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

by Cordwainer Smith

  “Whatever for?” said Elaine.

  “He is coming,” said the happy old voice of the Lady Panc Ashash.

  “Who is coming?” said Elaine, almost irritably.

  “Do you have a mirror? I wish you would look at your hair. It could be prettier, not that it isn’t pretty right now. You want to look your best. Your lover, that’s who is coming, of course.”

  “I haven’t got a lover,” said Elaine. “I haven’t been authorized one, not till I’ve done some of my lifework, and I haven’t even found my lifework yet. I’m not the kind of girl who would go ask a subchief for the dreamies, not when I’m not entitled to the real thing. I may not be much of a person, but I have some self-respect.” Elaine got so mad that she shifted her position on the bench and sat with her face turned away from the all-watching window.

  The next words gave her gooseflesh down her arms, they were uttered with such real earnestness, such driving sincerity. “Elaine, Elaine, do you really have no idea of who you are?”

  Elaine pivoted on the bench so that she looked toward the window. Her face was caught redly by the rays of the setting sun. She could only gasp.

  “I don’t know what you mean…”

  The inexorable voice went on. “Think, Elaine, think. Does the name ‘D’joan’ mean nothing to you?”

  “I suppose it’s an underperson, a dog. That’s what the D is for, isn’t it?”

  “That was the little girl you met,” said the Lady Panc Ashash, as though the statement were something tremendous.

  “Yes,” said Elaine dutifully. She was a courteous woman, and never quarreled with strangers.

  “Wait a minute,” said the Lady Panc Ashash. “I’m going to get my body out. God knows when I wore it last, but it’ll make you feel more at easy terms with me. Forgive the clothes. They’re old stuff, but I think the body will work all right. This is the beginning of the story of D’joan, and I want that hair of yours brushed even if I have to brush it myself. Just wait right there, girl, wait right there. I’ll just take a minute.”

  The clouds were turning from dark red to liver-black. What could Elaine do? She stayed on the bench. She kicked her shoe against the walk. She jumped a little when the old-fashioned street lights of the lower city went on with sharp geometrical suddenness; they did not have the subtle shading of the newer lights in the other city upstairs, where day phased into the bright clear night with no sudden shift in color.

  The door beside the little window creaked open. Ancient plastic crumbled to the walk.

  Elaine was astonished.

  Elaine knew she must have been unconsciously expecting a monster, but this was a charming woman of about her own height, wearing weird, old-fashioned clothes. The strange woman had glossy black hair, no evidence of recent or current illness, no signs of severe lesions in the past, no impairment evident of sight, gait, reach, or eyesight. (There was no way she could check on smell or taste right off, but this was the medical check-up she had had built into her from birth on—the checklist which she had run through with every adult person she had ever met. She had been designed as a “lay therapist, female” and she was a good one, even when there was no one at all to treat.)

  Truly, the body was a rich one. It must have cost the landing charges of forty or fifty planetfalls. The human shape was perfectly rendered. The mouth moved over genuine teeth; the words were formed by throat, palate, tongue, teeth, and lips, and not just by a microphone mounted in the head. The body was really a museum piece. It was probably a copy of the Lady Panc Ashash herself in time of life. When the face smiled, the effect was indescribably winning. The lady wore the costume of a bygone age—a stately frontal dress of heavy blue material, embroidered with a square pattern of gold at hem, waist, and bodice. She had a matching cloak of dark, faded gold, embroidered in blue with the same pattern of squares. Her hair was upswept and set with jeweled combs. It seemed perfectly natural, but there was dust on one side of it.

  The robot smiled, “I’m out of date. It’s been a long time since I was me. But I thought, my dear, that you would find this old body easier to talk to than the window over there…”

  Elaine nodded mutely.

  “You know this is not me?” said the body, sharply.

  Elaine shook her head. She didn’t know; she felt that she didn’t know anything at all.

  The Lady Panc Ashash looked at her earnestly. “This is not me. It’s a robot body. You looked at it as though it were a real person. And I’m not me, either. It hurts sometimes. Did you know a machine could hurt? I can. But—I’m not me.”

  “Who are you?” said Elaine to the pretty old woman.

  “Before I died, I was the Lady Panc Ashash. Just as I told you. Now I am a machine, and a part of your destiny. We will help each other to change the destiny of worlds, perhaps even to bring mankind back to humanity.”

  Elaine stared at her in bewilderment. This was no common robot. It seemed like a real person and spoke with such warm authority. And this thing, whatever it was, this thing seemed to know so much about her. Nobody else had ever cared. The nurse-mothers at the Childhouse on earth had said, “Another witch-child, and pretty too, they’re not much trouble,” and had let her life go by.

  At last Elaine could face the face which was not really a face. The charm, the humor, the expressiveness were still there.

  “What—what,” stammered Elaine, “do I do now?”

  “Nothing,” said the long-dead Lady Panc Ashash, “except to meet your destiny.”

  “You mean my lover?”

  “So impatient!” laughed the dead woman’s record in a very human way. “Such a hurry. Lover first and destiny later. I was like that myself when I was a girl.”

  “But what do I do?” persisted Elaine.

  The night was now complete above them. The street lights glared on the empty and unswept streets. A few doorways, not one of them less than a full street-crossing away, were illuminated with rectangles of light or shadow—light if they were far from the street lights, so that their own interior lights shone brightly, shadow if they were so close under the big lights that they cut off the glare from overhead.

  “Go through this door,” said the old nice woman.

  But she pointed at the undistinguished white of an uninterrupted wall. There was no door at all in that place.

  “But there’s no door there,” said Elaine.

  “If there were a door,” said the Lady Panc Ashash, “you wouldn’t need me to tell you to go through it. And you do need me.”

  “Why?” said Elaine.

  “Because I’ve waited for you hundreds of years, that’s why.”

  “That’s no answer!” snapped Elaine.

  “It is so an answer,” smiled the woman, and her lack of hostility was not robotlike at all. It was the kindliness and composure of a mature human being. She looked up into Elaine’s eyes and spoke emphatically and softly. “I know because I do know. Not because I’m a dead person—that doesn’t matter any more—but because I am now a very old machine. You will go into the Brown and Yellow Corridor and you will think of your lover, and you will do your work, and men will hunt you. But you will come out happily in the end. Do you understand this?”

  “No,” said Elaine, “no, I don’t.” But she reached out her hand to the sweet old woman. The lady took her hand. The touch was warm and very human.

  “You don’t have to understand it. Just do it. And I know you will. So since you are going, go.”

  Elaine tried to smile at her, but she was troubled, more consciously worried than ever before in her life. Something real was happening to her, to her own individual self, at a very long last. “How will I get through the door?”

  “I’ll open it,” smiled the lady, releasing Elaine’s hand, “and you’ll know your lover when he sings you the poem.”

  “Which poem?” said Elaine, stalling for time and frightened by a door which did not even exist.

  “It starts, ‘I knew you and loved you, and won
you, in Kalma…’ You’ll know it. Go on in. It’ll be bothersome at first, but when you meet the Hunter, it will all seem different.”

  “Have you ever been in there, yourself?”

  “Of course not,” said the dear old lady. “I’m a machine. That whole place is thoughtproof. Nobody can see, hear, think, or talk in or out of it. It’s a shelter left over from the ancient wars, when the slightest sign of a thought would have brought destruction on the whole place. That’s why the Lord Englok built it, long before my time. But you can go in. And you will. Here’s the door.”

  The old robot lady waited no longer. She gave Elaine a strange friendly crooked smile, half proud and half apologetic. She took Elaine with firm fingertips holding Elaine’s left elbow. They walked a few steps down toward the wall.

  “Here, now,” said the Lady Panc Ashash, and pushed.

  Elaine flinched as she was thrust toward the wall. Before she knew it, she was through. Smells hit her like a roar of battle. The air was hot. The light was dim. It looked like a picture of the Pain Planet, hidden somewhere in space. Poets later tried to describe Elaine at the door with a verse which begins.

  There were brown ones and blue ones

  And white ones and whiter,

  In the hidden and forbidden

  Downtown of Clown Town.

  There were horrid ones and horrider

  In the brown and yellow corridor.

  The truth was much simpler.

  Trained witch, born witch that she was, she perceived the truth immediately. All these people, all she could see, at least, were sick. They needed help. They needed herself.

  But the joke was on her, for she could not help a single one of them. Not one of them was a real person. They were just animals, things in the shape of man. Underpeople. Dirt.

  And she was conditioned to the bone never to help them.

  She did not know why the muscles of her legs made her walk forward, but they did.

  There are many pictures of that scene.

  The Lady Panc Ashash, only a few moments in her past, seemed very remote. And the city of Kalma itself, the New City, ten stories above her, almost seemed as though it had never existed at all. This, this was real.

  She stared at the underpeople.

  And this time, for the first time in her life, they stared right back at her. She had never seen anything like this before.

  They did not frighten her; they surprised her. The fright, Elaine felt, was to come later. Soon, perhaps, but not here, not now.

  IV

  Something which looked like a middle-aged woman walked right up to her and snapped at her.

  “Are you death?”

  Elaine stared. “Death? What do you mean? I’m Elaine.”

  “Be damned to that!” said the woman-thing. “Are you death?”

  Elaine did not know the word “damned” but she was pretty sure that “death,” even to these things, meant simply “termination of life.”

  “Of course not,” said Elaine. “I’m just a person. A witch woman, ordinary people would call me. We don’t have anything to do with you underpeople. Nothing at all.” Elaine could see that the woman-thing had an enormous coiffure of soft brown sloppy hair, a sweat-reddened face, and crooked teeth which showed when she grinned.

  “They all say that. They never know that they’re death. How do you think we die, if you people don’t send contaminated robots in with diseases? We all die off when you do that, and then some more underpeople find this place again later on and make a shelter of it and live in it for a few generations until the death machines, things like you, come sweeping through the city and kill us off again. This is Clown Town, the underpeople place. Haven’t you heard of it?”

  Elaine tried to walk past the woman-thing, but she found her arm grabbed. This couldn’t have happened before, not in the history of the world—an underperson seizing a real person!

  “Let go!” she yelled.

  The woman-thing let her arm go and faced toward the others. Her voice had changed. It was no longer shrill and excited, but low and puzzled instead. “I can’t tell. Maybe it is a real person. Isn’t that a joke? Lost, in here with us. Or maybe she is death. I can’t tell. What do you think, Charley-is-my-darling?”

  The man she spoke to stepped forward. Elaine thought, in another time, in some other place, that underperson might pass for an attractive human being. His face was illuminated by intelligence and alertness. He looked directly at Elaine as though he had never seen her before, which indeed he had not, but he continued looking with so sharp, so strange a stare that she became uneasy. His voice, when he spoke, was brisk, high, clear, friendly; set in this tragic place, it was the caricature of a voice, as though the animal had been programmed for speech from the habits of a human, persuader by profession, whom one saw in the storyboxes telling people messages which were neither good nor important, but merely clever. The handsomeness was itself deformity. Elaine wondered if he had come from goat stock.

  “Welcome, young lady,” said Charley-is-my-darling. “Now that you are here, how are you going to get out? If we turned her head around, Mabel,” said he to the underwoman who had first greeted Elaine, “turned it around eight or ten times, it would come off. Then we could live a few weeks or months longer before our lords and creators found us and put us all to death. What do you say, young lady? Should we kill you?”

  “Kill? You mean, terminate life? You cannot. It is against the law. Even the Instrumentality does not have the right to do that without trial. You can’t. You’re just underpeople.”

  “But we will die,” said Charley-is-my-darling, flashing his quick intelligent smile, “if you go back out of that door. The police will read about the Brown and Yellow Corridor in your mind and they will flush us out with poison or they will spray disease in here so that we and our children will die.”

  Elaine stared at him.

  The passionate anger did not disturb his smile or his persuasive tones, but the muscles of his eye-sockets and forehead showed the terrible strain. The result was an expression which Elaine had never seen before, a sort of self-control reaching out beyond the limits of insanity.

  He stared back at her.

  She was not really afraid of him. Underpeople could not twist the heads of real persons; it was contrary to all regulations.

  A thought struck her. Perhaps regulations did not apply in a place like this, where illegal animals waited perpetually for sudden death. The being which faced her was strong enough to turn her head around ten times clockwise or counterclockwise. From her anatomy lessons, she was pretty sure that the head would come off somewhere during that process. She looked at him with interest. Animal-type fear had been conditioned out of her, but she had, she found, an extreme distaste for the termination of life under random circumstances. Perhaps her “witch” training would help. She tried to pretend that he was in fact a man. The diagnosis “hypertension: chronic aggression, now frustrated, leading to overstimulation and neurosis; poor nutritional record; hormone disorder probable” leapt into her mind.

  She tried to speak in a new voice.

  “I am smaller than you,” she said, “and you can ‘kill’ me just as well later as now. We might as well get acquainted. I’m Elaine, assigned here from Manhome Earth.”

  The effect was spectacular.

  Charley-is-my-darling stepped back. Mabel’s mouth dropped open. The others gaped at her. One or two, more quick-witted than the rest, began whispering to their neighbors.

  At last Charley-is-my-darling spoke to her. “Welcome, my lady. Can I call you my lady? I guess not. Welcome, Elaine. We are your people. We will do whatever you say. Of course you got in. The Lady Panc Ashash sent you. She has been telling us for a hundred years that somebody would come from Earth, a real person with an animal name, not a number, and that we should have a child named D’joan ready to take up the threads of destiny. Please, please sit down. Will you have a drink of water? We have no clean vessel here. We are all underpeo
ple here and we have used everything in the place, so that it is contaminated for a real person.” A thought struck him. “Baby-baby, do you have a new cup in the kiln?” Apparently he saw someone nod, because he went right on talking. “Get it out then, for our guest, with tongs. New tongs. Do not touch it. Fill it with water from the top of the little waterfall. That way our guest can have an uncontaminated drink. A clean drink.” He beamed with a hospitality which was as ridiculous as it was genuine.

  Elaine did not have the heart to say she did not want a drink of water.

  She waited. They waited.

  By now, her eyes had become accustomed to the darkness. She could see that the main corridor was painted a yellow, faded and stained, and a contrasting light brown. She wondered what possible human mind could have selected so ugly a combination. Cross-corridors seemed to open into it; at any rate, she saw illuminated archways further down and people walking out of them briskly. No one can walk briskly and naturally out of a shallow alcove, so she was pretty sure that the archways led to something.

  The underpeople, too, she could see. They looked very much like people. Here and there, individuals reverted to the animal type—a horse-man whose muzzle had regrown to its ancestral size, a rat-woman with normal human features except for nylon-like white whiskers, twelve or fourteen on each side of her face, reaching twenty centimeters to either side. One looked very much like a person indeed—a beautiful young woman seated on a bench some eight or ten meters down the corridor, and paying no attention to the crowd, to Mabel, to Charley-is-my-darling, or to herself.

  “Who is that?” said Elaine, pointing with a nod at the beautiful young woman.

  Mabel, relieved from the tension which had seized her when she had asked if Elaine were “death,” babbled with a sociability which was outré in this environment, “That’s Crawlie.”