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

by Cordwainer Smith

  This time the doorway caught it. The powers which had immobilized Sto Odin and his robots were back in operation. The ball sang as it plunged into the doorway, stopped in mid-air, sang again as the door flung it back at Flavius.

  The returning ball missed Flavius’s head but crushed his chest utterly. That was where his real brain was. There was a flicker of light as the robot went out, but even in dying Flavius seized the ball one last time and flung it at Sun-boy. The robot terminated operation and the heavy ball, flung wild, caught the Lord Sto Odin in the right shoulder. The Lord Sto Odin felt pain until he dragged over his manikin meee and turned all pain off. Then he looked at the shoulder. It was almost totally demolished. Blood from his organic body and hydraulic fluid from his prosthetics joined in a slow, heavy stream as the liquids met, merged, and poured down his side.

  The dancer almost forgot to dance.

  Sto Odin wondered how far the girl had gone.

  The air pressure changed.

  “What is happening to the air? Why did you think about the girl? What is happening?”

  “Read me,” said the Lord Sto Odin.

  “I will dance and get my powers first,” said Sun-boy.

  For a few brief minutes it seemed that the dancer with the congohelium would cause a rock-fall.

  The Lord Sto Odin, dying, closed his eyes and found that it was restful to die. The blaze and noise of the world around him remained interesting, but had become unimportant.

  The congohelium with a thousand shifting rainbows and the dancer had attained near-transparency when Sun-boy came back to read Sto Odin’s mind.

  “I see nothing,” said Sun-boy worriedly. “Your vitality button is too high and you will die soon. Where is all that air coming from? I seem to hear a faraway roar. But you are not causing it. Your robot went wild. All you do is to look at me contentedly and die. That is very strange. You want to die your way when you could live unimaginable lives in here with us!”

  “That is right,” said the Lord Sto Odin. “I am dying my way. But dance for me, do dance for me with the congohelium, while I tell you your own story as you told it to me. It would be a pleasure to get the story straight before I die.”

  The dancer looked irresolute, started to dance, and then turned back to the Lord Sto Odin.

  “Are you sure you want to die right away? With the power of what you call the Douglas-Ouyang planets, which I receive right here with the help of the congohelium, you could be comfortable enough while I danced and you could still die whenever you wished. Vitality buttons are much weaker than the powers which I command. I could even help to lift you across the threshold of my door…”

  “No,” said the Lord Sto Odin. “Just dance for me while I die. My way.”

  IX

  Thus the world turned. Millions of tons of water were rushing toward them.

  Within minutes the Gebiet and the Bezirk would drown as the air whistled upward. Sto Odin noted contentedly that there was an air-shaft at the top of the dancer’s room. He did not allow himself to third-think of what would happen when the matter and anti-matter of the congohelium were immersed in rushing salt water. Something like forty megatons, he supposed, with the tired feeling of a man who has thought a problem through long, long ago and remembers it briefly only after the situation has long passed.

  Sun-boy was acting out religion before the age of space. He chorused hymns, he lifted his eyes and his hands and his piece of the congohelium to the sun; he played the rattle of whirling dervishes, the temple bells of the Man on the Two Pieces of Wood, and the other temple bells of that saint who had escaped time simply by seeing it and stepping out of it. Buddha, was that his name? And he went on to the severe profanities which afflicted mankind after the Old World fell.

  The music kept measure.

  And the lights, too.

  Whole processions of ghostly shadows followed Sun-boy as he showed how old mankind had found the gods, and the Sun, and then other gods. He pantomimed man’s most ancient mystery—that man pretended to be afraid of death, when it was life that never understood it.

  And as he danced, the Lord Sto Odin repeated his own story to him:

  “You fled the surface, Sun-boy, because the people were stupid clods, happy and dull in their miserable happiness. You fled because you could not stand being a chicken in a poultry house, antiseptically bred, safely housed, and frozen when dead. You joined the other miserable, bright, restless people who sought freedom in the Gebiet. You learned about their drugs and their liquors and their smokes. You knew their women, and their parties, and their games. It wasn’t enough. You became a gentleman-suicide, a hero seeking a fun-death which would stamp you with your individuality. You came on down to the Bezirk, the most forgotten and loathsome place of all. You found nothing. Just the old machines and the empty corridors. Here and there a few mummies or bones. Just the silent lights and the faint murmur of air through the corridors.”

  “I hear water now,” said the dancer, still dancing, “rushing water. Don’t you hear it, my dying Lord?”

  “If I did hear it, I wouldn’t care. Let’s get on with your story. You came to this room. The weird door made it look like a good place for a fun-death, such as you poor castaways liked to seek, except that there was not much sport in dying unless other people know that you did it intentionally, and know how you did it. Anyway, it was a long climb back up into the Gebiet, where your friends were, so you slept by this computer.

  “In the night, while you slept, as you dreamed, the computer sang to you:

  I need a temporary dog

  For a temporary job

  On a temporary place

  Like Earth!

  When you woke up you were surprised to find that you had dreamed an entire new kind of music. Really wild music which made people shudder with its delicious evil. And with the music, you had a job. To steal a piece of the congohelium.

  “You were a clever man, Sun-boy, before the trip down here. The Douglas-Ouyang planets caught you and made you a thousand times cleverer. You and your friends, this is what you told me—or what the presence behind you told me, just a half hour ago—you and your friends stole a subspace communicator console, got a fix on the Douglas-Ouyang planets, and got drunk at the sight. Iridescent, luminescent. Waterfalls uphill. All that kind of thing.”

  “And you did get the congohelium. The congohelium is made of matter and antimatter laminated apart by a dual magnetic grid. With that the presence of the Douglas-Ouyang planets made you independent of organic processes. You did not need food or rest or even air or drink any more. The Douglas-Ouyang planets are very old. They kept you as a link. I have no idea of what they intended to do with Earth and with mankind. If this story gets out, future generations will call you the merchant of menace, because you used the normal human appetitiousness for danger to trap other people with hypnotics and with music.”

  “I hear water,” interrupted Sun-boy. “I do hear water!”

  “Never mind,” said the Lord Sto Odin, “your story is more important. Anyhow, what could you and I do about it? I am dying, sitting in a pool of blood and effluvium. You can’t leave this room with the congohelium. Let me go on. Or perhaps the Douglas-Ouyang entity, whatever it was—”

  “Is,” said Sun-boy.

  “—whatever it is, may just have been longing for sensuous companionship. Dance on, man, dance on.”

  Sun-boy danced and the drums talked with him, rataplan, rataplan! kid-nork, kid-nork, nork! while the congohelium made music scream through the solid rock.

  The other sound persisted.

  Sun-boy stopped and stared.

  “It is water. It is.”

  “Who knows?” said the Lord Sto Odin.

  “Look,” screamed Sun-boy, holding the congohelium high. “Look!”

  The Lord Sto Odin did not need to look. He knew full well that the first few tons of water, mud-laden and heavy, had come frothing down the corridor and into their rooms.

  “But what do
I do?” screamed the voice of Sun-boy. Sto Odin felt that it was not Sun-boy speaking, but some relay speaking from the power of the Douglas-Ouyang planets. A power which had tried to find friendship with man, but had found the wrong man and the wrong friendship.

  Sun-boy took control of himself. His feet splashed in the water as he danced. The colors shone on the water as it rose. Ritiplin, tiplin! said the big drum. Kid-nork, kid-nork, said the little drum. Boom, boom, doom, doom, room, said the congohelium.

  The Lord Sto Odin felt his old eyes blur but he could still see the blazing image of the wild dancer.

  “This is a good way to die,” thought he, as he died.

  X

  Far above, on the surface of the planet, Santuna felt the continent itself heave beneath her feet and saw the eastern horizon grow dark as a volcano of muddy steam shot up from the calm blue sunlit ocean.

  “This must not, must not happen again!” she said, thinking of Sun-boy and the congohelium and the death of the Lord Sto Odin.

  “Something must be done about it,” she added to herself.

  And she did it.

  In later centuries she brought disease, risk, and misery back to increase the happiness of man. She was one of the principal architects of the Rediscovery of Man, and at her most famous she was known as the Lady Alice More.

  Drunkboat

  Perhaps it is the saddest, maddest, wildest story in the whole long history of space. It is true that no one else had ever done anything like it before, to travel at such a distance, and at such speeds, and by such means. The hero looked like such an ordinary man—when people looked at him for the first time. The second time, ah! that was different.

  And the heroine. Small she was, and ash-blonde, intelligent, perky, and hurt. Hurt—yes, that’s the right word. She looked as though she needed comforting or helping, even when she was perfectly all right. Men felt more like men when she was near. Her name was Elizabeth.

  Who would have thought that her name would ring loud and clear in the wild vomiting nothing which made up Space3?

  He took an old, old rocket, of an ancient design. With it he outflew, outfled, outjumped all the machines which had ever existed before. You might almost think that he went so fast that he shocked the great vaults of the sky, so that the ancient poem might have been written for him alone. “All the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears.”

  Go he did, so fast, so far that people simply did not believe it at first. They thought it was a joke told by men, a farce spun forth by rumor, a wild story to while away the summer afternoon.

  We know his name now.

  And our children and their children will know it for always.

  Rambo. Artyr Rambo of Earth Four.

  But he followed his Elizabeth where no space was. He went where men could not go, had not been, did not dare, would not think.

  He did all this of his own free will.

  Of course people thought it was a joke at first, and got to making up silly songs about the reported trip.

  “Dig me a hole for that reeling feeling!…” sang one.

  “Push me the call for the umber number!…” sang another.

  “Where is the ship of the ochre joker?…” sang a third.

  Then people everywhere found it was true. Some stood stock still and got gooseflesh. Others turned quickly to everyday things. Space3 had been found, and it had been pierced. Their world would never be the same again. The solid rock had become an open door.

  Space itself, so clean, so empty, so tidy, now looked like a million million light-years of tapioca pudding—gummy, mushy, sticky, not fit to breathe, not fit to swim in.

  How did it happen?

  Everybody took the credit, each in his own different way.

  I

  “He came for me,” said Elizabeth. “I died and he came for me because the machines were making a mess of my life when they tried to heal my terrible, useless death.”

  II

  “I went myself,” said Rambo. “They tricked me and lied to me and fooled me, but I took the boat and I became the boat and I got there. Nobody made me do it. I was angry, but I went. And I came back, didn’t I?”

  He too was right, even when he twisted and whined on the green grass of Earth, his ship lost in a space so terribly far and strange that it might have been beneath his living hand, or might have been half a galaxy away.

  How can anybody tell, with Space3?

  It was Rambo who got back, looking for his Elizabeth. He loved her. So the trip was his, and the credit his.

  III

  But the Lord Crudelta said, many years later, when he spoke in a soft voice and talked confidentially among friends, “The experiment was mine. I designed it. I picked Rambo. I drove the selectors mad, trying to find a man who would meet those specifications. And I had that rocket built to the old, old plans. It was the sort of thing which human beings first used when they jumped out of the air a little bit, leaping like flying fish from one wave to the next and already thinking that they were eagles. If I had used one of the regular planoform ships, it would have disappeared with a sort of reverse gurgle, leaving space milky for a little bit while it faded into nastiness and obliteration. But I did not risk that. I put the rocket on a launching pad. And the launching pad itself was an interstellar ship! Since we were using an ancient rocket, we did it up right, with the old, old writing, mysterious letters printed all over the machine. We even had the name of our Organization—I and O and M, for ‘the Instrumentality of Mankind’—written on it good and sharp.

  “How would I know,” went on the Lord Crudelta, “that we would succeed more than we wanted to succeed, that Rambo would tear space itself loose from its hinges and leave that ship behind, just because he loved Elizabeth so sharply much, so fiercely much?”

  Crudelta sighed.

  “I know it and I don’t know it. I’m like that ancient man who tried to take a water boat the wrong way around the planet Earth and found a new world instead. Columbus, he was called. And the land, that was Australia or America or something like that. That’s what I did. I sent Rambo out in that ancient rocket and he found a way through space-three. Now none of us will ever know who might come bulking through the floor or take shape out of the air in front of us.”

  Crudelta added, almost wistfully, “What’s the use of telling the story? Everybody knows it, anyhow. My part in it isn’t very glorious. Now the end of it, that’s pretty. The bungalow by the waterfall and all the wonderful children that other people gave to them, you could write a poem about that. But the next to the end, how he showed up at the hospital helpless and insane, looking for his own Elizabeth. That was sad and eerie, that was frightening. I’m glad it all came to the happy ending with the bungalow by the waterfall, but it took a crashing long time to get there. And there are parts of it that we will never quite understand, the naked skin against naked space, the eyeballs riding something much faster than light ever was. Do you know what an aoudad is? It’s an ancient sheep that used to live on Old Earth, and here we are, thousands of years later, with a children’s nonsense rhyme about it. The animals are gone but the rhyme remains. It’ll be like that with Rambo someday. Everybody will know his name and all about his drunkboat, but they will forget the scientific milestone that he crossed, hunting for Elizabeth in an ancient rocket that couldn’t fly from peetle to pootle…Oh, the rhyme? Don’t you know that? It’s a silly thing. It goes:

  Point your gun at a murky lurky.

  (Now you’re talking ham or turkey!)

  Shoot a shot at a dying aoudad.

  (Don’t ask the lady why or how, dad!)

  Don’t ask me what ‘ham’ and ‘turkey’ are. Probably parts of ancient animals, like beefsteak or sirloin. But the children still say the words. They’ll do that with Rambo and his drunken boat some day. They may even tell the story of Elizabeth. But they will never tell the part about how he got to the hospital. That part is too terrible, too real, too sad and wonderful a
t the end. They found him on the grass. Mind you, naked on the grass, and nobody knew where he had come from!”

  IV

  They found him naked on the grass and nobody knew where he had come from. They did not even know about the ancient rocket which the Lord Crudelta had sent beyond the end of nowhere with the letters I, O, and M written on it. They did not know that this was Rambo, who had gone through Space3. The robots noticed him first and brought him in, photographing everything that they did. They had been programmed that way, to make sure that anything unusual was kept in the records.

  Then the nurses found him in an outside room.

  They assumed that he was alive, since he was not dead, but they could not prove that he was alive, either.

  That heightened the puzzle.

  The doctors were called in. Real doctors, not machines. They were very important men. Citizen Doctor Timofeyev, Citizen Doctor Grosbeck, and the director himself, Sir and Doctor Vomact. They took the case.

  (Over on the other side of the hospital Elizabeth waited, unconscious, and nobody knew it at all. Elizabeth, for whom he had jumped space, and pierced the stars, but nobody knew it yet!)

  The young man could not speak. When they ran eyeprints and fingerprints through the Population Machine, they found that he had been bred on Earth itself, but had been shipped out as a frozen and unborn baby to Earth Four. At tremendous cost, they queried Earth Four with an “instant message,” only to discover that the young man who lay before them in the hospital had been lost from an experimental ship on an intergalactic trip.

  Lost.

  No ship and no sign of ship.

  And here he was.

  They stood at the edge of space, and did not know what they were looking at. They were doctors and it was their business to repair or rebuild people, not to ship them around. How should such men know about Space3 when they did not even know about Space3 except for the fact that people got on the planoform ships and made trips through it? They were looking for sickness when their eyes saw engineering. They treated him when he was well.