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

by Cordwainer Smith

  “What are they? I never saw these before.”

  “Proximity stunners,” she said. “Shoot ten centimeters above the head of any living thing and the stunner knocks it out.”

  “You want the children alive?”

  “Alive, of course. And unconscious. They are a part of your final test.”

  Two hours later, after an exciting hike to the edge of the weather controls, they had the six children stretched out on the floor of the great hall. Four were little boys, two girls; they were fine-boned, soft-haired people, very thin, but they did not look too far from Earth-normal.

  T’ruth called up a doctor-underman from among her servants. There must have been a crowd of fifty or sixty undermen and robots standing around. Far up the staircase, John Joy Tree stood hidden, half in shadow. Casher suspected that he was as inquisitive as the others but afraid of himself, Casher, “the man of blood.”

  T’ruth spoke quietly but firmly to the doctor. “Can you give them a strong euphoric before you waken them? We don’t want to have to pluck them out of all the curtains in the house, if they go wild when they wake up.”

  “Nothing simpler,” said the doctor-underman. He seemed to be of dog origin, but Casher could not tell.

  He took a glass tube and touched it to the nape of each little neck. The necks were all streaked with dirt. These children had never been washed in their lives, except by the rain.

  “Wake them,” said T’ruth.

  The doctor stepped back to a rolling table. It gleamed with equipment. He must have pre-set his devices, because all he did was to press a button and the children stirred into life.

  The first reaction was wildness. They got ready to bolt. The biggest of the boys, who by Earth-standards would have been about ten, got three steps before he stopped and began laughing.

  T’ruth spoke the Old Common Tongue to them, very slowly and with long spaces between the words:

  “Wind-children—do—you—know—where—you—are?”

  The biggest girl twittered back to her so fast that Casher could not understand it.

  T’ruth turned to Casher and said, “The girl said that she is in the Dead Place, where the air never moves and where the Old Dead Ones move around on their own business. She means us.” To the wind-children she spoke again.

  “What—would—you—like—most?”

  The biggest girl went from child to child. They nodded agreement vigorously. They formed a circle and began a little chant. By the second repetition around, Casher could make it out.

  Shig—shag—shuggery,

  shuck shuck shuck!

  What all of us need is

  an all-around duck.

  Shig—shag—shuggery,

  shuck shuck shuck!

  At the fourth or fifth repetition they all stopped and looked at T’ruth, who was so plainly the mistress of the house.

  She in turn spoke to Casher O’Neill: “They think that they want a tribal feast of raw duck. What they are going to get is inoculations against the worst diseases of this planet, several duck meals, and their freedom again. But they need something else beyond all measure. You know what that is, Casher, if you can only find it.”

  The whole crowd turned its eyes on Casher, the human eyes of the people and underpeople, the milky lenses of the robots.

  Casher stood aghast.

  “Is this a test?” he asked, softly.

  “You could call it that,” said T’ruth, looking away from him.

  Casher thought furiously and rapidly. It wouldn’t do any good to make them into forgetties. The household had enough of them, T’ruth had announced a plan to let them loose again. Mister and owner Murray Madigan must have told her, sometime or other, to “do something” about the wind-people. She was trying to do it. The whole crowd watched him. What might T’ruth expect?

  The answer came to him in a flash.

  If she were asking him, it must be something to do with himself, something which he—uniquely among these people, underpeople, and robots—had brought to the storm-sieged mansion of Beauregard.

  Suddenly he saw it.

  “Use me, my Lady Ruth,” said he, deliberately giving her the wrong title, “to print on them nothing from my intellectual knowledge, but everything from my emotional makeup. It wouldn’t do them any good to know about Mizzer, where the Twelve Niles work their way down across the Intervening Sands. Nor about Pontoppidan, the Gem Planet. Nor about Olympia, where the blind brokers promenade under numbered clouds. Knowing things would not help these children. But wanting—”

  He was unique. He had wanted to return to Mizzer. He had wanted to return beyond all dreams of blood and revenge. He had wanted things fiercely, wildly, so that even if he could not get them, he zig-zagged the galaxy in search of them.

  Truth was speaking to him again, urgently and softly, but not in so low a voice that the others in the room could not hear.

  “And what, Casher O’Neill, should I give them from you?”

  “My emotional structure. My determination. My desire. Nothing else. Give them that and throw them back into the winds. Perhaps if they want something fiercely enough, they will grow up to find out what it is.”

  There was a soft murmur of approval around the room.

  T’ruth hesitated a moment and then nodded. “You answered, Casher. You answered quickly and perceptively. Bring seven helmets, Eunice. Stay here, doctor.”

  Eunice, the forgetty, left, taking two robots with her.

  “A chair,” said T’ruth to no one in particular. “For him.”

  A large powerful underman pushed his way through the crowd and dragged a chair to the end of the room.

  T’ruth gestured that Casher should sit in it.

  She stood in front of him. Strange, thought Casher, that she should be a great lady and still a little girl. How would he ever find a girl like her? He was not even afraid of the mystery of the Fish, or the image of the man on two pieces of wood. He no longer dreaded space-three, where so many travelers had gone in and so few had come out. He felt safe, comforted by her wisdom and authority. He felt that he would never see the likes of this again—a child running a planet and doing it well; a half-dead man surviving through the endless devotion of his maidservant; a fierce woman hypnotist living on with all the anxieties and angers of humanity gone, but with the skill and obstinacy of turtle genes to sustain her in her re-imprinted form.

  “I can guess what you are thinking,” said T’ruth, “but we have already said the things that we had to say. I’ve peeped your mind a dozen times and I know that you want to go back to Mizzer so bad that space-three will spit you out right at the ruined fort where the big turn of the Seventh Nile begins. In my own way I love you, Casher, but I could not keep you here without turning you into a forgetty and making you a servant to my master. You know what always comes first with me, and always will.”

  “Madigan.”

  “Madigan,” she answered, and with her voice the name itself was a prayer.

  Eunice came back with the helmets.

  “When we are through with these, Casher, I’ll have them take you to the conditioning room. Good-bye, my might-have-been!”

  In front of everyone, she kissed him full on the lips.

  He sat in the chair, full of patience and contentment. Even as his vision blacked out, he could see the thin light sheath of a smock on the girlish figure, he could remember the tender laughter lurking in her smile.

  In the last instant of his consciousness, he saw that another figure had joined the crowd—the tall old man with the worn bathrobe, the faded blue eyes, the thin yellow hair. Murray Madigan had risen from his private-life-in-death and had come to see the last of Casher O’Neill. He did not look weak, nor foolish. He looked like a great man, wise and strange in ways beyond Casher’s understanding.

  There was the touch of T’ruth’s little hand on his arm and everything became a velvety cluttered dark quiet inside his own mind.

  XIV

  When
he awoke, he lay naked and sunburned under the hot sky of Mizzer. Two soldiers with medical patches were rolling him onto a canvas litter.

  “Mizzer!” he cried to himself. His throat was too dry to make a sound. “I’m home.”

  Suddenly the memories came to him and he scrabbled and snatched at them, seeing them dissolve within his mind before he could get paper to write them down.

  Memory: there was the front hall, himself getting ready to sleep in the chair, with the old giant of Murray Madigan at the edge of the crowd and the tender light touch of T’ruth—his girl, his girl, now uncountable light-years away—putting her hand on his arm.

  Memory: there was another room, with stained glass pictures and incense, and the weepworthy scenes of a great life shown in frescoes around the wall. There were the two pieces of wood and man in pain nailed to them. But Casher knew that scattered and coded through his mind, there was the ultimate and undefeatable wisdom of the Sign of the Fish. He knew he could never fear fear again.

  Memory: there was a gaming table in a bright room, with the wealth of a thousand worlds being raked toward him. He was a woman, strong, big-busted, bejeweled, and proud. He was Agatha Madigan, winning at the games. (That must have come, he thought, when they printed me with T’ruth.) And in that mind of the Hechizera, which was now his own mind, too, there was clear sure knowledge of how he could win men and women, officers and soldiers, even underpeople and robots, to his cause without a drop of blood or word of anger.

  The man, lifting him on the litter, made red waves of heat and pain roll over him.

  He heard one of them say, “Bad case of burn. Wonder how he lost his clothes.”

  The words were matter-of-fact; the comment was nothing special; but the cadence, that special cadence, was the true speech of Mizzer.

  As they carried him away, he remembered the face of Rankin Meiklejohn, enormous eyes staring with inward despair over the brim of a big glass. That was the Administrator. On Henriada. That was the man who sent me past Ambiloxi to Beauregard at two seventy-five in the morning. The litter jolted a little.

  He thought of the wet marshes of Henriada and knew that soon he would never remember them again. The worms of the tornadoes creeping up to the edge of the estate. The mad wise face of John Joy Tree.

  Space-three? Space-three? Already, even now, he could not remember how they had put him into space-three.

  And space-three itself—

  All the nightmares which mankind has ever had pushed into Casher’s mind. He twisted once in agony, just as the litter reached a medical military cart. He saw a girl’s face—what was her name?—and then he slept.

  XV

  Fourteen Mizzer days later, the first test came.

  A doctor colonel and an intelligence colonel, both in the workaday uniform of Colonel Wedder’s Special Forces, stood by his bed.

  “Your name is Casher O’Neill and we do not know how your body fell among the skirmishers,” the doctor was saying, roughly and emphatically. Casher O’Neill turned his head on the pillow and looked at the man.

  “Say something more!” he whispered to the doctor.

  The doctor said, “You are a political intruder and we do not know how you got mixed up among our troops. We do not even know how you got back among the people of this planet. We found you on the Seventh Nile.”

  The intelligence colonel, standing beside him, nodded agreement.

  “Do you think the same thing, Colonel?” whispered Casher O’Neill to the intelligence colonel.

  “I ask questions. I don’t answer them,” said the man gruffly.

  Casher felt himself reaching for their minds with a kind of fingertip which he did not know he had. It was hard to put into ordinary words, but it felt as though someone had said to him, Casher: “That one is vulnerable at the left forefront area of his consciousness, but the other one is well armored and must be reached through the mid-brain.” Casher was not afraid of revealing anything by his expression. He was too badly burned and in too much pain to show nuances of meaning on his face. (Somewhere he had heard of the wild story of the Hechizera of Gonfalon! Somewhere endless storms boiled across ruined marshes under a cloudy yellow sky! But where, when, what was that…? He could not take time off for memory. He had to fight for his life.)

  “Peace be with you,” he whispered to both of them.

  “Peace be with you,” they responded in unison, with some surprise.

  “Lean over me, please,” said Casher, “so that I do not have to shout.”

  They stood stock straight.

  Somewhere in the resources of his own memory and intelligence, Casher found the right note of pleading which could ride his voice like a carrier wave and make them do as he wished.

  “This is Mizzer,” he whispered.

  “Of course this is Mizzer,” snapped the intelligence colonel, “and you are Casher O’Neill. What are you doing here?”

  “Lean over, gentlemen,” he said softly, lowering his voice so that they could barely hear him.

  This time, they did lean over.

  His burned hands reached for their hands. The officers noticed it, but since he was sick and unarmed, they let him touch them.

  Suddenly he felt their minds glowing in his as brightly as if he had swallowed their gleaming, thinking brains at a single gulp.

  He spoke no longer.

  He thought at them—torrential, irresistible thought.

  I am not Casher O’Neill. You will find his body in a room, four doors down. I am the civilian Bindaoud.

  The two colonels stared, breathing heavily.

  Neither said a word.

  Casher went on; “Our fingerprints and records have gotten mixed. Give me the fingerprints and papers of the dead Casher O’Neill. Bury him then, quietly, but with honor. Once he loved your leader and there is no point in stirring up wild rumors about returns from out of space. I am Bindaoud. You will find my records in your front office. I am not a soldier. I am a civilian technician doing studies on the salt in blood chemistry under field conditions. You have heard me, gentlemen. You hear me now. You will hear me always. But you will not remember this, gentlemen, when you awaken. I am sick. You can give me water and a sedative.”

  They still stood, enraptured by the touch of his tight burned hands.

  Casher O’Neill said, “Awaken.”

  Casher O’Neill let go their hands.

  The medical colonel blinked and said amiably, “You’ll be better, mister and doctor Bindaoud. I’ll have the orderly bring you water and a sedative.”

  To the other officer he said, “I have an interesting corpse four doors down. I think you had better see it.”

  Casher O’Neill tried to think of the recent past, but the blue light of Mizzer was all around him, the sand-smell, the sound of horses galloping. For a moment, he thought of a big child’s blue dress and he did not know why he almost wept.

  This is the story of the sand planet itself, Mizzer, which had lost all hope when the tyrant Wedder imposed the reign of terror and virtue. And its liberator, Casher O’Neill—of whom strange things were told, from the day of blood in which he fled from his native city of Kaheer, until he came back to end the shedding of blood for all the rest of his years.

  Everywhere that Casher had gone, he had had only one thought in his mind—deliverance of his home country from the tyrants whom he himself had let slip into power when they had conspired against his uncle, the unspeakable Kuraf. He never forgot, whether waking or sleeping. He never forgot Kaheer itself along the First Nile, where the horses raced on the turf with the sand nearby. He never forgot the blue skies of his home and the great dunes of the desert between one Nile and the others. He remembered the freedom of a planet built and dedicated to freedom. He never forgot that the price of blood is blood, that the price of freedom is fighting, that the risk of fighting is death. But he was not a fool. He was willing, if he had to, to risk his own death, but he wanted odds on the battle which would not merely snare him home, like a
rabbit to be caught in a steel trap, by the police of the dictator Wedder.

  And then, he met the solution of his crusade without knowing it at first. He had come to the end of all things, all problems, all worries. He had also come to the end of all ordinary hope. He met T’ruth. Now her subtle powers belonged to Casher O’Neill, to do with as he pleased.

  It pleased him to return to Mizzer, to enter Kaheer itself, and to confront Wedder.

  Why should he not come? It was his home and he thirsted for revenge. More than revenge he hungered for justice. He had lived many years for this hour and this hour came.

  He entered the north gate of Kaheer.

  I

  Casher walked into Mizzer wearing the uniform of a medical technician in Wedder’s own military service. He had assumed the appearance and the name of a dead man named Bindaoud. Casher walked with nothing more than his hands as weapons, and his hands swung freely at the end of his arms. Only the steadfastness of his feet, the resolute grace with which he took each step, betrayed his purpose. The crowds in the street saw him pass but they did not see him. They looked at a man and they did not realize that they saw their own history going step by step through their various streets. Casher O’Neill had entered the city of Kaheer; he knew that he was being followed. He could feel it.

  He glanced around.

  He had learned in his many years of fighting and struggle, on strange planets, countless rules of unremembered hazards. To be alert, he knew what this was. It was a suchesache. The suchesache at the moment had taken the shape of a small witless boy, some eight years old, who had two trails of stained mucus pouring down from his nostrils, who had forever-open lips ready to call with the harsh bark of idiocy, who had eyes that did not focus right. Casher O’Neill knew that this was a boy and not a boy. It was a hunting and searching device often employed by police lords when they presumed to make themselves into kings or tyrants, a device which flitted from shape to shape, from child to butterfly or bird, which moved with the suchesache and watched the victim; watching, saying nothing, following. He hated the suchesache and was tempted to throw all the powers of his strange mind at it so that the boy might die and the machine hidden within it might perish. But he knew that this would lead to a cascade of fire and splashing of blood. He had already seen blood in Kaheer long ago; he had no wish to see it in the city again.