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

by Cordwainer Smith

  The horse rolled his eyes at her and said nothing.

  The cat-woman pressed an emergency button on the side of the room. One could not see the other communication screen which lighted up, but her end of the conversation was plain.

  “I want an ornithopter. Big one. Emergency.”

  A mumble from the side screen.

  “To go to the Hippy Dipsy. There’s an underperson there, and he’s in so much trouble that he won’t talk.” From the screen beside her, the horse seemed to have understood the sense of the message, if not the words, because he repeated:

  Whay-yay-whay-yay-yay!

  “See,” said the cat-woman to the person in the other screen, “that’s what he’s doing. It’s obviously an emergency.”

  The voice from the other screen came through, tinny and remote by double recording:

  “Fool, yourself, cat-woman! Nobody can fly an ornithopter into a dipsy. Tell your silly friend to go back to the floor of the dipsy and we’ll pick him up by space rocket.”

  Whay-yay-yay! said the horse impatiently.

  “He’s not my friend,” said the cat-woman with brisk annoyance. “I just discovered him a couple of minutes ago. He’s asking for help. Any idiot can see that, even if we don’t know his language.”

  The picture snapped off.

  The next scene showed tiny human figures working with searchlights at the top of an immeasurably high cliff. Here and there, the beam of the searchlight caught the cliff face; the translucent faceted material of the cliff looked almost like rows of eerie windows, their lights snapping on and off, as the searchlight moved.

  Far down there was a red glow. Fire came from inside the mountain.

  Even with telescopic lenses the cameraman could not get the close-up of the glow. On one side there was the figure of the horse, his four arms stretched at impossible angles as he held himself firm in the crevasse; on the other side of the fire there were the even tinier figures of men, laboring to fit some sort of sling to reach the horse.

  For some odd reason having to do with the techniques of recording, the voices came through very plainly, even the heavy, tired breathing of the old horse. Now and then he uttered one of the special horse-words which seemed to be the limit of his vocabulary. He was obviously watching the men, and was firmly persuaded of their friendliness to him. His large, tame, yellow eyes rolled wildly in the light of the searchlight and every time the horse looked down, he seemed to shudder.

  Casher O’Neill found this entirely understandable. The bottom of the Hippy Dipsy was nowhere in sight; the horse, even with nothing more than the enlarged fingernails of his middle fingers to help him climb, had managed to get about four of the six kilometers’ height of the cliff face behind him.

  The voice of a tiger-man sounded clearly from among the shift of men, underpeople, and robots who were struggling on the face of the cliff.

  “It’s a gamble, but not much of a gamble. I weigh six hundred kilos myself, and, do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever had to use my full strength since I was a kitten. I know that I can jump across the fire and help that thing be more comfortable. I can even tie a rope around him so that he won’t slip and fall after all the work we’ve done. And the work he’s done, too,” added the tiger-man grimly. “Perhaps I can just take him in my arms and jump back with him. It will be perfectly safe if you have a safety rope around each of us. After all, I never saw a less prehensile creature in my life. You can’t call those fingers of his ‘fingers.’ They look like little boxes of bone, designed for running around and not much good for anything else.”

  There was a murmur of other voices and then the command of the supervisor. “Go ahead.”

  No one was prepared for what happened next.

  The cameraman got the tiger-man right in the middle of his frame, showing the attachment of one rope around the tiger-man’s broad waist. The tiger-man was a modified type whom the authorities had not bothered to put into human cosmetic form. He still had his ears on top of his head, yellow and black fur over his face, huge incisors overlapping his lower jaw, and enormous antenna-like whiskers sticking out from his moustache. He must have been thoroughly modified inside, however, because his temperament was calm, friendly, and even a little humorous; he must have had a carefully re-done mouth, because the utterance of human speech came to him clearly and without distortion.

  He jumped—a mighty jump, right through the top edges of the flame.

  The horse saw him.

  The horse jumped too, almost in the same moment, also through the top of the flame, going the other way.

  The horse had feared the tiger-man more than he did the cliff.

  The horse landed right in the group of workers. He tried not to hurt them with his flailing limbs, but he did knock one man—a true man, at that—off the cliff. The man’s scream faded as he crashed into the impenetrable darkness below.

  The robots were quick. Having no emotions except on, off, and high, they did not get excited. They had the horse trussed and, before the true men and underpeople had ensured their footing, they had signaled the crane operator at the top of the cliff. The horse, his four arms swinging limply, disappeared upward.

  The tiger-man jumped back through the flames to the nearer ledge. The picture went off.

  In the viewing room, the Hereditary Dictator Philip Vincent stood up. He stretched, looking around.

  Genevieve looked at Casher O’Neill expectantly.

  “That’s the story,” said the Dictator mildly. “Now you solve it.”

  “Where is the horse now?” said Casher O’Neill.

  “In the hospital, of course. My niece can take you to see him.”

  III

  After a short, painful, and very thorough peeping of his own mind by the Hereditary Dictator, Casher O’Neill and Genevieve set off for the hospital in which the horse was being kept in bed. The people of Pontoppidan had not known what else to do with him, so they had placed him under strong sedation and were trying to feed him with sugar-water compounds going directly into his veins. Genevieve told Casher that the horse was wasting away.

  They walked to the hospital over amethyst pebbles.

  Instead of wearing his spacesuit, Casher wore a surface helmet which enriched his oxygen. His hosts had not counted on his getting spells of uncontrollable itching from the sharply reduced atmospheric pressure. He did not dare mention the matter, because he was still hoping to get the green ruby as a weapon in his private war for the liberation of the Twelve Niles from the rule of Colonel Wedder. Whenever the itching became less than excruciating, he enjoyed the walk and the company of the slight, beautiful girl who accompanied him across the fields of jewels to the hospital. (In later years, he sometimes wondered what might have happened. Was the itching a part of his destiny, which saved him for the freedom of the city of Kaheer and the planet Mizzer? Might not the innocent brilliant loveliness of the girl have otherwise tempted him to forswear his duty and stay forever on Pontoppidan?)

  The girl wore a new kind of cosmetic for outdoor walking—a warm peach-hued powder which let the natural pink of her cheeks show through. Her eyes, he saw, were a living, deep gray; her eyelashes, long; her smile, innocently provocative beyond all ordinary belief. It was a wonder that the Hereditary Dictator had not had to stop duels and murders between young men vying for her favor.

  They finally reached the hospital, just as Casher O’Neill thought he could stand it no longer and would have to ask Genevieve for some kind of help or carriage to get indoors and away from the frightful itching.

  The building was underground.

  The entrance was sumptuous. Diamonds and rubies, the size of building-bricks on Mizzer, had been set to frame the doorway, which was apparently enameled steel. Kuraf at his most lavish had never wasted money on anything like this door-frame. Genevieve saw his glance.

  “It did cost a lot of credits. We had to bring a blind artist all the way from Olympia to paint that enamel-work. The poor man. He spent mos
t of his time trying to steal extra gem-stones when he should have known that we pay justly and never allowed anyone to get away with stealing.”

  “What do you do?” asked Casher O’Neill.

  “We cut thieves up in space, just at the edge of the atmosphere. We have more manned boats in orbit than any other planet I know of. Maybe Old North Australia has more, but, then, nobody ever gets close enough to Old North Australia to come back alive and tell.”

  They went on into the hospital.

  A respectful chief surgeon insisted on keeping them in the office and entertaining them with tea and confectionery, when they both wanted to go see the horse; common politeness prohibited their pushing through. Finally they got past the ceremony and into the room in which the horse was kept.

  Close up, they could see how much he had suffered. There were cuts and abrasions over almost all of his body. One of his hooves—the doctor told them that was the correct name, hoof, for the big middle fingernail on which he walked—was split; the doctor had put a cadmium-silver bar through it. The horse lifted his head when they entered, but he saw that they were just more people, not horsey people, so he put his head down, very patiently.

  “What’s the prospect, doctor?” asked Casher O’Neill, turning away from the animal.

  “Could I ask you, sir, a foolish question first?”

  Surprised, Casher could only say yes.

  “You’re an O’Neill. Your uncle is Kuraf. How do you happen to be called ‘Casher’?”

  “That’s simple,” laughed Casher. “This is my young-man-name. On Mizzer, everybody gets a baby name, which nobody uses. Then he gets a nickname. Then he gets a young-man-name, based on some characteristic or some friendly joke, until he picks out his career. When he enters his profession, he picks out his own career name. If I liberate Mizzer and overthrow Colonel Wedder, I’ll have to think up a suitable career name for myself.”

  “But why ‘Casher,’ sir?” persisted the doctor.

  “When I was a little boy and people asked me what I wanted, I always asked for cash. I guess that contrasted with my uncle’s wastefulness, so they called me Casher.”

  “But what is cash? One of your crops?”

  It was Casher’s time to look amazed. “Cash is money. Paper credits. People pass them back and forth when they buy things.”

  “Here on Pontoppidan, all the money belongs to me. All of it,” said Genevieve. “My uncle is trustee for me. But I have never been allowed to touch it or to spend it. It’s all just planet business.”

  The doctor blinked respectfully. “Now this horse, sir, if you will pardon my asking about your name, is a very strange case. Physiologically he is a pure Earth type. He is suited only for a vegetable diet, but otherwise he is a very close relative of man. He has a single stomach and a very large cone-shaped heart. That’s where the trouble is. The heart is in bad condition. He is dying.”

  “Dying?” cried Genevieve.

  “That’s the sad, horrible part,” said the doctor. “He is dying but he cannot die. He could go on like this for many years. Perinö wasted enough stroon on this animal to make a planet immortal. Now the animal is worn out but cannot die.”

  Casher O’Neill let out a long, low, ululating whistle. Everybody in the room jumped. He disregarded them. It was the whistle he had used near the stables, back among the Twelve Niles, when he wanted to call a horse.

  The horse knew it. The large head lifted. The eyes rolled at him so imploringly that he expected tears to fall from them, even though he was pretty sure that horses could not lachrymate.

  He squatted on the floor, close to the horse’s head, with a hand on its mane.

  “Quick,” he murmured to the surgeon. “Get me a piece of sugar and an underperson-telepath. The underperson-telepath must not be of carnivorous origin.”

  The doctor looked stupid. He snapped “Sugar” at an assistant, but he squatted down next to Casher O’Neill and said, “You will have to repeat that about an underperson. This is not an underperson hospital at all. We have very few of them here. The horse is here only by command of His Excellency Philip Vincent, who said that the horse of Perinö should be given the best of all possible care. He even told me,” said the doctor, “that if anything wrong happened to this horse, I would ride patrol for it for the next eighty years. So I’ll do what I can. Do you find me too talkative? Some people do. What kind of an underperson do you want?”

  “I need,” said Casher, very calmly, “a telepathic underperson, both to find out what this horse wants and to tell the horse that I am here to help him. Horses are vegetarians and they do not like meat-eaters. Do you have a vegetarian underperson around the hospital?”

  “We used to have some squirrel-men,” said the chief surgeon, “but when we changed the air circulating system the squirrel-men went away with the old equipment. I think they went to a mine. We have tiger-men, cat-men, and my secretary is a wolf.”

  “Oh, no!” said Casher O’Neill. “Can you imagine a sick horse confiding in a wolf?”

  “It’s no more than you are doing,” said the surgeon, very softly, glancing up to see if Genevieve were in hearing range, and apparently judging that she was not. “The Hereditary Dictators here sometimes cut suspicious guests to pieces on their way off the planet. That is, unless the guests are licensed, regular traders. You are not. You might be a spy, planning to rob us. How do I know? I wouldn’t give a diamond chip for your chances of being alive next week. What do you want to do about the horse? That might please the Dictator. And you might live.”

  Casher O’Neill was so staggered by the confidence of the surgeon that he squatted there thinking about himself, not about the patient. The horse licked him, seemingly sensing that he needed solace.

  The surgeon had an idea. “Horses and dogs used to go together, didn’t they, back in the old days of Manhome, when all the people lived on planet Earth?”

  “Of course,” said Casher. “We still run them together in hunts on Mizzer, but under these new laws of the Instrumentality we’ve run out of underpeople-criminals to hunt.”

  “I have a good dog,” said the chief surgeon. “She talks pretty well, but she is so sympathetic that she upsets the patients by loving them too much. I have her down in the second underbasement tending the dish-sterilizing machinery.”

  “Bring her up,” said Casher in a whisper.

  He remembered that he did not need to whisper about this, so he stood up and spoke to Genevieve:

  “They have found a good dog-telepath who may reach through to the mind of the horse. It may give us the answer.”

  She put her hand on his forearm gently, with the approbatory gesture of a princess. Her fingers dug into his flesh. Was she wishing him well against her uncle’s habitual treachery, or was this merely the impulse of a kind young girl who knew nothing of the way the world was run?

  IV

  The interview went extremely well.

  The dog-woman was almost perfectly humaniform. She looked like a tired, cheerful, worn-out old woman, not valuable enough to be given the life-prolonging santaclara drug called stroon. Work had been her life and she had had plenty of it, Casher O’Neill felt a twinge of envy when he realized that happiness goes by the petty chances of life and not by the large destiny. This dog-woman, with her haggard face and her stringy gray hair, had more love, happiness, and sympathy than Kuraf had found with his pleasures, Colonel Wedder with his powers, or himself with his crusade. Why did life do that? Was there no justice, ever? Why should a worn-out worthless old underwoman be happy when he was not?

  “Never mind,” she said, “you’ll get over it and then you will be happy.”

  “Over what?” he said. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “I’m not going to say it,” she retorted, meaning that she was telepathic. “You’re a prisoner of yourself. Some day you will escape to unimportance and happiness. You’re a good man. You’re trying to save yourself, but you really like this horse.”

  “Of c
ourse I do,” said Casher O’Neill. “He’s a brave old horse, climbing out of that hell to get back to people.”

  When he said the word hell her eyes widened, but she said nothing. In his mind, he saw the sign of a fish scrawled on a dark wall and he felt her think at him, So you too know something of the “dark wonderful knowledge” which is not yet to be revealed to all mankind?

  He thought a cross back at her and then turned his thinking to the horse, lest their telepathy be monitored and strange punishments await them both.

  She spoke in words, “Shall we link?”

  “Link,” he said.

  Genevieve stepped up. Her clear-cut, pretty, sensitive face was alight with excitement. “Could I—could I be cut in?”

  “Why not?” said the dog-woman, glancing at him. He nodded. The three of them linked hands and then the dog-woman put her left hand on the forehead of the old horse.

  The sand splashed beneath their feet as they ran toward Kaheer. The delicious pressure of a man’s body was on their backs. The red sky of Mizzer gleamed over them. There came the shout:

  “I’m a horse, I’m a horse, I’m a horse!”

  “You’re from Mizzer,” thought Casher O’Neill, “from Kaheer itself!”

  “I don’t know names,” thought the horse, “but you’re from my land. The land, the good land.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Dying,” thought the horse. “Dying for hundreds and thousands of sundowns. The old one brought me. No riding, no running, no people. Just the old one and the small ground. I have been dying since I came here.”

  Casher O’Neill got a glimpse of Perinö sitting and watching the horse, unconscious of the cruelty and loneliness which he had inflicted on his large pet by making it immortal and then giving it no work to do.

  “Do you know what dying is?”

  Thought the horse promptly: “Certainly. No-horse.”

  “Do you know what life is?”

  “Yes. Being a horse.”