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

by Cordwainer Smith

  IV

  He waited so long that even the robots began to wonder if he died amid the thick wet air and the nearby stench of steam and oil.

  The Lord Sto Odin finally roused himself and said: “I need no help. Just put the bag with my manikin meee on my lap.”

  “This one?” asked Flavius, lifting a small brown suitcase and handling it with a very gingerly touch indeed.

  The Lord Sto Odin gave a barely perceptible nod and whispered, “Open it carefully for me. But do not touch the manikin, if those are your orders.”

  Flavius twisted at the catch of the bag. It was hard to manage. Robots did not feel fear, but they were intellectually attuned to the avoidance of danger. Flavius found his mind racing with wild choices as he tried to get the bag open. Sto Odin tried to help him, but the ancient hand, palsied and weak, could not even reach the top of the case. Flavius labored on, thinking that the Gebiet and Bezirk had their dangers, but that this meddling with manikins was the riskiest thing which he had ever encountered while in robot form, though in his human life he had handled many of them, including his own. They were “manikin, electro-encephalographic and endocrine” in model form, and they showed in miniaturized replica the entire diagnostic position of the patient for whom they were fashioned.

  Sto Odin whispered to them. “There’s no helping it. Turn me up. If I die, take my body back and tell the people that I misjudged my time.”

  Just as he spoke, the case sprang open. Inside it there lay a little naked human man, a direct copy of Sto Odin himself.

  “We have it, my Lord,” cried Livius, from the other side. “Let me guide your hand to it, so that you can see what to do.”

  Though it was forbidden for robots to touch manikins meee, it was legal for them to touch a human person with the person’s consent. Livius’s strong cupro-plastic fingers, with a reserve of many tons of gripping power in their human-like design, pulled the hands of the Lord Sto Odin forward until they rested on the manikin meee. Flavius, quick, smooth, agile, held the Lord’s head upright on his weary old neck, so that the ancient Lord could see what the hands were doing.

  “Is any part dead?” said the old Lord to the manikin, his voice clearer for the moment.

  The manikin shimmered and two spots of solid black showed along the outside upper right thigh and the right buttock.

  “Organic reserve?” said the Lord to his own manikin meee, and again the machine responded to his command. The whole miniature body shimmered to a violent purple and then subsided to an even pink.

  “I still have some all-around strength left in this body, prosthetics and all,” said Sto Odin to the two robots. “Set me up, I tell you! Set me up.”

  “Are you sure, my Lord,” said Livius, “that we should do a thing like that here where the three of us are alone in a deep tunnel? In less than half an hour we could take you to a real hospital, where actual doctors could examine you.”

  “I said,” repeated the Lord Sto Odin, “set me up. I’ll watch the manikin while you do it.”

  “Your control is in the usual place, my Lord?” asked Livius.

  “How much of a turn?” asked Flavius.

  “Nape of my neck, of course. The skin over it is artificial and self-sealing. One twelfth of a turn will be enough. Do you have a knife with you?”

  Flavius nodded. He took a small sharp knife from his belt, probed gently around the old Lord’s neck, and then brought the knife down with a quick, sure turn.

  “That did it!” said Sto Odin, in a voice so hearty that both of them stepped back a little. Flavius put the knife back in his belt. Sto Odin, who had almost been comatose a moment before, now held the manikin meee in his unaided hands. “See, gentlemen!” he cried. “You may be robots, but you can still see the truth and report it.”

  They both looked at the manikin meee, which Sto Odin now held in front of himself, his thumb and fingertip in the armpits of the medical doll.

  “Watch what it reads,” he said to them with a clear, ringing voice.

  “Prosthetics!” he shouted at the manikin.

  The tiny body changed from its pink color to a mixture. Both legs turned the color of a deep bruised blue. The legs, the left arm, one eye, one ear, and the skullcap stayed blue, showing the prostheses in place.

  “Felt pain!” shouted Sto Odin at the manikin. The little doll returned to its light pink color. All the details were there, even to genitals, toenails, and eyelashes. There was no trace of the black color of pain in any part of the little body.

  “Potential pain!” shouted Sto Odin. The doll shimmered. Most of it settled to the color of dark walnut wood, with some areas of intense brown showing more clearly than the rest.

  “Potential breakdown—one day!” shouted Sto Odin. The little body went back to its normal color of pink. Small lightnings showed at the base of the brain, but nowhere else.

  “I’m all right,” said Sto Odin. “I can continue as I have done for the last several hundred years. Leave me set up on this high life-output. I can stand it for a few hours, and if I cannot, there’s little lost.” He put the manikin back in its bag, hung the bag on the doorhandle of the sedan-chair, and commanded the legionaries. “Proceed!”

  The legionaries stared at him as if they could not see him.

  He followed the lines of glance and saw that they were gazing rigidly at his manikin meee. It had turned black.

  “Are you dead?” asked Livius, speaking as hoarsely as a robot could.

  “Not dead at all!” cried Sto Odin. “I have been death in fractions of a moment, but for the time I am still life. That was just the pain-sum of my living body which showed on the manikin meee. The fire of life still burns within me. Watch as I put the manikin away…” The doll flared into a swirl of pastel orange as the Lord Sto Odin pulled the cover down.

  They looked away as though they had seen an evil or an explosion.

  “Down, men, down,” he cried, calling them wrong names as they stepped back between their carrying shafts to take him deeper under the vitals of the earth.

  V

  He dreamed brown dreams while they trotted down endless ramps. He woke a little to see the yellow walls passing. He looked at his dry old hand and it seemed to him that in this atmosphere, he had himself become more reptilian than human.

  “I am caught by the dry, drab enturtlement of old, old age,” he murmured, but the voice was weak and the robots did not hear him. They were running downward on a long meaningless concrete ramp which had become filmed by a leak of ancient oil, and they were taking care that they did not stumble and drop their precious master.

  At a deep, hidden point the downward ramp divided, the left into a broad arena of steps which could have seated thousands of spectators for some never-to-occur event, and the right into a narrow ramp which bore upward and then curved, yellow lights and all.

  “Stop!” called Sto Odin. “Do you see her? Do you hear it?”

  “Hear what?” said Flavius.

  “The beat and the cadence of the congohelium rising out of the Gebiet. The whirl and the skirl of impossible music coming at us through miles of solid rock? That girl whom I can already see, waiting at a door which should never have been opened? The sound of the star-borne music, not designed for the proper human ear?” He shouted, “Can’t you hear it? That cadence. The unlawful metal of congohelium so terrible far underground? Dah, dah. Dah, dah. Dah. Music which nobody has ever understood before?”

  Said Flavius, “I hear nothing, saving the pulse of air in this corridor, and your own heartbeat, my Lord. And something else, a little like machinery, very far away.”

  “There, that!” cried Sto Odin, “which you call ‘a little like machinery,’ does it come in a beat of five separate sounds, each one distinct?”

  “No. No, sir. Not five.”

  “And you, Livius, when you were a man, you were very telepathic? Is there any of that left in the robot which is you?”

  “No, my Lord, nothing. I have good senses, an
d I am also cut into the subsurface radio of the Instrumentality. Nothing unusual.”

  “No five-beat? Each note separate, short of prolonged, given meaning and shape by the terrible music of the congohelium, imprisoned with us inside this much-too-solid rock? You hear nothing?”

  The two robots, shaped like Roman legionaries, shook their heads.

  “But I can see her, through this stone. She has breasts like ripe pears and dark brown eyes that are like the stones of fresh-cut peaches. And I can hear what they are singing, their weird silly words of a pentapaul, made into something majestic by the awful music of the congohelium. Listen to the words. When I repeat them, they sound just silly, because the dread-inspiring music does not come with them. Her name is Santuna and she stares at him. No wonder she stares. He is much more tall than most men, yet he makes this foolish song into something frightening and strange.

  Slim Jim.

  Dim him.

  Grim.

  And his name is Yebayee, but now he is Sun-boy. He has the long face and the thick lips of the first man to talk about one god and one only: Akhnaton.”

  “Akhnaton the pharaoh,” said Flavius. “That name was known in my office when I was a man. It was a secret. One of the first and greatest of the more-than-ancient kings. You see him, my Lord?”

  “Through this rock I see him. Through this rock I hear the delirium engendered by the congohelium. I go to him.” The Lord Sto Odin stepped out of the sedan chair and beat softly and weakly against the solid stone wall of the corridor. The yellow lamps gleamed. The legionaries were helpless. Here was something which their sharp swords could not pierce. Their once-human personalities, engraved on their micro-miniaturized brains, could not make sense out of the all-too-human situation of an old, old man dreaming wild dreams in a remote tunnel.

  Sto Odin leaned against the wall, breathing heavily, and said to them with a sibilant rasp:

  “These are no whispers which can be missed. Can’t you hear the five-beat of the congohelium, making its crazy music again? Listen to the words of this one. It’s another pentapaul. Silly, bony words given flesh and blood and entrails by the music which carries them. Here, listen.

  Try. Vie.

  Cry. Die.

  Bye.

  This one you did not hear either?”

  “May I use my radio to ask the surface of Earth for advice?” said one of the robots.

  “Advice! Advice! What advice do we need? This is the Gebiet and one more hour of running and you will be in the heart of the Bezirk.”

  He climbed back into the sedan chair and commanded, “Run, men, run! It can’t be more than three or four kilometers somewhere in this warren of stone. I will guide you. If I stop guiding you, you may take my body back to the surface, so that I can be given a wonderful funeral and be shot with a rocket-coffin into space with an orbit of no return. You have nothing to worry about. You are machines, nothing more, are you not? Are you not?” His voice shrilled at the end.

  Said Flavius, “Nothing more.”

  Said Livius, “Nothing more. And yet—”

  “And yet what?” demanded the Lord Sto Odin.

  “And yet,” said Livius, “I know I am a machine, and I know that I have known feelings only when I was once a living man. I sometimes wonder if you people might go too far. Too far, with us robots. Too far, perhaps, with the underpeople too. Things were once simple, when everything that talked was a human being and everything which did not talk was not. You may be coming to an ending of the ways.”

  “If you had said that on the surface,” said the Lord Sto Odin grimly, “your head might have been burned off by its automatic magnesium flare. You know that there you are monitored against having illegal thoughts.”

  “Too well do I know it,” said Livius, “and I know that I must have died once as a man, if I exist here in robot form. Dying didn’t seem to hurt me then and it probably won’t hurt next time. But nothing really matters much when we get down this far into the Earth. When we get this far down, everything changes. I never really understood that the inside of the world was this big and this sick.”

  “It’s not how far down we are,” said the Lord crossly, “it’s where we are. This is the Gebiet, where all laws have been lifted, and down below and over yonder is the Bezirk, where laws have never been. Carry me rapidly now. I want to look on this strange musician with the face of Akhnaton and I want to talk to the girl who worships him, Santuna. Run carefully now. Up a little, to the left a little. If I sleep, do not worry. Keep going. I will waken myself when we come anywhere near the music of the congohelium. If I can hear it now, so far away, think of what it will be like when you yourselves approach it!”

  He leaned back in his seat. They picked up the shafts of the sedan-chair and ran in the direction which they had been told.

  VI

  They had run for more than an hour, with occasional delays when they had tricky footwork over leaking pipes or damaged walkways, when the light became so bright that they had to reach in their pouches and put on sun-glasses, which looked very odd indeed underneath the Roman helmets of two fully armed legionaries. (It was even more odd, of course, that the eyes were not eyes at all; robot eyes were like white marbles swimming in little bowls of glittering ink, producing a grimly milky stare.) They looked at their master and he had not yet stirred, so they took a corner of his robe and twisted it firmly into a bandage to protect his eyes against the bright light.

  The new light made the yellow bulbs of the corridor fade out of notice. The light was like a whole aurora borealis compressed and projected through the basement corridor of a hotel left over from long ago. Neither of the robots knew the nature of the light, but it pulsed in beats of five.

  The music and the lights became obtrusive even to the two robots as they walked or trotted downward toward the center of the world. The air-forcing system must have been very strong, because the inner heat of the Earth had not reached them, even at this great depth. Flavius had no idea of how many kilometers below the surface they had come. He knew that it was not much in planetary distance, but it was very far indeed for an ordinary walk.

  The Lord Sto Odin sat up in the litter quite suddenly. When the two robots slowed, he said crossly at them: “Keep going. Keep going. I am going to set myself up. I’m strong enough to do it.”

  He took out the manikin meee and studied it in the light of the minor aurora borealis which repeated itself in the corridor. The manikin ran through its changes of diagnoses and colors. The Lord was satisfied. With firm old fingers he put the knifetip to the back of his neck and set his output of vital energies at an even higher level.

  The robots did what they had been told.

  The lights had been bewildering. Sometimes they made walking itself difficult. It was hard to believe that dozens or hundreds, perhaps thousands, of human beings had found their way through these uncharted corridors in order to discover the inmost precincts of the Bezirk, where all things were allowed. Yet the robots had to believe it. They themselves had been here before and they scarcely remembered how they had found their way the other time.

  And the music! It beat at them harder than ever before. It came in beats of five, ringing out the tones of the pentapaul, the five-word verse which the mad cat-minstrel C’paul had developed while playing his c’lute some centuries before. The form itself confirmed and reinforced the poignancy of cats combined with the heartbreaking intelligence of the human being. No wonder people had found their way down here.

  In all the history of man, there was no act which could not be produced by any one of the three bitterest forces in the human spirit—religious faith, vengeful vainglory, or sheer vice. Here, for the sake of vice, men had found the undiscoverable deep and had put it to wild, filthy uses. The music called them on.

  This was very special music. It came at Sto Odin and his legionaries in two utterly different ways by now, reverberating at them through solid rock and echoing, re-echoing through the maze of corridors, carried by
the dark heavy air. The corridor lights were still yellow, but the electromagnetic illuminations, which kept time to the music, made the ordinary lighting seem wan. The music controlled all things, paced all time, called all life to itself. It was song of a kind which the two robots had not noticed with such intensity on their previous visit.

  Even the Lord Sto Odin, for all his travels and experiences, had never heard it before.

  It was all of this:

  The beat and the heat and the neat repeat of the notes which poured from the congohelium—metal never made for music, matter and antimatter locked in a fine magnetic grid to ward off the outermost perils of space. Now a piece of it was deep in the body of Old Earth, counting out strange cadences. The churn and the burn and the hot return of music riding the living rock, accompanying itself in an air-carried echo. The surge and the urge of an erotic dirge which moaned, groaned through the heavy stone.

  Sto Odin woke and stared sharply forward, seeing nothing but experiencing everything.

  “Soon we shall see the gate and the girl,” said he.

  “You know this, man? You who have never been here before?” Livius had spoken.

  “I know it,” said the Lord Sto Odin, “because I know it.”

  “You wear the feathers of immunity.”

  “I wear the feathers of immunity.”

  “Does that mean that we, your robots, are free too, down in this Bezirk?”

  “Free as you like,” said the Lord Sto Odin, “provided that you do my wishes. Otherwise I shall kill you.”

  “If we keep going,” said Flavius, “may we sing the underpeople song? It might keep some of that terrible music out of our brains. The music has all feelings and we have none. Nevertheless it disturbs us. I do not know why.”

  “My radio contact with the surface has lapsed,” said Livius irrelevantly. “I need to sing too.”