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

by Cordwainer Smith

  Instead he stopped the pacing which had been following his cadenced walk through the street. He turned calmly and kindly and looked at the boy, and he said to the boy and to the hideous machine within the boy, “Come along with me; I’m going straightway to the palace and you would like to see that.”

  The machine, confronted, had no further choice.

  The idiot boy put his hand in Casher’s hand and somehow or other Casher O’Neill managed to resume the rolling deliberate march which had marked so many of his years, while keeping a grip on the hand of the demented child who skipped beside him. Casher could still feel the machine watching him from within the eyes of the boy. He did not care; he was not afraid of guns; he could stop them. He was not afraid of poison; he could resist it. He was not afraid of hypnotism; he could take it in and spit it back. He was not afraid of fear; he had been on Henriada. He had come home through space-three. There was nothing left to fear.

  Straightway went he to the palace. The midday gleamed in the bright yellow sun which rode the skies of Kaheer. The whitewashed walls in the arabesque design stayed as they had been for thousands of years. Only at the door was he challenged, but the sentry hesitated as Casher spoke: “I am Bindaoud, loyal servant to Colonel Wedder, and this is a child of the streets whom I propose to heal in order to show our good Colonel Wedder a fair demonstration of my powers.”

  The sentry said something into a little box which sat in the wall.

  Casher passed freely. The suchesache trotted beside him. As he went through the corridors, laid with rich rugs, military and civilians moving back and forth, he felt happy. This was not the palace of Wedder, though Wedder lived in it. It was his own palace. He, Casher, had been born in it. He knew it. He knew every corridor.

  The changes of the years were very few. Casher turned left into an open courtyard. He smelled the smell of salt water and the sand and the horses nearby. He sighed a little at the familiarity of it, the good and kind welcome. He turned right again and ascended long, long stairs. Each step was carpeted in a different design.

  His uncle Kuraf had stood at the head of these very stairs while men and women, boys and girls were brought to him to become toys of his evil pleasures. Kuraf had been too fat to walk down these stairs to greet them. He always let the captives come up to himself and to his den of pleasures. Casher reached the top of the stairs and turned left.

  This was no den of pleasures now.

  It was the office of Colonel Wedder. He, Casher, had reached it.

  How strange it was to reach this office, this target of all his hopes, this one fevered pinpoint in all the universe for which his revenge had thirsted until he thought himself mad. He had thought of bombing this office from outer space, or of cutting it with the thin arc of a laser beam, or of poisoning it with chemicals, or of assaulting it with troops. He had thought of pouring fire on this building, or water. He had dreamed of making Mizzer free—even at the price of the lovely city of Kaheer itself—by finding a small asteroid somewhere and crashing it, in an interplanetary tragedy, directly into the city itself. And the city, under the roar of that impact, would have blazed into thermonuclear incandescence and would have become a poison lake at the end of the Twelve Niles. He had thought of a thousand ways of entering the city and of destroying the city, merely in order to destroy Wedder.

  Now he was here. So too was Wedder.

  Wedder did not know that he, Casher O’Neill, had come back.

  Even less did Wedder know who Casher O’Neill had become, the master of space, the traveler who traveled without ships, the vehicle for devices stranger than any mind on Mizzer had ever conceived.

  Very calm, very relaxed, very quiet, very assured, the doom which was Casher O’Neill walked into the antechamber of Wedder. Very modestly, he asked for Wedder.

  The dictator happened to be free.

  He had changed little since Casher last saw him, a little older, a little fatter, a little wiser—all these perhaps. Casher was not sure. Every cell and filament in his living body had risen to the alert. He was ready to do the work for which the light-years had ached, for which the worlds had turned, and he knew that within an instant it would be done. He confronted Wedder, gave Wedder a modest assured smile.

  “Your servant, the technician Bindaoud, sir and colonel,” said Casher O’Neill. Wedder looked at him strangely. He reached out his hand, and, even as their hands touched, Wedder said the last words he would ever say on his own.

  Within that handclasp, Wedder spoke again and his voice was strange: “Who are you?”

  Casher had dreamed that he would say, “I am Casher O’Neill come back from unimaginable distances to punish you,” or that he would say, “I am Casher O’Neill and I have ridden starlanes for years upon years to find your destruction.” Or he had even thought that he might say, “Surrender or die, Wedder, your time has come.” Sometimes he had dreamed he would say, “Here, Wedder,” and then show him the knife with which to take his blood.

  Yet this was the climax and none of these things occurred.

  The idiot boy with the machine within it stood at ease.

  Casher O’Neill merely held Wedder’s hand and said quite simply, “Your friend.”

  As he said that, he searched back and forth. He could feel inner eyes within his own head, eyes which did not move within the sockets of his face, eyes which he did not have and with which he could nevertheless see. These were the eyes of his perception. Quickly, he adjusted the anatomy of Wedder, working kinesthetically, squeezing an artery there, pinching off a gland here. Here, harden the tissue, through which the secretions of a given endocrine material had to come. In less time than it would take an ordinary doctor to describe the process, he had changed Wedder. Wedder had been tuned down like a radio with dials realigned, like a spaceship with its locksheets reset.

  The work which Casher had done was less than any pilot does in the course of an ordinary landing; but the piloting he had done was within the biochemical system of Wedder himself. And the changes which he had effected were irreversible.

  The new Wedder was the old Wedder. The same mind. The same will, the same personality. Yet its permutations were different. And its method of expression already slightly different. More benign. More tolerant. More calm, more human. Even a little corrupt, as he smiled and said, “I remember you, now, Bindaoud. Can you help that boy?”

  The supposed Bindaoud ran his hands over the boy. The boy wept with pain and shock for a moment. He wiped his dirty nose and upper lip on his sleeves. His eyes came into focus. His lips compressed. His mind burned brightly as its old worn channels became human instead of idiot. The suchesache machine knew it was out of place and fled for another refuge. The boy, given his brains, but no words, no education yet, stood there and hiccupped with joy.

  Wedder said very pleasantly, “That is remarkable. Is it all that you have to show me?”

  “All,” said Casher O’Neill. “You were not he.”

  He turned his back on Wedder and did so in perfect safety.

  He knew Wedder would never kill another man.

  Casher stopped at the door and looked back. He could tell from the posture of Wedder that that which had to be done, had been done: the changes within the man were larger than the man himself. The planet was free and Casher’s own work was indeed done. The suddenly frightened child, which had lost the suchesache, followed him out of blind instinct.

  The colonels and the staff officers did not know whether to salute or nod when they saw their chief stand at the doorway, and waved with unexpected friendliness at Casher O’Neill as Casher descended the broad carpeted steps, the child stumbling behind him. At the furthest steps, Casher looked one last time at the enemy who had become almost a part of himself. There stood Wedder, the man of blood. And now, he himself, Casher O’Neill, had expunged the blood, had redone the past, and reshaped the future. All Mizzer was heading back to the openness and freedom which it had enjoyed in the time of the old Republic of the Twelve Niles.
He walked on, shifting from one corridor to the other and using short-cuts to the courtyards, until he came to the doorway of the palace. The sentry presented arms.

  “At ease,” said Casher. The man put down his gun.

  Casher stood outside the palace, that palace which had been his uncle’s, which had been his own, which had really been himself. He felt the clear air of Mizzer. He looked at the clear blue skies which he had always loved. He looked at the world to which he had promised he would return, with justice, with vengeance, with thunder, with power. Thanks to the strange and subtle capacities which he had learned from the turtle-girl, T’ruth, hidden in her own world amid the storm-churned atmosphere of Henriada, he had not needed to fight.

  Casher turned to the boy and said, “I am a sword which has been put into its scabbard. I am a pistol with the cartridges dropped out. I am a wirepoint with no battery behind it. I am a man, but I am very empty.”

  The boy made strangled, confused sounds as though he were trying to think, to become himself, to make up for all the lost time he had spent in idiocy.

  Casher acted on impulse. Curiously, he gave to the boy his own native speech of Kaheer. He felt his muscles go tight, shoulders, neck, fingertips, as he concentrated with the arts he had learned in the palace of Beauregard where the girl T’ruth governed almost-forever in the name of Mister and Owner Murray Madigan. He took the arts and memories he sought. He seized the boy roughly but tightly by the shoulders. He peered into frightened crying eyes and then, in a single blast of thought, he gave the boy speech, words, memory, ambition, skills. The boy stood there dazed.

  At last the boy spoke and he asked, “Who am I?”

  Casher could not answer that one. He patted the child on the shoulder. He said, “Go back to the city and find out. I have other needs. I have to find out who I myself may be. Good-bye and peace be with you.”

  II

  Casher remembered that his mother still lived here. He had often forgotten her. It would have been easier to forget her. Her name was Trihaep, and she had been sister to Kuraf. Where Kuraf had been vicious, she had been virtuous. Where Kuraf had sometimes been grateful, she had been thrifty and shifty. Where Kuraf, with all his evils, had acquired a toleration for men and things and ideas, she remained set on the pattern of thought which her parents had long ago taught her.

  Casher O’Neill did something he thought he would never do. He had never really even thought about doing it. It was too simple. He went home.

  At the gate of the house, his mother’s old servant knew him, despite the change in his face, and she said, with a terrible awe in her voice, “It seems to me that I am looking at Casher O’Neill.”

  “I use the name Bindaoud,” said Casher, “but I am Casher O’Neill. Let me in and tell my mother that I am here.”

  He went into the private apartment of his mother. The old furniture was still there. The polished bricabrac of a hundred ages, the old paintings and the old mirrors, and the dead people whom he had never known, represented by their pictures and their mementos. He felt just as ill at ease as he felt when he was a small boy, when he had visited the same room, before his uncle came to take him to the palace.

  His mother came in. She had not changed.

  He half-thought that she would reach out her arms to him, and cry in a deliberately modern passion, “My baby! My precious! Come back to me!”

  She did no such thing.

  She looked at him coldly as though he were a complete stranger.

  She said to him, “You don’t look like my son, but I suppose that you are. You have made trouble enough in your time. Are you making trouble now?”

  “I make no malicious trouble, Mother, and I never have,” said Casher, “no matter what you may think of me. I did what I had to do. I did what was right.”

  “Betraying your uncle was right? Letting down our family was right? Disgracing us all was right? You must be a fool to talk like this. I heard that you were a wanderer, that you had great adventures, and had seen many worlds. You don’t sound any different to me. You’re an old man. You almost seem as old as I do. I had a baby once, but how could that be you? You are an enemy of the house of Kuraf O’Neill. You’re one of the people who brought it down in blood. But they came from outside with their principles and their thoughts and their dreams of power. And you stole from inside like a cur. You opened the door and you let in ruin. Who are you that I should forgive you?”

  “I do not ask your forgiveness, Mother,” said Casher. “I do not even ask your understanding. I have other places to go and other things yet to do. May peace be upon you.”

  She stared at him, said nothing.

  He went on, “You will find Mizzer a more pleasant place to live in, since I talked to Wedder this morning.”

  “You talked to Wedder?” cried she. “And he did not kill you?”

  “He did not know me.”

  “Wedder did not know you?”

  “I assure you, Mother, he did not know me.”

  “You must be a very powerful man, my son. Perhaps you can repair the fortune of the house of Kuraf O’Neill after all the harm you have done, and all the heartbreak you brought to my brother. I suppose you know your wife’s dead?”

  “I had heard that,” said Casher. “I hope she died instantly in an accident and without pain.”

  “Of course it was an accident. How else do people die these days? She and her husband tried out one of those new boats, and it overturned.”

  “I’m sorry, I wasn’t there.”

  “I know that. I know that perfectly well, my son. You were outside there, so that I had to look up at the stars with fear. I could look up in the sky and stare for the man who was my son lurking up there with blood and ruin. With vengeance upon vengeance heaped upon all of us, just because he thought he knew what was right. I’ve been afraid of you for a long long time, and I thought if I ever met you again I would fear you with my whole heart. You don’t quite seem to be what I expected, Casher. Perhaps I can like you. Perhaps I can even love you as a mother should. Not that it matters. You and I are too old now.”

  “I’m not working on that kind of mission any longer, Mother. I have been in this old room long enough and I wish you well. But I wish many other people well, too. I have done what I had to do. Perhaps I had better say good-bye, and much later perhaps, I will come back and see you again. When both of us know more about what we have to do.”

  “Don’t you even want to see your daughter?”

  “Daughter?” said Casher O’Neill. “Do I have a daughter?”

  “Oh, poor fool, you. Didn’t you even find that out after you left? She bore your child, all right. She even went through the old-fashioned business of a natural birth. The child even looks something like the way you used to look. Matter of fact, she’s rather arrogant, like you. You can call on her if you want to. She lives in the house which is just outside the square in Golden Laut in the leather workers’ area. Her husband’s name is Ali Ali. Look her up if you want to.”

  She extended a hand. Casher took the hand as though she had been a queen. And he kissed the cool fingers. As he looked her in the face, here, too, he brought his skills from Henriada in place. He surveyed and felt her personally as though he were a surgeon of the soul, but in this case there was nothing for him to do. This was not a dynamic personality struggling and fighting and moving against the forces of life and hope and disappointment. This was something else, a person set in life, immobile, determined, rigid even for a man with healing arts who could destroy a fleet with his thoughts or who could bring an idiot to normality by mere command. He could see that this was a case beyond his powers.

  He patted the old hand affectionately and she smiled warmly at him, not knowing what it meant. “If anyone asks,” said Casher, “the name I have been using is that of the Doctor Bindaoud. Bindaoud the technician. Can you remember that, Mother?”

  “Bindaoud the technician,” she echoed, as she led him out the door to walk in the street.r />
  Within twenty minutes he was knocking at his daughter’s door.

  III

  The daughter herself answered the door. She flung it open. She looked at the strange man, surveyed him from head to heels. She noted the medical insignia on his uniform. She noted his mark of rank. She appraised him shrewdly, quickly, and she knew he had no business there in the quarters of the leather workers.

  “Who are you?” she sang out, quickly and clearly.

  “In these hours and at this time, I pass under the name of the expert Bindaoud, a technician and medical man back from the special forces of Colonel Wedder. I’m just on leave, you see, but sometime later, madam, you might find out who I really am, and I thought you better hear it from my lips. I’m your father.”

  She did not move. The significant thing is that she did not move at all. Casher studied her and could see the cast of his own bones in the shape of her face, could see the length of his own fingers repeated in her hands. He had sensed that the storms of duty which had blown him from sorrow to sorrow, the wind of conscience which had kept alive his dreams of vengeance, had turned into something very different in her. It, too, was a force, but not the kind of force he understood.

  “I have children now and I would just as soon you not meet them. As a matter of fact, you have never done me a good deed except to beget me. You have never done me an ill deed except to threaten my life from beyond the stars. I am tired of you and I am tired of everything you were or might have been. Let’s forget it. Can’t you go your way and let me be? I may be your daughter, but I can’t help that.”