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

by Cordwainer Smith

“Smell who?” asked Samm mildly. “There isn’t any smell out here in the nothingness of space.”

  “Silly,” thought Folly back, “I don’t mean really smell. I mean that I can pick up their sense of odor telepathically.”

  “Whose?” said Samm, being dense.

  “Our enemies’, of course,” cried Folly. “The man-rememberers who are not man. The cackle-gabble creatures. The beings who remember man and hate him. They smell thick and warm and alive to each other. Their whole world is full of smells. Their telepaths are getting frantic now. They have even figured out that there are three of us and they are trying to get our smells.”

  “And we have no smell. Not when we do not even know whether we have human bodies or not, inside these things. Imagine this metal body of mine smelling. If it did have a smell,” said Samm, “it would probably be the very soft smell of working steel and a little bit of lubricants, plus whatever odors my jets might activate inside an atmosphere. If I know the Instrumentality, they have made my jets smell awful to almost any kind of being. Most forms of life think first through their noses and then figure out the rest of experience later. After all, I was built to intimidate, to frighten, to destroy. The Instrumentality did not make this giant to be friendly with anybody. You and I can be friends, Folly, because you are a little ship which I could hold like a cigar between my fingers, and because the ship holds the memory of a very lovely woman. I can sense what you once were. What you may still be, if your actual body is still inside that boat.”

  “Oh, Samm!” she cried. “Do you think I might still be alive, really alive, with a real me in a real me, and a chance to be myself somewhere again, out here between the stars?”

  “I can’t sense it plainly,” said Samm. “I’ve reached as much as I can through your ship with my sensors, but I can’t tell whether there’s a whole woman there or not. It might be just a memory of you dissected and laminated between a lot of plastic sheets. I really can’t tell, but sometimes I have the strangest hunch that you are still alive, in the old ordinary way, and that I am alive too.”

  “Wouldn’t that be wonderful!” She almost shouted at him. “Samm, imagine being us again, if we fulfill our mission and conquer this planet and stay alive and settle there! I might even meet you and—”

  They both fell silent at the implications of being ordinary-alive again. They knew that they loved each other. Out here, in the immense blackness of space, there was nothing they could do but streak along in their fast trajectories and talk to each other a little bit by telepathy.

  “Samm,” said Folly, and the tone of her thought showed that she was changing a difficult subject. “Do you think that we are the furthest out that people have ever gone? You used to be a technician. You might know. Do you?”

  “Of course I know,” thought Samm promptly, “We’re not. After all, we’re still deep inside our own galaxy.”

  “I didn’t know,” said Folly contritely.

  “With all those instruments, don’t you know where you are?”

  “Of course I know where I am, Samm. In relation to the third planet of Linschoten XV. I even have a faint idea of the general direction in which Old Earth must lie, and how many thousands of ages it would take us to get home, traveling through ordinary space, if we did try to turn around.” She thought to herself but didn’t add in her thought to Samm, “Which we can’t.” She thought again to him. “But I’ve never studied astronomy or navigation, so I couldn’t tell whether we were at the edge of the galaxy or not.”

  “Nowhere near the edge,” said Samm. “We’re not John Joy Tree and we’re nowhere near the two-headed elephants which weep forever in intergalactic space.”

  “John Joy Tree?” sang Folly; there was joy and memory in her thoughts as she sounded the name. “He was my idol when I was a girl. My father was a Subchief of the Instrumentality and always promised to bring John Joy Tree to our house. We had a country house and it was unusual and very fine for this day and age. But Mister and Go-Captain Tree never got around to visiting us, so there I was, a big girl with picture-cubes of him all over my room. I liked him because he was so much older than me, and so resolute-looking and so tender too. I had all sorts of romantic day-dreams about him, but he never showed up and I married the wrong man several times, and my children got given to the wrong people, so here I am. But what’s this stuff about two-headed elephants?”

  “Really?” said Samm. “I don’t see how you could hear about John Joy Tree and not know what he did.”

  “I knew he flew far, far out, but I didn’t know exactly what he did. After all, I was just a child when I fell in love with his picture. What did he do? He’s dead now, I suppose, so I don’t suppose it matters.”

  Finsternis cut in, grimly and unexpectedly, “John Joy Tree is not dead. He’s creeping around a monstrous place on an abandoned planet, and he is immortal and insane.”

  “How did you know that?” cried Samm, turning his enormous metal head to look at the dark burnished cube which had said nothing for so many years.

  There was no further thought from Finsternis, not a ghost, not an echo of a word.

  Folly prodded him.

  “It’s no use trying to make that thing talk if it doesn’t want to. We’ve both tried, thousands of times. Tell me about the two-headed elephants. Those are the big animals with large floppy ears and the noses that pick things up, aren’t they? And they make very wise, dependable underpeople out of them?”

  “I don’t know about the underpeople part, but the animals are the kind you mention, very big indeed. When John Joy Tree got far outside our cosmos by flying through Space3 he found an enormous procession of open ships flying in columns where there was nothing at all. The ships were made by nothing which man has ever even seen. We still don’t know where they came from or what made them. Each open ship had a sort of animal, something like an elephant with four front legs and a head at each end, and as he passed the unimaginable ships, these animals howled at him. Howled grief and mourning. Our best guess was that the ships were the tombs of some great race of beings and the howling elephants, the immortal half-living mourners who guarded them.”

  “But how did John Joy Tree ever get back?”

  “Ah, that was beautiful. If you go into Space3, you take nothing more than your own body with you. That was the finest engineering the human race has ever done. They designed and built a whole planoform ship out of John Joy Tree’s skin, fingernails, and hair. They had to change his body chemistry a bit to get enough metal in him to carry the coils and the electric circuits, but it worked. He came back. That was a man who could skip through space like a little boy hopping on familiar rocks. He’s the only pilot who ever piloted himself back home from outside our galaxy. I don’t know whether it will be worth the time and treasure to use space-three for intergalactic trips. After all, some very gifted people may have already fallen through by accident, Folly. You and Finsternis and I are people who have been built into machines. We are now ourselves the machines. But with Tree they did it the other way around. They made a machine out of him. And it worked. In that one deep flight he went billions of times further than we will ever go.”

  “You think you know,” said Finsternis unexpectedly. “That’s what you always do. You think you know.”

  Folly and Samm tried to get Finsternis to talk some more, but nothing happened. After a few more rests and talks they were ready for landing on the third planet of Linschoten XV.

  They landed.

  They fought.

  Blood ran on the ground. Fire scorched the valleys and boiled the lakes. The telepathic world was full of the cackle-gabble of fright, hatred throwing itself into suicide, fury turning into surrender, into deep despair, into hopelessness, and at last into a strange kind of quiet and love.

  Let us not tell that story.

  It can be written some other time, told by some other voice.

  The beings died by thousands and tens of thousands while Finsternis sat on a mountain-top, d
oing nothing. Folly wove death and destruction, uncoded languages, drew maps, showed Samm the strong-points and the weapons which had to be destroyed. Part of the technology was very advanced, other parts were still tribal. The dominant race was that of the beings who had evolved into handlers and thinkers; it was they who were the telepaths.

  All hatred ceased as the haters died. Only the submissive ones lived on.

  Samm tore cities about with his bare metal hands, ripped heavy guns to pieces while they were firing at him, picking the gunners off the gun carriages as though they were lice, swimming oceans when he had to, with Folly darting and hovering around or ahead of him.

  Final surrender was brought by their strongest telepath, a very wise old male who had been hidden inside a deep mountain.

  “You have come, people. We surrender. Some of us have always known the truth. We are Earth-born, too. A cargo of chickens settled here unimaginable times ago. A time-twist tore us out of our convoy and threw us here. That’s why, when we sensed you far across space, we caught the relationship of eat-and-eaten. Only, our brave ones had it wrong. You eat us: we don’t eat you. You are the masters now. We will serve you forever. Do you seek our death?”

  “No, no,” said Folly. “We came only to avert a danger, and we have done that. Live on, and on, but plan no war and make no weapons. Leave that to the Instrumentality.”

  “Blessed is the Instrumentality, whoever that may be. We accept your terms. We belong to you.”

  When this was done, the war was over.

  Strange things began to happen.

  Wild voices sang from within Folly and Samm, voices not their own. Mission gone. Work finished. Go to hill with cube. Go and rejoice!

  Samm and Folly hesitated. They had left Finsternis where they landed, halfway around the planet.

  The singing voices became more urgent. Go. Go. Go now. Go back to the cube. Tell the chicken-people to plant a lawn and a grove of trees. Go, go, go now to the good reward!

  They told the telepaths what had been said to them and voyaged wearily up out of the atmosphere and back down for a landing at the original point of contact, a long low hill which had been planted with huge patches of green turf and freshly transplanted trees even in the hours in which they flew off the world and back on it again. The bird-telepaths must have had strong and quick commands.

  The singing became pure music as they landed, chorales of reward and rejoicing, with the hint of martial marches and victory fugues woven in.

  Alan, stand up, said the voices to Samm.

  Samm stood on the ridge of the hill. He stood like a colossus against the red-dawning sky. A friendly, quiet crowd of the chicken-people fell back.

  Alan, put your hand to your right forehead, sang the voices.

  Samm obeyed. He did not know why the voices called him “Alan.”

  Ellen, land, sang the rejoicing voices to Folly. Folly, herself a little ship, landed at Samm’s feet. She was bewildered with happy confusion and a great deal of pain which did not seem to matter much.

  Alan, come forth, sang the voices. Samm felt a sharp pain as his forehead—his huge metal forehead, two hundred meters above the ground—burst open and closed again. There was something pink and helpless in his hand.

  The voices commanded, Alan, put your hand gently on the ground.

  Samm obeyed and put his hand on the ground. The little pink toy fell on the fresh turf. It was a tiny miniature of a man.

  Ellen, stand forth, sang the voices again. The ship named Folly opened a door and a naked young woman fell out.

  Alma, wake up. The cube named Finsternis turned darker than charcoal. Out of the dark side, there stumbled a black-haired girl. She ran across the hill-slope to the figure named Ellen. The man-body named Alan was struggling to his feet.

  The three of them stood up.

  The voices spoke to them: This is our last message. You have done your work. You are well. The boat named Folly contains tools, medicine, and the other equipment for a human colony. The giant named Samm will stand forever as a monument to human victory. The cube named Finsternis will now dissolve. Alan! Ellen! Treat Alma lovingly and well. She is now a forgetty.

  The three naked people stood bewildered in the dawn.

  Good-bye and a great high thanks from the Instrumentality. This is a pre-coded message, effective only if you won. You have won. Be happy. Live on!

  Ellen took Alma—who had been Finsternis—and held her tight. The great cube dissolved into a shapeless slag-heap. Alan, who had been Samm, looked up at his former body dominating the skyline.

  For reasons which the travelers did not understand until many years had passed, the bird-people around them broke into ululant hymns of peace, welcome, and joy.

  “My house,” said Ellen, pointing at the little ship which had spat forth her body just minutes ago, “is now a home for all of us.”

  They climbed into the successful little ship which had been called Folly. They knew, somehow, that they would find clothes and food. And wisdom, too. They did.

  VI

  Ten years later, they had the proof of happiness playing in the yard before their house—a substantial building, made of stone and brick, which the local people had built under Alan’s directions. (They had changed their whole technology in the process of learning from him, and—thanks to the efficiency and power of the telepathic priestly caste—things learned at any one spot on the planet were swiftly disseminated to the whole group of races on the planet.) The proof of happiness consisted of the thirty-five human children playing in the yard. Ellen had had nine, four sets of twins and a single. Alma had had twelve, two sets of quintuplets and a pair of twins. The other fourteen had been bottle-grown from ova and sperm which they found in the ship, the frozen donations of complete strangers who had done their bit for the offworld settling of the human race. Thanks to the careful genetic coding of both the womb-children and the bottle-children, there was a variety of types, suitable for natural breeding over many generations to come.

  Alan came to the door. He measured the time by the place where the great shadow fell. It was hard to realize that the gigantic, indestructible statue which loomed above them all had once been his own self. A small glacier was beginning to form around the feet of Samm and the night was getting cold.

  “I’m bringing the children in already,” said Ch-tikkik, one of the local nurses they had hired to help with the huge brood of human babies. She, in return, got the privilege of hatching her eggs on the warm shelf behind the electric stove; she turned them every hour, eagerly awaiting the time that sharp little mouths would break the shell and humanlike little hands would tear an opening from which a humanlike baby would emerge, oddly-pretty-ugly like a gnome, and unusual only in that it could stand upright from the moment of birth.

  One little boy was arguing with Ch-tikkik. He wore a warm robe of vegetable-fiber veins knitted to serve as a base for a feather cloak. He was pointing out that with such a robe he could survive a blizzard and claiming, quite justly, that he did not have to be in the house in order to stay warm. Was that Rupert? thought Alan.

  He was about to call the child when his two wives came to the door, arm in arm, flushed with the heat of the kitchen where they had been cooking the two dinners together—one dinner for the humans, now numbering thirty-eight, and the other for the bird-people, who were tremendously appreciative of getting cooked food, but who had odd requirements in the recipes, such as “one quart of finely ground granite gravel to each gallon of oatmeal, sugared to taste and served with soybean milk.”

  Alan stood behind his wives and put a hand on the shoulder of each.

  “It’s hard to think,” he said, “that a little over ten years ago, we didn’t even know that we were still people. Now look at us, a family, and a good one.”

  Alma turned her face up to be kissed, and Ellen, who was less sentimental, lifted her face to be kissed, too, so that her co-wife would not be embarrassed at being babied separately. The two liked each oth
er very much. Alma came out of the cube Finsternis as a forgetty, conditioned to remember nothing of her long sad psychotic life before the Instrumentality had sent her on a wild mission among the stars. When she had joined Alan and Ellen, she knew the words of the Old Common Tongue, but very little else.

  Ellen had had some time to teach her, to love her, and to mother her before any of the babies were born, and the relationship between the two of them was warm and good.

  The three parents stood aside as the bird-women, wearing their comfortable and pretty feather cloaks, herded the children into the house. The smallest children had already been brought in from their sunning and were being given their bottles by bird-girls who never got tired of watching the cuteness and helplessness of the human infant.

  “It’s hard to think of that time at all,” said Ellen, who had been “Folly.” “I wanted beauty and fame and a perfect marriage and nobody even told me that they didn’t go together. I have had to come to the end of the stars to get what I wanted, to be what I might become.”

  “And me,” said Alma, who had been “Finsternis,” “I had a worse problem. I was crazy. I was afraid of life. I didn’t even know how to be a woman, a sweetheart, a female, a mother. How could I ever guess that I needed a sister and wife, like the one you have been, to make my life whole? Without you to show me, Ellen, I could never have married our husband. I thought I was carrying murder among the stars, but I was carrying my own solution as well. Where else could I turn out to be me?”

  “And I,” said Alan, who had been “Samm,” “became a metal giant between the stars because my first wife was dead and my own children forgot me and neglected me. Nobody can say I’m not a father now. Thirty-five, and more than half of them mine. I’ll be more of a father than any other man of the human race has ever been.”

  There was a change in the shadow as the enormous right arm swung heavily toward the sky as a prelude to the sharp robotic call that nightfall, calculated with astronomical precision, had indeed come to the place where he stood.