“I command you,” she said, with all the passion of a working witch, “I command you to leave this place.”
His eye-lenses were like dark-blue marbles floating in milk. They seemed swimmy and poorly focused as he looked her over. He did not reply but stepped around her, faster than her own body could intercept him. He made for the dear, dead Lady Panc Ashash.
Elaine, bewildered, realized that the Lady’s robot body seemed more human than ever. The robot-sergeant confronted her.
This is the scene which we all remember, the first authentic picture tape of the entire incident:
The gold and black sergeant, his milky eyes staring at the Lady Panc Ashash.
The Lady herself, in the pleasant old robot body, lifting a commanding hand.
Elaine, distraught, half-turning as though she would grab the robot by his right arm. Her head is moving so rapidly that her black hair swings as she turns.
Charley-is-my-darling shouting, “I love, love, love!” at a small handsome man with mouse-colored hair. The man is gulping and saying nothing.
All this we know.
Then comes the unbelievable, which we now believe, the event for which the stars and worlds were unprepared.
Mutiny.
Robot mutiny.
Disobedience in open daylight.
The words are hard to hear on the tape, but we can still make them out. The recording device on the police ornithopter had gotten a square fix on the face of the Lady Panc Ashash. Lip-readers can see the words plainly; non-lip-readers can hear the words the third or fourth time the tape is run through the eyebox.
Said the Lady, “Overridden.”
Said the sergeant, “No, you’re a robot.”
“See for yourself. Read my brain. I am a robot. I am also a woman. You cannot disobey people. I am people. I love you. Furthermore, you are people. You think. We love each other. Try. Try to attack.”
“I—I cannot,” said the robot sergeant, his milky eyes seeming to spin with excitement. “You love me? You mean I’m alive? I exist?”
“With love, you do,” said the Lady Panc Ashash. “Look at her,” said the Lady, pointing to Joan, “because she has brought you love.”
The robot looked and disobeyed the law. His squad looked with him.
He turned back to the Lady and bowed to her: “Then you know what we must do, if we cannot obey you and cannot disobey the others.”
“Do it,” she said sadly, “but know what you are doing. You are not really escaping two human commands. You are making a choice. You. That makes you men.”
The sergeant turned to his squad of man-sized robots: “You hear that? She says we are men. I believe her. Do you believe her?”
“We do,” they cried almost unanimously.
This is where the picture-tape ends, but we can imagine how the scene was concluded. Elaine had stopped short, just behind the sergeant-robot. The other robots had come up behind her. Charley-is-my-darling had stopped talking. Joan was in the act of lifting her hands in blessing, her warm brown dog eyes gone wide with pity and understanding.
People wrote down the things that we cannot see.
Apparently the robot-sergeant said, “Our love, dear people, and good-bye. We disobey and die.” He waved his hand to Joan. It is not certain whether he did or did not say, “Good-bye, our lady and our liberator.” Maybe some poet made up the second saying; the first one, we are sure about. And we are sure about the next word, the one which historians and poets all agree on. He turned to his men and said,
“Destruct.”
Fourteen robots, the black-and-gold sergeant and his thirteen silver-blue foot soldiers, suddenly spurted white fire in the street of Kalma. They detonated their suicide buttons, thermite caps in their own heads. They had done something with no human command at all, on an order from another robot, the body of the Lady Panc Ashash, and she in turn had no human authority, but merely the word of the little dog-girl Joan, who had been made an adult in a single night.
Fourteen white flames made people and underpeople turn their eyes aside. Into the light there dropped a special police ornithopter. Out of it came the two Ladies, Arabella Underwood and Goroke. They lifted their forearms to shield their eyes from the blazing dying robots. They did not see the Hunter, who had moved mysteriously into an open window above the street and who watched the scene by putting his hands over his eyes and peeking through the slits between his fingers. While the people still stood blinded, they felt the fierce telepathic shock of the mind of the Lady Goroke taking command of the situation. That was her right, as a Chief of the Instrumentality. Some of the people, but not all of them, felt the outré countershock of Joan’s mind reaching out to meet the Lady Goroke.
“I command,” thought the Lady Goroke, her mind kept open to all beings.
“Indeed you do, but I love, I love you,” thought Joan.
The first-order forces met.
They engaged.
The revolution was over. Nothing had really happened, but Joan had forced people to meet her. This was nothing like the poem about people and underpeople getting all mixed up. The mixup came much later, even after the time of C’mell. The poem is pretty, but it is dead wrong, as you can see for yourself:
You should ask me,
Me, me, me
Because I know—
I used to live
On the Eastern Shore.
Men aren’t men,
And women aren’t women,
And people aren’t people any more.
There is no Eastern Shore on Fomalhaut III anyhow; the people/ underpeople crisis came much later than this. The revolution had failed, but history had reached its new turning-point, the quarrel of the two Ladies. They left their minds open out of sheer surprise. Suicidal robots and world-loving dogs were unheard-of. It was bad enough to have illegal underpeople on the prowl, but these new things—ah!
Destroy them all, said the Lady Goroke.
“Why?” thought the Lady Arabella Underwood.
Malfunction, replied Goroke.
“But they’re not machines!”
Then they’re animals—underpeople. Destroy! Destroy!
Then came the answer which has created our own time. It came from the Lady Arabella Underwood, and all Kalma heard it:
Perhaps they are people. They must have a trial.
The dog-girl Joan dropped to her knees. “I have succeeded. I have succeeded, I have succeeded! You can kill me, dear people, but I love, love you!”
The Lady Panc Ashash said quietly to Elaine, “I thought I would be dead by now. Really dead, at last. But I am not. I have seen the worlds turn, Elaine, and you have seen them turn with me.”
The underpeople had fallen quiet as they heard the high-volume telepathic exchange between the two great Ladies.
The real soldiers dropped out of the sky, their ornithopters whistling as they hawked down to the ground. They ran up to the underpeople and began binding them with cord.
One soldier took a single look at the robot body of the Lady Panc Ashash. He touched it with his staff, and the staff turned cherry-red with heat. The robot-body, its heat suddenly drained, fell to the ground in a heap of icy crystals.
Elaine walked between the frigid rubbish and the red-hot staff. She had seen Hunter.
She missed seeing the soldier who came up to Joan, started to bind her, and then fell back weeping, babbling, “She loves me! She loves me!”
The Lord Femtiosex, who commanded the inflying soldiers, bound Joan with cord despite her talking.
Grimly he answered her: “Of course you love me. You’re a good dog. You’ll die soon, doggy, but till then, you’ll obey.”
“I’m obeying,” said Joan, “but I’m a dog and a person. Open your mind, man, and you’ll feel it.”
Apparently he did open his mind and felt the ocean of love riptiding into him. It shocked him. His arm swung up and back, the edge of the hand striking at Joan’s neck for the ancient kill.
“No,
you don’t,” thought the Lady Arabella Underwood. “That child is going to get a proper trial.”
He looked at her and glared. Chief doesn’t strike Chief, my Lady. Let go my arm.
Thought the Lady Arabella at him, openly and in public: A trial, then.
In his anger he nodded at her. He would not think or speak to her in the presence of all the other people.
A soldier brought Elaine and Hunter before him.
“Sir and master, these are people, not underpeople. But they have dog-thoughts, cat-thoughts, goat-thoughts, and robot-ideas in their heads. Do you wish to look?”
“Why look?” said the Lord Femtiosex, who was as blond as the ancient pictures of Baldur, and oftentimes that arrogant as well. “The Lord Limaono is arriving. That’s all of us. We can have the trial here and now.”
Elaine felt cords bite into her wrists; she heard the Hunter murmur comforting words to her, words which she did not quite understand.
“They will not kill us,” he murmured, “though we will wish they had, before this day is out. Everything is happening as she said it would, and—”
“Who is that she?” interrupted Elaine.
“She? The lady, of course. The dear dead Lady Panc Ashash, who has worked wonders after her own death, merely with the print of her personality on the machine. Who do you think told me what to do? Why did we wait for you to condition Joan to greatness? Why did the people way down in Clown Town keep on raising one D’joan after another, hoping that hope and a great wonder would occur?”
“You knew?” said Elaine. “You knew…before it happened?”
“Of course,” said the Hunter, “not exactly, but more or less. She had had hundreds of years after death inside that computer. She had time for billions of thoughts. She saw how it would be if it had to be, and I—”
“Shut up, you people!” roared the Lord Femtiosex. “You are making the animals restless with your babble. Shut up, or I will stun you!”
Elaine fell silent.
The Lord Femtiosex glanced around at her, ashamed at having made his anger naked before another person. He added quietly:
“The trial is about to begin. The one that the tall Lady ordered.”
IX
You all know about the trial, so there is no need to linger over it. There is another picture of San Shigonanda, the one from his conventional period, which shows it very plainly.
The street had filled full of real people, crowding together to see something which would ease the boredom of perfection and time. They all had numbers or number-codes instead of names. They were handsome, well, dully happy. They even looked a great deal alike, similar in their handsomeness, their health, and their underlying boredom. Each of them had a total of four hundred years to live. None of them knew real war, even though the extreme readiness of the soldiers showed vain practice of hundreds of years. The people were beautiful, but they felt themselves useless, and they were quietly desperate without knowing it themselves. This is all clear from the painting, and from the wonderful way that San Shigonanda has of forming them in informal ranks and letting the calm blue light of day shine down on their handsome, hopeless features.
With the underpeople, the artist performs real wonders.
Joan herself is bathed in light. Her light brown hair and her doggy brown eyes express softness and tenderness. He even conveys the idea that her new body is terribly new and strong, that she is virginal and ready to die, that she is a mere girl and yet completely fearless. The posture of love shows in her legs: she stands lightly. Love shows in her hands: they are turned outward toward the judges. Love shows in her smile: it is confident.
And the judges!
The artist has them, too. The Lord Femtiosex, calm again, his narrow sharp lips expressing perpetual rage against a universe which has grown too small for him. The Lord Limaono, wise, twice-reborn, sluggardly, but alert as a snake behind the sleepy eyes and the slow smile. The Lady Arabella Underwood, the tallest true-human present, with her Norstrilian pride and the arrogance of great wealth, along with the capricious tenderness of great wealth, showing in the way that she sat, judging her fellow-judges instead of the prisoners. The Lady Goroke, bewildered at last, frowning at a play of fortune which she does not understand. The artist has it all.
And you have the real view-tapes, too, if you want to go to a museum. The reality is not as dramatic as the famous painting, but it has value of its own. The voice of Joan, dead these many centuries, is still strangely moving. It is the voice of a dog-carved-into-man, but it is also the voice of a great lady. The image of the Lady Panc Ashash must have taught her that, along with what she had learned from Elaine and Hunter in the antechamber above the Brown and Yellow Corridor of Englok.
The words of the trial, they too have survived. Many of them have become famous, all across the worlds.
Joan said, during inquiry, “But it is the duty of life to find more than life, and to exchange itself for that higher goodness.”
Joan commented, upon sentence, “My body is your property, but my love is not. My love is my own, and I shall love you fiercely while you kill me.”
When the soldiers had killed Charley-is-my-darling and were trying to hack off the head of the S-woman until one of them thought to freeze her into crystals, Joan said:
“Should we be strange to you, we animals of Earth that you have brought to the stars? We shared the same sun, the same oceans, the same sky. We are all from Manhome. How do you know that we would not have caught up with you if we had all stayed at home together? My people were dogs. They loved you before you made a woman-shaped thing out of my mother. Should I not love you still? The miracle is not that you have made people out of us. The miracle is that it took us so long to understand it. We are people now, and so are you. You will be sorry for what you are going to do to me, but remember that I shall love your sorrow, too, because great and good things will come out of it.”
The Lord Limaono slyly asked, “What is a ‘miracle’?”
And her words were, “There is knowledge from Earth which you have not yet found again. There is the name of the nameless one. There are secrets hidden in time from you. Only the dead and the unborn can know them right now: I am both.”
The scene is familiar, and yet we will never understand it.
We know what the Lords Femtiosex and Limaono thought they were doing. They were maintaining established order and they were putting it on tape. The minds of men can live together only if the basic ideas are communicated. Nobody has, even now, found out a way of recording telepathy directly into an instrument. We get pieces and snatches and wild jumbles, but we never get a satisfactory record of what one of the great ones was transmitting to another. The two male chiefs were trying to put on record all those things about the episode which would teach careless people not to play with the lives of the underpeople. They were even trying to make underpeople understand the rules and designs by virtue of which they had been transformed from animals into the highest servants of man. This would have been hard to do, given the bewildering events of the last few hours, even from one Chief of the Instrumentality to another; for the general public, it was almost impossible. The outpouring from the Brown and Yellow Corridor was wholly unexpected, even though the Lady Goroke had surprised D’joan; the mutiny of the robot police posed problems which would have to be discussed halfway across the galaxy. Furthermore, the dog-girl was making points which had some verbal validity. If they were left in the form of mere words without proper context, they might affect heedless or impressionable minds. A bad idea can spread like a mutated germ. If it is at all interesting, it can leap from one mind to another halfway across the universe before it has a stop put to it. Look at the ruinous fads and foolish fashions which have nuisanced mankind even in the ages of the highest orderliness. We today know that variety, flexibility, danger, and the seasoning of a little hate can make love and life bloom as they never bloomed before; we know it is better to live with the complications of thirte
en thousand old languages resurrected from the dead ancient past than it is to live with the cold blind-alley perfection of the Old Common Tongue. We know a lot of things which the Lords Femtiosex and Limaono did not, and before we consider them stupid or cruel, we must remember that centuries passed before mankind finally came to grips with the problem of the underpeople and decided what “life” was within the limits of the human community.
Finally, we have the testimony of the two Lords themselves. They both lived to very advanced ages, and toward the end of their lives they were worried and annoyed to find that the episode of D’joan overshadowed all the bad things which had not happened during their long careers—bad things which they had labored to forestall for the protection of the planet Fomalhaut III—and they were distressed to see themselves portrayed as casual, cruel men when in fact they were nothing of the sort. If they had seen that the story of Joan on Fomalhaut III would get to be what it is today—one of the great romances of mankind, along with the story of C’mell or the romance of the lady who sailed The Soul—they would not only have been disappointed, but they would have been justifiably angry at the fickleness of mankind as well. Their roles are clear, because they made them clear. The Lord Femtiosex accepts the responsibility for the notion of fire; the Lord Limaono agrees that he concurred in the decision. Both of them, many years later, reviewed the tapes of the scene and agreed that something which the Lady Arabella Underwood had said or thought—
Something had made them do it.
But even with the tapes to refresh and clarify their memories, they could not say what.
We have even put computers on the job of cataloguing every word and every inflection of the whole trial, but they have not pinpointed the critical point either.
And the Lady Arabella—nobody ever questioned her. They didn’t dare. She went back to her own planet of Old North Australia, surrounded by the immense treasure of the santaclara drug, and no planet is going to pay at the rate of two thousand million credits a day for the privilege of sending an investigator to talk to a lot of obstinate, simple, wealthy Norstrilian peasants who will not talk to offworlders anyhow. The Norstrilians charge that sum for the admission of any guest not selected by their own invitation; so we will never know what the Lady Arabella Underwood said or did after she went home. The Norstrilians said they did not wish to discuss the matter, and if we do not wish to go back to living a mere seventy years we had better not anger the only planet which produces stroon.
The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated Page 37
