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

by Cordwainer Smith

  The Lady Johanna lifted her right hand in a gesture of silence and compassion. She looked around the room. Her eyes came back to the Lady Da. Perhaps she guessed what effort the Lady Da had made in order to remain standing erect while the two drugs, the super-condamine and the lifeboat drug, fought within her veins.

  “You people can rest. I will tell you now that all things possible will be done for you. The Empire is finished. The Fundamental Agreement, by which the Instrumentality surrendered the Empire a thousand years ago, has been set aside. We did not know that you people existed. We would have found out in time, but I am sorry we did not find out sooner. Is there anything we can do for you right away?”

  “Time is what we all have,” said the Lady Da. “Perhaps we cannot ever leave Shayol, because of the dromozoa and the medicine. The one could be dangerous. The other must never be permitted to be known.”

  The Lady Johanna Gnade looked around the room. When her glance reached him, B’dikkat fell to his knees and lifted his enormous hands in complete supplication.

  “What do you want?” said she.

  “These,” said B’dikkat, pointing to the mutilated children. “Order a stop on children. Stop it now!” He commanded her with the last cry, and she accepted his command. “And, Lady—” he stopped as if shy.

  “Yes? Go on.”

  “Lady, I am unable to kill. It is not in my nature. To work, to help, but not to kill. What do I do with these?” He gestured at the four motionless children on the floor.

  “Keep them,” she said. “Just keep them.”

  “I can’t,” he said, “There’s no way to get off this planet alive. I do not have food for them in the cabin. They will die in a few hours. And governments,” he added wisely, “take a long, long time to do things.”

  “Can you give them the medicine?”

  “No, it would kill them if I give them that stuff first before the dromozoa have fortified their bodily processes.”

  The Lady Johanna Gnade filled the room with tinkling laughter that was very close to weeping. “Fools, poor fools, and the more fool I! If super-condamine works only after the dromozoa, what is the purpose of the secret?”

  B’dikkat rose to his feet, offended. He frowned, but he could not get the words with which to defend himself.

  The Lady Da, ex-empress of a fallen empire, addressed the other Lady with ceremony and force: “Put them outside, so they will be touched. They will hurt. Have B’dikkat give them the drug as soon as he thinks it safe. I beg your leave, my Lady…”

  Mercer had to catch her before she fell.

  “You’ve all had enough,” said the Lady Johanna. “A storm ship with heavily armed troops is on its way to your ferry satellite. They will seize the medical personnel and find out who committed this crime against children.”

  Mercer dared to speak. “Will you punish the guilty doctor?”

  “You speak of punishment.” she cried. “You!”

  “It’s fair. I was punished for doing wrong. Why shouldn’t he be?”

  “Punish—punish!” she said to him, “We will cure that doctor. And we will cure you too, if we can.”

  Mercer began to weep. He thought of the oceans of happiness which super-condamine had brought him, forgetting the hideous pain and the deformities on Shayol. Would there be no next needle? He could not guess what life would be like off Shayol. Was there to be no more tender, fatherly B’dikkat coming with his knives?

  He lifted his tear-stained face to the Lady Johanna Gnade and choked out the words. “Lady, we are all insane in this place. I do not think we want to leave.”

  She turned her face away, moved by enormous compassion. Her next words were to B’dikkat. “You are wise and good, even if you are not a human being. Give them all of the drug they can take. The Instrumentality will decide what to do with all of you. I will survey your planet with robot soldiers. Will the robots be safe, cowman?”

  B’dikkat did not like the thoughtless name she called him, but he held no offense. “The robots will be all right, Ma’am, but the dromozoa will be excited if they cannot feed them and heal them. Send as few as you can. We do not know how the dromozoa live or die.”

  “As few as I can,” she murmured. She lifted her hand in command to some technician unimaginable distances away. The odorless smoke rose about her and the image was gone.

  A shrill cheerful voice spoke up. “I fixed your window,” said the Customs Robot. B’dikkat thanked him absentmindedly. He helped Mercer and the Lady Da into the doorway. When they had gotten outside, they were promptly stung by the dromozoa. It did not matter.

  B’dikkat himself emerged, carrying the four children in his two gigantic, tender hands. He lay the slack bodies on the ground near the cabin. He watched as the bodies went into spasm with the onset of the dromozoa. Mercer and the Lady Da saw that his brown cow eyes were rimmed with red and that his huge cheeks were dampened by tears.

  Hours or centuries.

  Who could tell them apart?

  The herd went back to its usual life, except that the intervals between needles were much shorter. The once-commander, Suzdal, refused the needle when he heard the news. Whenever he could walk, he followed the Customs Robots around as they photographed, took soil samples, and made a count of the bodies. They were particularly interested in the mountain of Go-Captain Alvarez and professed themselves uncertain as to whether there was organic life there or not. The mountain did appear to react to super-condamine, but they could find no blood, no heart-beat. Moisture, moved by the dromozoa, seemed to have replaced the once-human bodily processes.

  V

  And then, early one morning, the sky opened.

  Ship after ship landed. People emerged, wearing clothes.

  The dromozoa ignored the newcomers. Mercer, who was in a state of bliss, confusedly tried to think this through until he realized that the ships were loaded to their skins with communications machines; the “people” were either robots or images of persons in other places.

  The robots swiftly gathered together the herd. Using wheelbarrows, they brought the hundreds of mindless people to the landing area.

  Mercer heard a voice he knew. It was the Lady Johanna Gnade. “Set me high,” she commanded.

  Her form rose until she seemed one-fourth the size of Alvarez. Her voice took on more volume.

  “Wake them all,” she commanded.

  Robots moved among them, spraying them with a gas which was both sickening and sweet. Mercer felt his mind go clear. The super-condamine still operated in his nerves and veins, but his cortical area was free of it. He thought clearly.

  “I bring you,” cried the compassionate feminine voice of the gigantic Lady Johanna, “the judgment of the Instrumentality on the planet Shayol.

  “Item: the surgical supplies will be maintained and the dromozoa will not be molested. Portions of human bodies will be left here to grow, and the grafts will be collected by robots. Neither man nor homunculus will live here again.

  “Item: the underman B’dikkat, of cattle extraction, will be rewarded by an immediate return to Earth. He will be paid twice his expected thousand years of earnings.”

  The voice of B’dikkat, without amplification, was almost as loud as hers through the amplifier. He shouted his protest, “Lady, Lady!”

  She looked down at him, his enormous body reaching to ankle height on her swirling gown, and said in a very informal tone, “What do you want?”

  “Let me finish my work first,” he cried, so that all could hear. “Let me finish taking care of these people.”

  The specimens who had minds all listened attentively. The brainless ones were trying to dig themselves back into the soft earth of Shayol, using their powerful claws for the purpose. Whenever one began to disappear, a robot seized him by a limb and pulled him out again.

  “Item: cephalectomies will be performed on all persons with irrecoverable minds. Their bodies will be left here. Their heads will be taken away and killed as pleasantly as we can
manage, probably by an overdosage of super-condamine.”

  “The last big jolt,” murmured Commander Suzdal, who stood near Mercer. “That’s fair enough.”

  “Item: the children have been found to be the last heirs of the Empire. An over-zealous official sent them here to prevent their committing treason when they grew up. The doctor obeyed orders without questioning them. Both the official and the doctor have been cured and their memories of this have been erased, so that they need have no shame or grief for what they have done.”

  “It’s unfair,” cried the half-man. “They should be punished as we were!”

  The Lady Johanna Gnade looked down at him. “Punishment is ended. We will give you anything you wish, but not the pain of another. I shall continue.

  “Item: since none of you wish to resume the lives which you led previously, we are moving you to another planet nearby. It is similar to Shayol, but much more beautiful. There are no dromozoa.”

  At this an uproar seized the herd. They shouted, wept, cursed, appealed. They all wanted the needle, and if they had to stay on Shayol to get it, they would stay.

  “Item,” said the gigantic image of the lady, overriding their babble with her great but feminine voice, “you will not have super-condamine on the new planet, since without dromozoa it would kill you. But there will be caps. Remember the caps. We will try to cure you and to make people of you again. But if you give up, we will not force you. Caps are very powerful; with medical help you can live under them many years.”

  A hush fell on the group. In their various ways, they were trying to compare the electrical caps which had stimulated their pleasure-lobes with the drug which had drowned them a thousand times in pleasure. Their murmur sounded like assent.

  “Do you have any questions?” said the Lady Johanna.

  “When do we get the caps?” said several. They were human enough that they laughed at their own impatience.

  “Soon,” said she reassuringly. “Very soon.”

  “Very soon,” echoed B’dikkat, reassuring his charges even though he was no longer in control.

  “Question,” cried the Lady Da.

  “My Lady…?” said the Lady Johanna, giving the ex-empress her due courtesy.

  “Will we be permitted marriage?”

  The Lady Johanna looked astonished. “I don’t know.” She smiled. “I don’t know any reason why not—”

  “I claim this man Mercer,” said the Lady Da. “When the drugs were deepest, and the pain was greatest, he was the one who always tried to think. May I have him?”

  Mercer thought the procedure arbitrary but he was so happy that he said nothing. The Lady Johanna scrutinized him and then she nodded. She lifted her arms in a gesture of blessing and farewell.

  The robots began to gather the pink herd into two groups. One group was to whisper in a ship over to a new world, new problems and new lives. The other group, no matter how much its members tried to scuttle into the dirt, was gathered for the last honor which humanity could pay their manhood.

  B’dikkat, leaving everyone else, jogged with his bottle across the plain to give the mountain-man Alvarez an especially large gift of delight.

  On the Gem Planet

  Consider the horse. He climbed up through the crevasses of a cliff of gems; the force which drove him was the love of man.

  Consider Mizzer, the resort planet, where the dictator Colonel Wedder reformed the culture so violently that whatever had been slovenly now became atrocious.

  Consider Genevieve, so rich that she was the prisoner of her own wealth, so beautiful that she was the victim of her own beauty, so intelligent that she knew there was nothing, nothing to be done about her fate.

  Consider Casher O’Neill, a wanderer among the planets, thirsting for justice and yet hoping in his innermost thoughts that “justice” was not just another word for revenge.

  Consider Pontoppidan, that literal gem of a planet, where the people were too rich and busy to have good food, open air, or much fun. All they had were diamonds, rubies, tourmalines, and emeralds.

  Add these together and you have one of the strangest stories ever told from world to world.

  I

  When Casher O’Neill came to Pontoppidan, he found that the capital city was appropriately called Andersen.

  This was the second century of the Rediscovery of Man. People everywhere had taken up old names, old languages, old customs, as fast as the robots and the underpeople could retrieve the data from the rubbish of forgotten starlanes or the subsurface ruins of Manhome itself.

  Casher knew this very well, to his bitter cost. Re-acculturation had brought him revolution and exile. He came from the dry, beautiful planet of Mizzer. He was himself the nephew of the ruined ex-ruler, Kuraf, whose collection of objectionable books had at one time been unmatched in the settled galaxy; he had stood aside, half-assenting, when the colonels Gibna and Wedder took over the planet in the name of reform; he had implored the Instrumentality, vainly, for help when Wedder became a tyrant; and now he traveled among the stars, looking for men or weapons who might destroy Wedder and make Kaheer again the luxurious, happy city which it once had been.

  He felt that his cause was hopeless when he landed on Pontoppidan. The people were warm-hearted, friendly, intelligent, but they had no motives to fight for, no weapons to fight with, no enemies to fight against. They had little public spirit, such as Casher O’Neill had seen back on his native planet of Mizzer. They were concerned about little things.

  Indeed, at the time of his arrival, the Pontoppidans were wildly excited about a horse.

  A horse! Who worries about one horse?

  Casher O’Neill himself said so. “Why bother about a horse? We have lots of them on Mizzer. They are four-handed beings, eight times the weight of a man, with only one finger on each of the four hands. The fingernail is very heavy and permits them to run fast. That’s why our people have them, for running.”

  “Why run?” said the Hereditary Dictator of Pontoppidan. “Why run, when you can fly? Don’t you have ornithopters?”

  “We don’t run with them,” said Casher indignantly. “We make them run against each other and then we pay prizes to the one which runs fastest.”

  “But then,” said Philip Vincent, the Hereditary Dictator, “you get a very illogical situation. When you have tried out these four-fingered beings, you know how fast each one goes. So what? Why bother?”

  His niece interrupted. She was a fragile little thing, smaller than Casher O’Neill liked women to be. She had clear gray eyes, well-marked eyebrows, a very artificial coiffure of silver-blonde hair, and the most sensitive little mouth he had ever seen. She conformed to the local fashion by wearing some kind of powder or face cream which was flesh-pink in color but which had overtones of lilac. On a woman as old as twenty-two, such a coloration would have made the wearer look like an old hag, but on Genevieve it was pleasant, if rather startling. It gave the effect of a happy child playing grown-up and doing the job joyfully and well. Casher knew that it was hard to tell ages in these off-trail planets. Genevieve might be a grande dame in her third or fourth rejuvenation.

  He doubted it, on second glance. What she said was sensible, young, and pert:

  “But uncle, they’re animals!”

  “I know that,” he rumbled.

  “But uncle, don’t you see it?”

  “Stop saying ‘but uncle’ and tell me what you mean,” growled the Dictator, very fondly.

  “Animals are always uncertain.”

  “Of course,” said the uncle.

  “That makes it a game, uncle,” said Genevieve. “They’re never sure that any one of them would do the same thing twice. Imagine the excitement—the beautiful big beings from earth running around and around on their four middle fingers, the big fingernails making the gems jump loose from the ground!”

  “I’m not at all sure it’s that way. Besides, Mizzer may be covered with something valuable, such as earth or sand, instead of gemstones
like the ones we have here on Pontoppidan. You know, your flower-pots with their rich, warm, wet, soft earth?”

  “Of course I do, uncle. And I know what you paid for them. You were very generous. And still are,” she added diplomatically, glancing quickly at Casher O’Neill to see how the familial piety went across with the visitor.

  “We’re not that rich on Mizzer. It’s mostly sand, with farmland along the Twelve Niles, our big rivers.”

  “I’ve seen pictures of rivers,” said Genevieve. “Imagine living on a whole world full of flower-pot stuff!”

  “You’re getting off the subject, darling. We were wondering why anyone would bring one horse, just one horse, to Pontoppidan. I suppose you could race a horse against himself, if you had a stopwatch. But would it be fun? Would you do that, young man?”

  Casher O’Neill tried to be respectful. “In my home we used to have a lot of horses. I’ve seen my uncle time them one by one.”

  “Your uncle?” said the Dictator interestedly. “Who was your uncle that he had all these four-fingered ‘horses’ running around? They’re all Earth animals and very expensive.”

  Casher felt the coming of the low, slow blow he had met so many times before, right from the whole outside world into the pit of his stomach. “My uncle”—he stammered—“my uncle—I thought you knew—was the old Dictator of Mizzer, Kuraf.”

  Philip Vincent jumped to his feet, very lightly for so well-fleshed a man. The young mistress, Genevieve, clutched at the throat of her dress.

  “Kuraf!” cried the old Dictator. “Kuraf! We know about him, even here. But you were supposed to be a Mizzer patriot, not one of Kuraf’s people.”

  “He doesn’t have any children—” Casher began to explain.