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

by Cordwainer Smith

The Administrator hung almost slack in Gosigo’s arms. By his own standard and in his own way, he was a very brave man, indeed. His eyes looked clear, even though his body was collapsing.

  “To see T’ruth, if she will see me,” said Rankin Meiklejohn.

  “She cannot,” said Casher, “see you now. Gosigo!”

  The forgetty turned to Casher and gave him a bow.

  “You will forget me. You have not seen me.”

  “I have not seen you, lord. Give my greetings to your lady. Anything else?”

  “Yes. Take your master home, as safely and swiftly as you can.”

  “My lord!” cried Gosigo, though this was an improper title for Casher. Casher turned around.

  “My lord, tell her to extend the weather machines for just a few more kilometers and I will have him home safe in ten minutes. At top speed.”

  “I can tell her,” said Casher, “but I cannot promise she will do it.”

  “Of course,” said Gosigo. He picked up the Administrator and began putting him into the groundcar, Rankin Meiklejohn bawled once, like a man crying in pain. It sounded like a blurred version of the name Murray Madigan. No one heard it but Gosigo and Casher; Gosigo busy closing the groundcar, Casher pushing on the big house door.

  The door clicked.

  There was silence.

  The opening of the door was remembered only by the warm sweet salty stink of seaweed, which had disturbed the odor-pattern of the changeless, musty old house.

  Casher hurried back with the message about the weather machines.

  T’ruth received the message gravely. Without looking at the console, she reached out and controlled it with her extended right hand, not taking her eyes off Casher for a moment. The machine clicked its agreement. T’ruth exhaled.

  “Thank you, Casher. Now the Instrumentality and the forgetty are gone.”

  She stared at him, almost sadly and inquiringly. He wanted to pick her up, to crush her to his chest, to rain his kisses on her face. But he stood stock still. He did not move. This was not just the forever-loving turtle-child; this was the real mistress of Henriada. This was the Hechizera of Gonfalon, whom he had formerly thought about only in terms of a wild, melodic grand opera.

  “I think you are seeing me, Casher. It is hard to see people, even when you look at them every day. I think I can see you, too, Casher. It is almost time for us both to do the things which we have to do.”

  “Which we have to do?” he whispered, hoping she might say something else.

  “For me, my work here on Henriada. For you, your fate on your homeland of Mizzer. That’s what life is, isn’t it? Doing what you have to do in the first place. We’re lucky people if we find it out. You are ready, Casher. I am about to give you weapons which will make bombs and cruisers and lasers and bombs seem like nothing at all.”

  “By the Bell, girl! Can’t you tell me what those weapons are?”

  T’ruth stood in her innocently revealing sheath, the yellow light of the old music room pouring like a halo around her.

  “Yes,” she said, “I can tell you now. Me.”

  “You?”

  Casher felt a wild surge of erotic attraction for the innocently voluptuous child. He remembered his first insane impulse to crush her with kisses, to sweep her up with hugs, to exhaust her with all the excitement which his masculinity could bring to both of them.

  He stared at her.

  She stood there, calm.

  That sort of an idea did not ring right.

  He was going to get her, but he was going to get something far from fun or folly—something, indeed, which he might not even like.

  When at last he spoke, it was out of the deep bewilderment of his own thoughts, “What do you mean, you’re going to give me yourself? It doesn’t sound very romantic to me, nor the tone in which you said it.”

  The child stepped close to him, reaching up and patting his forehead.

  “You’re not going to get me for a night’s romance, and if you did, you would be sorry. I am the property of my master and of no other man. But I can do something with you which I have never done to anyone else. I can get myself imprinted on you. The technicians are already coming. You will be the turtle-child. You will be the citizeness Agatha Madigan, the Hechizera of Gonfalon herself. You will be many other people. And yourself. You will then win. Accidents may kill you, Casher, but no one will be able to kill you on purpose. Not when you’re me. Poor man! Do you know what you will be giving up?”

  “What?” he croaked, at the edge of a great fright. He had seen danger before, but never before had danger loomed up from within himself.

  “You will not fear death, ever again, Casher. You will have to lead your life minute by minute, second by second, and you will not have the alibi that you are going to die anyhow. You will know that’s not special.”

  He nodded, understanding her words and scrabbling around his mind for a meaning.

  “I’m a girl, Casher…”

  He looked at her and his eyes widened. She was a girl—a beautiful, wonderful girl. But she was something more. She was the mistress of Henriada. She was the first of the underpeople really and truly to surpass humanity. To think that he had wanted to grab her poor little body. The body—ah, that was sweet!—but the power within it was the kind of thing that empires and religions are made of.

  “…and if you take the print of me, Casher, you will never lie with a woman without realizing that you know more about her than she does. You will be a seeing man among blind multitudes, a hearing person in the world of the deaf. I don’t know how much fun romantic love is going to be to you after this.”

  Gloomily he said, “If I can free my home planet of Mizzer, it will be worth it. Whatever it is.”

  “You’re not going to turn into a woman!” She laughed. “Nothing that easy. But you are going to get wisdom. And I will tell you the whole story of the Sign of the Fish before you leave here.”

  “Not that, please,” he begged. “That’s a religion and the Instrumentality would never let me travel again.”

  “I’m going to have you scrambled, Casher, so that nobody can read you for a year or two. And the Instrumentality is not going to send you back. I am. Through space-three.”

  “It’ll cost you a fine, big ship to do it.”

  “My master will approve when I tell him, Casher. Now give me that kiss you have been wanting to give me. Perhaps you will remember something of it when you come out of scramble.”

  She stood there. He did nothing.

  “Kiss me!” she commanded.

  He put his arm around her. She felt like a big little girl. She lifted her face. She thrust her lips up toward his. She stood on tiptoe.

  He kissed her the way a man might kiss a picture or a religious object. The heat and fierceness had gone out of his hopes. He had not kissed a girl, but power—tremendous power and wisdom put into a single slight form.

  “Is that the way your master kisses you?”

  She gave him a quick smile, “How clever of you! Yes, sometimes. Come along now. We have to shoot some children before the technicians are ready. It will give you a good last chance of seeing what you can do, when you have become what I am. Come along, the guns are in the hall.”

  XIII

  They went down an enormous light-oak staircase to a floor which Casher had never seen before. It must have been the entertainment and hospitality center of Beauregard long ago, when the mister and owner Murray Madigan was himself young.

  The robots did a good job of keeping away the dust and the mildew. Casher saw inconspicuous little air-driers placed at strategic places, so that the rich tooled leather on the walls would not spoil, so that the velvet bar-stools would not become slimy with mold, so that the pool tables would not warp nor the golf clubs go out of shape with age and damp. By the Bell, he thought, that man Madigan could have entertained a thousand people at one time in a place this size.

  The gun-cabinet, now, that was functional. The glass shone.
The velvet of oil showed on the steel and walnut of the guns. They were old Earth models, very rare and very special. For actual fighting, people used the cheap artillery of the present time or wirepoints for close work. Only the richest and rarest of connoisseurs had the old Earth weapons or could use them.

  T’ruth touched the guard-robot and waked him. The robot saluted, looked at her face, and without further inquiry, opened the cabinet.

  “Do you know guns?” said T’ruth to Casher.

  “Wirepoints,” he said. “Never touched a gun in my life.”

  “Do you mind using a learning-helmet, then? I could teach you hypnotically with the special rules of the Hechizera, but they might give you a headache or upset you emotionally. The helmet is neuro-electric and it has filters.”

  Casher nodded and saw his reflection nodding in the polished glass doors of the gun-cabinet. He was surprised to see how helpless and lugubrious he looked.

  But it was true. Never before in his life had he felt that a situation swept over him, washed him along like a great wave, left him with no choice and no responsibility. Things were her choice now, not his, and yet he felt that her power was benign, self-limited, restricted by factors at which he could no more than guess. He had come for one weapon—the cruiser which he had hoped to get from the Administrator Rankin Meiklejohn. She was offering him something else—psychological weapons in which he had neither experience nor confidence.

  She watched him attentively for a long moment and then turned to the gun-watching robot.

  “You’re little Harry Hadrian, aren’t you? The gun-watcher.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the silver robot brightly, “and I’m owl-brained too. That makes me very bright.”

  “Watch this,” she said, extending her arms the width of the gun-cabinet and then dropping them after a queer flutter of her hands. “Do you know what that means?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the little robot quickly, the emotion showing in his toneless voice by the speed with which he spoke, not by the intonation, “it-means-you-have-taken-over-and-I-am-off-duty! Can-I-go-sit-in-the-garden-and-look-at-the-live-things?”

  “Not quite yet, little Harry Hadrian. There are some wind-people out there now and they might hurt you. I have another errand for you first. Do you remember where the teaching helmets are?”

  “Silver hats on the third floor in an open closet with a wire running to each hat. Yes.”

  “Bring one of those as fast as you can. Pull it loose very carefully from its electrical connection.”

  The little robot disappeared in a sudden, fast, gentle clatter up the stairs.

  T’ruth turned back to Casher. “I have decided what to do with you. I am helping you. You don’t have to look so gloomy about it.”

  “I’m not gloomy. The Administrator sent me here on a crazy errand, killing an unknown underperson. I find out that the person is really a little girl. Then I find out that she is not an underperson, but a frightening old dead woman, still walking around alive. My life gets turned upside down. All my plans are set aside. You propose to send me home to fulfill my life’s work on Mizzer. I’ve struggled for this, so many years! Now you’re making it all come through, even though you are going to cook me through space-three to do it, and throw in a lot of illegal religion and hypnotic tricks, that I’m not sure I can handle. Now you tell me to come along—to shoot children with guns. I’ve never done anything like that in my life and yet I find myself obeying you. I’m tired out, girl, tired out. If you have put me in your power, I don’t even know it. I don’t even want to know it.”

  “Here you are, Casher, on the ruined wet world of Henriada. In less than a week you will be recovering among the military casualties of Colonel Wedder’s army. You will be under the clear sky of Mizzer, and the Seventh Nile will be near you, and you will be ready at long last to do what you have to do. You will have bits and pieces of memories of me—not enough to make you find your way back here or to tell people all the secrets of Beauregard, but enough for you to remember that you have been loved. You may even”—and she smiled very gently, with a tender wry humor on her face—“marry some Mizzer girl because her body or her face or her manner reminds you of me.”

  “In a week—?” he gasped.

  “Less than that.”

  “Who are you,” he cried out, “that you, an underperson, should run real people and should manipulate their lives?”

  “I didn’t look for power, Casher. Power doesn’t usually work if you look for it. I have eighty-nine thousand years to live, Casher, and as long as my master lives, I shall love him and take care of him. Isn’t he handsome? Isn’t he wise? Isn’t he the most perfect master you ever saw?”

  Casher thought of the old ruined-looking body with the plastic knobs set into it; he thought of the faded pajama bottoms; he said nothing.

  “You don’t have to agree,” said T’ruth. “I know I have a special way of looking at him. But they took my turtle brain and raised the IQ to above normal human level. They took me when I was a happy little girl, enchanted by the voice and the glance and the touch of my master—they took me to where this real woman lay dying and they put me into a machine and they put her into one, too. When they were through, they picked me up. I had on a pink dress with pastel blue socks and pink shoes. They carried me out into the corridor, on a rug. They had finished with me. They knew that I wouldn’t die. I was healthy. Can’t you see it, Casher? I cried myself to sleep, nine hundred years ago.”

  Casher could not really answer. He nodded sympathetically.

  “I was a girl, Casher. Maybe I was a turtle once, but I don’t remember that, any more than you remember your mother’s womb or your laboratory bottle. In that one hour I was never to be a girl again. I did not need to go to school. I had her education, and it was a good one. She spoke twenty or more languages. She was a psychologist and a hypnotist and a strategist. She was also the tyrannical mistress of this house. I cried because my childhood was finished, because I knew what I would have to do. I cried because I knew that I could do it. I loved my master so, but I was no longer to be the pretty little servant who brought him his tablets or his sweetmeats or his beer. Now I saw the truth—as she died I had myself become Henriada. The planet was mine to care for, to manage—to protect my master. If I come along and I protect and help you, is that so much for a woman who will just be growing up when your grandchildren will all be dead of old age?”

  “No, no,” stammered Casher O’Neill. “But your own life? A family, perhaps?”

  Anger lashed across her pretty face. Her features were the features of the delicious girl-child T’ruth, but her expression was that of the citizeness Agatha Madigan, perhaps, a worldly woman reborn to the endless worldliness of her own wisdom.

  “Should I order a husband from the turtle bank, perhaps? Should I hire out a piece of my master’s estate, to be sold to somebody because I’m an underperson, or perhaps put to work somewhere in an industrial ship? I’m me. I may be an animal, but I have more civilization in me than all the wind-people on this planet. Poor things! What kind of people are they, if they are only happy when they catch a big mutated duck and tear it to pieces, eating it raw? I’m not going to lose, Casher. I’m going to win. My master will live longer than any person has ever lived before. He gave me that mission when he was strong and wise and well in the prime of his life. I’m going to do what I was made for, Casher, and you’re going to go back to Mizzer and make it free, whether you like it or not!”

  They both heard a happy scurrying on the staircase.

  The small silver robot, little Harry Hadrian, burst upon them; he carried a teaching helmet.

  T’ruth said, “Resume your post. You are a good boy, little Harry, and you can have time to sit in the garden later on, when it is safe.”

  “Can I sit in a tree?” the little robot asked.

  “Yes, if it is safe.”

  Little Harry Hadrian resumed his post by the gun-cabinet. He kept the key in his hand. It
was a very strange key, sharp at the end and as long as an awl. Casher supposed that it must be one of the straight magnetic keys, cued to its lock by a series of magnetized patterns.

  “Sit on the floor for a minute,” said T’ruth to Casher; “you’re too tall for me.” She slipped the helmet on his head, adjusted the levers on each side so that the helmet sat tight and true upon his skull.

  With a touching gesture of intimacy, for which she gave him a sympathetic apologetic little smile, she moistened the two small electrodes with her own spit, touching her finger to her tongue and then to the electrode. These went to his temples.

  She adjusted the verniered dials on the helmet itself, lifted the rear wire, and applied it to her forehead.

  Casher heard the click of a switch.

  “That did it,” he heard T’ruth’s voice saying, very far away.

  He was too busy looking into the gun-cabinet. He knew them all and loved some of them. He knew the feel of their stocks on his shoulder, the glimpse of their barrels in front of his eyes, the dance of the target on their various sights, the welcome heavy weight of the gun on his supporting arm, the rewarding thrust of the stock against his shoulder when he fired. He knew all this, and did not know how he knew it.

  “The Hechizera, Agatha herself, was a very accomplished sportswoman,” murmured T’ruth to him. “I thought her knowledge would take a second printing when I passed it along to you. Let’s take these.”

  She gestured to little Harry Hadrian, who unlocked the cabinet and took out two enormous guns, which looked like the long muskets mankind had had on Earth even before the age of space began.

  “If you’re going to shoot children,” said Casher with his new-found expertness, “these won’t do. They’ll tear the bodies completely to pieces.”

  T’ruth reached into the little bag which hung from her belt. She took out three shotgun shells. “I have three more,” she said. “Six children is all we need.”

  Casher looked at the slug projecting slightly from the shotgun casing. It did not look like any shell he had ever seen before. The workmanship was unbelievably fine and precise.