correct number code, but the fourfold emphasis seemed to confirm the need for a “lay therapist, female.” The machine itself noted that a genuine man had corrected the situation card presented as a matter of emergency.
“Accepted,” said the machine.
This word, too late, jolted the supervisor away from his music.
“Accepted what?” he asked.
There was no answering voice. There was no sound at all except for the whisper of slightly-moistened warm air through the ventilators.
The supervisor looked out the window. He could see a little of the blood-black red color of the Peace Square of An-fang; beyond lay the ocean, endlessly beautiful and endlessly tedious.
The supervisor sighed hopefully. He was young. “Guess it doesn’t matter,” he thought, picking up his guitar.
(Thirty-seven years later, he found out that it did matter. The Lady Goroke herself, one of the Chiefs of the Instrumentality, sent a Subchief of the Instrumentality to find out who had caused D’joan. When the man found that the witch Elaine was the source of the trouble, she sent him on to find out how Elaine had gotten into a well-ordered universe. The supervisor was found. He was still a musician. He remembered nothing of the story. He was hypnotized. He still remembered nothing. The subchief invoked an emergency and Police Drug Four (“clear memory”) was administered to the musician. He immediately remembered the whole silly scene, but insisted that it did not matter. The case was referred to Lady Goroke, who instructed the authorities that the musician be told the whole horrible, beautiful story of D’joan at Fomalhaut—the very story which you are now being told—and he wept. He was not punished otherwise, but the Lady Goroke commanded that those memories be left in his mind for so long as he might live.)
The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated Page 30
