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

by Cordwainer Smith

  When Lord William saw the polishing, he was furious. “Get that here,” he shouted. “I want to buy those myself!”

  “All right,” said Lord Issan. “It’s a little irregular, but all right.”

  The machine showed the key search devices and brought the robot to the escalator.

  The Lord Issan said, “This isn’t much of a case.”

  C’mell sniveled. She was a good actress. “Then he wanted me to get a homunculus egg. One of the E-type, derived from birds, for him to take home.”

  Issan put on the search device.

  “Maybe,” said C’mell, “somebody has already put it in the disposal series.”

  The Bell and Bank ran through all the disposal devices at high speed. Jestocost felt his nerves go on edge. No human being could have memorized these thousands of patterns as they flashed across the Bell too fast for human eyes, but the brain reading the Bell through his eyes was not human. It might even be locked into a computer of its own. It was, thought Jestocost, an indignity for a Lord of the Instrumentality to be used as a human spy-glass.

  The machine blotted up.

  “You’re a fraud,” cried the Lord Issan. “There’s no evidence.”

  “Maybe the offworlder tried,” said the Lady Johanna.

  “Shadow him,” said Lord William. “If he would steal ancient coins he would steal anything.”

  The Lady Johanna turned to C’mell. “You’re a silly thing. You have wasted our time and you have kept us from serious inter-world business.”

  “It is inter-world business,” wept C’mell. She let her hand slip from Jestocost’s shoulder, where it had rested all the time. The body-to-body relay broke and the telepathic link broke with it.

  “We should judge that,” said Lord Issan.

  “You might have been punished,” said Lady Johanna.

  The Lord Jestocost had said nothing, but there was a glow of happiness in him. If the E’telekeli was half as good as he seemed, the underpeople had a list of checkpoints and escape routes which would make it easier to hide from the capricious sentence of painless death which human authorities meted out.

  V

  There was singing in the corridors that night.

  Underpeople burst into happiness for no visible reason.

  C’mell danced a wild cat dance for the next customer who came in from outworld stations, that very evening. When she got home to bed, she knelt before the picture of her father C’mackintosh and thanked the E’telekeli for what Jestocost had done.

  But the story became known a few generations later, when the Lord Jestocost had won acclaim for being the champion of the underpeople and when the authorities, still unaware of E’telekeli, accepted the elected representatives of the underpeople as negotiators for better terms of life; and C’mell had died long since.

  She had first had a long, good life.

  She became a female chef when she was too old to be a girlygirl. Her food was famous. Jestocost once visited her. At the end of the meal he had asked, “There’s a silly rhyme among the underpeople. No human beings know it except me.”

  “I don’t care about rhymes,” she said.

  “This is called ‘The what-she-did.’”

  C’mell blushed all the way down to the neckline of her capacious blouse. She had filled out a lot in middle age. Running the restaurant had helped.

  “Oh, that rhyme!” she said. “It’s silly.”

  “It says you were in love with a hominid.”

  “No,” she said. “I wasn’t.” Her green eyes, as beautiful as ever, stared deeply into his. Jestocost felt uncomfortable. This was getting personal. He liked political relationships; personal things made him uncomfortable.

  The light in the room shifted and her cat eyes blazed at him: she looked like the magical fire-haired girl he had known.

  “I wasn’t in love. You couldn’t call it that…”

  Her heart cried out, It was you, it was you, it was you.

  “But the rhyme,” insisted Jestocost, “says it was a hominid. It wasn’t that Prins van de Schemering?”

  “Who was he?” C’mell asked the question quietly, but her emotions cried out. Darling, will you never, never know?

  “The strong man.”

  “Oh, him. I’ve forgotten him.”

  Jestocost rose from the table. “You’ve had a good life, C’mell. You’ve been a citizen, a committeewoman, a leader. And do you even know how many children you have had?”

  “Seventy-three,” she snapped at him. “Just because they’re multiple doesn’t mean we don’t know them.”

  His playfulness left him. His face was grave, his voice kindly. “I meant no harm, C’mell.”

  He never knew that when he left she went back to the kitchen and cried for a while. It was Jestocost whom she had vainly loved ever since they had been comrades, many long years ago.

  Even after she died, at the full age of five-score and three, he kept seeing her about the corridors and shafts of Earthport. Many of her great-granddaughters looked just like her and several of them practiced the girlygirl business with huge success.

  They were not half-slaves. They were citizens (reserved grade) and they had photopasses which protected their property, their identity, and their rights. Jestocost was the godfather to them all; he was often embarrassed when the most voluptuous creatures in the universe threw playful kisses at him. All he asked was fulfillment of his political passions, not his personal ones. He had always been in love, madly in love—

  With justice itself.

  At last, his own time came, and he knew that he was dying, and he was not sorry. He had had a wife, hundreds of years ago, and had loved her well; their children had passed into the generations of man.

  In the ending, he wanted to know something, and he called to a nameless one (or to his successor) far beneath the world. He called with his mind till it was a scream.

  I have helped your people.

  “Yes,” came back the faintest of faraway whispers, inside his head.

  I am dying. I must know. Did she love me?

  “She went on without you, so much did she love you. She let you go, for your sake, not for hers. She really loved you. More than death. More than life. More than time. You will never be apart.”

  Never apart?

  “Not, not in the memory of man,” said the voice, and was then still.

  Jestocost lay back on his pillow and waited for the day to end.

  A Planet Named Shayol

  I

  There was a tremendous difference between the liner and the ferry in Mercer’s treatment. On the liner, the attendants made gibes when they brought him his food.

  “Scream good and loud,” said one rat-faced steward, “and then we’ll know it’s you when they broadcast the sounds of punishment on the Emperor’s birthday.”

  The other, fat steward ran the tip of his wet, red tongue over his thick, purple-red lips one time and said, “Stands to reason, man. If you hurt all the time, the whole lot of you would die. Something pretty good must happen, along with the—whatchamacallit. Maybe you turn into a woman. Maybe you turn into two people. Listen, cousin, if it’s real crazy fun, let me know…” Mercer said nothing. Mercer had enough troubles of his own not to wonder about the daydreams of nasty men.

  At the ferry it was different. The biopharmaceutical staff was deft, impersonal, quick in removing his shackles. They took off all his prison clothes and left them on the liner. When he boarded the ferry, naked, they looked him over as if he were a rare plant or a body on the operating table. They were almost kind in the clinical deftness of their touch. They did not treat him as a criminal, but as a specimen.

  Men and women, clad in their medical smocks, they looked at him as though he were already dead.

  He tried to speak. A man, older and more authoritative than the others, said firmly and clearly, “Do not worry about talking. I will talk to you myself in a very little time. What we are having now are the preliminaries, to de
termine your physical condition. Turn around, please.”

  Mercer turned around. An orderly rubbed his back with a very strong antiseptic.

  “This is going to sting,” said one of the technicians, “but it is nothing serious or painful. We are determining the toughness of the different layers of your skin.”

  Mercer, annoyed by this impersonal approach, spoke up just as a sharp little sting burned him above the sixth lumbar vertebra. “Don’t you know who I am?”

  “Of course we know who you are,” said a woman’s voice. “We have it all in a file in the corner. The chief doctor will talk about your crime later, if you want to talk about it. Keep quiet now. We are making a skin test, and you will feel much better if you do not make us prolong it.”

  Honesty forced her to add another sentence: “And we will get better results as well.”

  They had lost no time at all in getting to work.

  He peered at them sidewise to look at them. There was nothing about them to indicate that they were human devils in the antechambers of hell itself. Nothing was there to indicate that this was the satellite of Shayol, the final and uttermost place of chastisement and shame. They looked like medical people from his life before he committed the crime without a name.

  They changed from one routine to another. A woman, wearing a surgical mask, waved her hand at a white table.

  “Climb up on that, please.”

  No one had said “please” to Mercer since the guards had seized him at the edge of the palace. He started to obey her and then he saw that there were padded handcuffs at the head of the table. He stopped.

  “Get along, please,” she demanded. Two or three of the others turned around to look at both of them.

  The second “please” shook him. He had to speak. These were people, and he was a person again. He felt his voice rising, almost cracking into shrillness as he asked her, “Please, Ma’am, is the punishment going to begin?”

  “There’s no punishment here,” said the woman. “This is the satellite. Oct on the table. We’re going to give you your first skin-toughening before you talk to the head doctor. Then you can tell him all about your crime—”

  “You know my crime?” he said, greeting it almost like a neighbor.

  “Of course not,” said she, “but all the people who come through here are believed to have committed crimes. Somebody thinks so or they wouldn’t be here. Most of them want to talk about their personal crimes. But don’t slow me down. I’m a skin technician, and down on the surface of Shayol you’re going to need the very best work that any of us can do for you. Now get on that table. And when you are ready to talk to the chief you’ll have something to talk about besides your crime.”

  He complied.

  Another masked person, probably a girl, took his hands in cool, gentle fingers and fitted them to the padded cuffs in a way he had never sensed before. By now he thought he knew every interrogation machine in the whole empire, but this was nothing like any of them.

  The orderly stepped back. “All clear, Sir and Doctor.”

  “Which do you prefer?” said the skin technician. “A great deal of pain or a couple of hours’ unconsciousness?”

  “Why should I want pain?” said Mercer.

  “Some specimens do,” said the technician, “by the time they arrive here. I suppose it depends on what people have done to them before they got here. I take it you did not get any of the dream-punishments.”

  “No,” said Mercer. “I missed those.” He thought to himself, I didn’t know that I missed anything at all.

  He remembered his last trial, himself wired and plugged in to the witness stand. The room had been high and dark. Bright blue light shone on the panel of judges, their judicial caps a fantastic parody of the episcopal mitres of long, long ago. The judges were talking, but he could not hear them. Momentarily the insulation slipped and he heard one of them say, “Look at that white, devilish face. A man like that is guilty of everything. I vote for Pain Terminal.” “Not Planet Shayol?” said a second voice. “The dromozoa place,” said a third voice. “That should suit him,” said the first voice. One of the judicial engineers must then have noticed that the prisoner was listening illegally. He was cut off. Mercer then thought that he had gone through everything which the cruelty and intelligence of mankind could devise.

  But this woman said he had missed the dream-punishments. Could there be people in the universe even worse off than himself? There must be a lot of people down on Shayol. They never came back.

  He was going to be one of them; would they boast to him of what they had done, before they were made to come to this place?

  “You asked for it,” said the woman technician. “It is just an ordinary anesthetic. Don’t panic when you awaken. Your skin is going to be thickened and strengthened chemically and biologically.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Of course,” said she. “But get this out of your head. We’re not punishing you. The pain here is just ordinary medical pain. Anybody might get it if they needed a lot of surgery. The punishment, if that’s what you want to call it, is down on Shayol. Our only job is to make sure that you are fit to survive after you are landed. In a way, we are saving your life ahead of time. You can be grateful for that if you want to be. Meanwhile, you will save yourself a lot of trouble if you realize that your nerve endings will respond to the change in the skin. You had better expect to be very uncomfortable when you recover. But then, we can help that, too.” She brought down an enormous lever and Mercer blacked out.

  When he came to, he was in an ordinary hospital room, but he did not notice it. He seemed bedded in fire. He lifted his hand to see if there were flames on it. It looked the way it always had, except that it was a little red and a little swollen. He tried to turn in the bed. The fire became a scorching blast which stopped him in mid-turn. Uncontrollably, he moaned.

  A voice spoke, “You are ready for some pain-killer.”

  It was a girl nurse. “Hold your head still,” she said, “and I will give you half an amp of pleasure. Your skin won’t bother you then.”

  She slipped a soft cap on his head. It looked like metal but it felt like silk.

  He had to dig his fingernails into his palms to keep from threshing about on the bed.

  “Scream if you want to,” she said. “A lot of them do. It will just be a minute or two before the cap finds the right lobe in your brain.”

  She stepped to the corner and did something which he could not see.

  There was the flick of a switch.

  The fire did not vanish from his skin. He still felt it; but suddenly it did not matter. His mind was full of delicious pleasure which throbbed outward from his head and seemed to pulse down through his nerves. He had visited the pleasure palaces, but he had never felt anything like this before.

  He wanted to thank the girl, and he twisted around in the bed to see her. He could feel his whole body flash with pain as he did so, but the pain was far away. And the pulsating pleasure which coursed out of his head, down his spinal cord, and into his nerves was so intense that the pain got through only as a remote, unimportant signal.

  She was standing very still in the corner.

  “Thank you, nurse,” said he.

  She said nothing.

  He looked more closely, though it was hard to look while enormous pleasure pulsed through his body like a symphony written in nerve-messages. He focused his eyes on her and saw that she too wore a soft metallic cap.

  He pointed at it.

  She blushed all the way down to her throat.

  She spoke dreamily, “You looked like a nice man to me. I didn’t think you’d tell on me…”

  He gave her what he thought was a friendly smile, but with the pain in his skin and the pleasure bursting out of his head, he really had no idea of what his actual expression might be. “It’s against the law,” he said. “It’s terribly against the law. But it is nice.”

  “How do you think we stand it here?�
� said the nurse. “You specimens come in here talking like ordinary people and then you go down to Shayol. Terrible things happen to you on Shayol. Then the surface station sends up parts of you, over and over again. I may see your head ten times, quick-frozen and ready for cutting up, before my two years are up. You prisoners ought to know how we suffer,” she crooned, the pleasure-charge still keeping her relaxed and happy. “You ought to die as soon as you get down there and not pester us with your torments. We can hear you screaming, you know. You keep on sounding like people even after Shayol begins to work on you. Why do you do it, Mr. Specimen?” She giggled sillily. “You hurt our feelings so. No wonder a girl like me has to have a little jolt now and then. It’s real, real dreamy and I don’t mind getting you ready to go down on Shayol.” She staggered over to his bed. “Pull this cap off me, will you? I haven’t got enough will power left to raise my hands.”

  Mercer saw his hand tremble as he reached for the cap.

  His fingers touched the girl’s soft hair through the cap. As he tried to get his thumb under the edge of the cap, in order to pull it off, he realized this was the loveliest girl he had ever touched. He felt that he had always loved her, that he always would. Her cap came off. She stood erect, staggering a little before she found a chair to hold to. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

  “Just a minute,” she said in her normal voice. “I’ll be with you in just a minute. The only time I can get a jolt of this is when one of you visitors gets a dose to get over the skin trouble.”

  She turned to the room mirror to adjust her hair. Speaking with her back to him, she said, “I hope I didn’t say anything about downstairs.”

  Mercer still had the cap on. He loved this beautiful girl who had put it on him. He was ready to weep at the thought that she had had the same kind of pleasure which he still enjoyed. Not for the world would he say anything which could hurt her feelings. He was sure she wanted to be told that she had not said anything about “downstairs”—probably shop talk for the surface of Shayol—so he assured her warmly, “You said nothing. Nothing at all.”