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

by Cordwainer Smith

  Farrer smiled and his eyes lit up. “Furthermore,” he added, as a winning point, “you can keep my watch for yourself, for always.”

  The Martian frowned. Speaking to himself the student-Martian said, “I can see that Chinese Communism is going to collapse in eight years, eight hundred years, or eighty thousand years. Perhaps I’d better go to this Waterbury, Conn.”

  The two young Communists nodded their heads vigorously and grinned. They both smiled at the Martian.

  “Honored, esteemed Martian, sir, please hurry along because I want to get my men over the edge of the cliff before darkness falls. Go with our blessing.”

  The Martian changed shape. He took on the image of an Arhat, a subordinate disciple of Buddha. Eight feet tall, he loomed above them. His face radiated unearthly calm. The watch, miraculously provided with a new strap, was firmly strapped to his left wrist.

  “Bless you, my boys,” said he. “I go to Waterbury.” And he did.

  Farrer stared at Kungsun. “What’s happened to Li?”

  Kungsun shook his head dazedly. “I don’t know. I feel funny.”

  (In departing for that marvelous strange place, Waterbury, Conn., the Martian had taken with him all their memories of himself.)

  Kungsun walked to the edge of the cliff. Looking over, he saw the men sleeping.

  “Look at that,” he muttered. He stepped to the edge of the cliff and began shouting. “Wake up, you fools, you turtles. Haven’t you any more sense than to sleep on a cliff as nightfall approaches?”

  The Martian concentrated all his powers on the location of Waterbury. Conn.

  He was the 1,387,229th Eastern Subordinate Incarnation of a Lohan (or an Arhat), and his powers were limited, impressive though they might seem to outsiders.

  With a shock, a thrill, a something of breaking, a sense of things done and undone, he found himself in flat country. Strange darkness surrounded him. Air, which he had never smelled before, flowed quietly around him. Farrer and Li, hanging on a cliff high above the Chinshachiang, lay far behind him in the world from which he had broken. He remembered that he had left his shape behind.

  Absentmindedly he glanced down at himself to see what form he had taken for the trip.

  He discovered that he had arrived in the form of a small, laughing Buddha seven inches high, carved in yellowed ivory.

  “This will never do!” muttered the Martian to himself. “I must take on one of the local forms…”

  He sensed around in his environment, groping telepathically for interesting objects near him.

  “Aha, a milk truck.”

  Thought he, Western science is indeed very wonderful. Imagine a machine made purely for the purpose of transporting milk!

  Swiftly he transferred himself into a milk truck.

  In the darkness, his telepathic senses had not distinguished the metal of which the milk truck was made nor the color of the paint.

  In order to remain inconspicuous, he turned himself into a milk truck made of solid gold. Then, without a driver, he started up his own engine and began driving himself down one of the main highways leading into Waterbury, Connecticut…So if you happen to be passing through Waterbury, Conn., and see a solid gold milk truck driving itself through the streets, you’ll know it’s the Martian, otherwise the 1,387,229th Eastern Subordinate Incarnation of a Lohan, and that he still thinks Western science is wonderful.

  Nancy

  Two men faced Gordon Greene as he came into the room. The young aide was a nonentity. The general was not. The commanding general sat where he should, at his own desk. It was placed squarely in the room, and yet the infinite courtesy of the general was shown by the fact that the blinds were so drawn that the light did not fall directly into the eyes of the person interviewed.

  At that time the colonel general was Wenzel Wallenstein, the first man ever to venture into the very deep remoteness of space. He had not reached a star. Nobody had, at that time, but he had gone farther than any man had ever gone before.

  Wallenstein was an old man and yet the count of his years was not high. He was less than ninety in a period in which many men lived to one hundred and fifty. The thing that made Wallenstein look old was the suffering which came from mental strain, not the kind which came from anxiety and competition, not the kind which came from ill health.

  It was a subtler kind—a sensitivity which created its own painfulness.

  Yet it was real.

  Wallenstein was as stable as men came, and the young lieutenant was astonished to find that at his first meeting with the commander in chief his instinctive emotional reaction should be one of quick sympathy for the man who commanded the entire organization.

  “Your name?”

  The lieutenant answered, “Gordon Greene.”

  “Born that way?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What was your name originally?”

  “Giordano Verdi.”

  “Why did you change? Verdi is a great name too.”

  “People just found it hard to pronounce, sir. I followed along the best I could.”

  “I kept my name,” said the old general. “I suppose it is a matter of taste.”

  The young lieutenant lifted his hand, left hand, palm outward, in the new salute which had been devised by the psychologists. He knew that this meant military courtesy could be passed by for the moment and that the subordinate officer was requesting permission to speak as man to man. He knew the salute and yet in these surroundings he did not altogether trust it.

  The general’s response was quick. He countersigned, left hand, palm outward.

  The heavy, tired, wise, strained old face showed no change of expression. The general was alert. Mechanically friendly, his eyes followed the lieutenant. The lieutenant was sure that there was nothing behind those eyes, except world upon world of inward troubles.

  The lieutenant spoke again, this time on confident ground.

  “Is this a special interview, General? Do you have something in mind for me? If it is, sir, let me warn you, I have been declared to be psychologically unstable. Personnel doesn’t often make a mistake but they may have sent me in here under error.”

  The general smiled. The smile itself was mechanical. It was a control of muscles, not a quick spring of human emotion.

  “You will know well enough what I have in mind when we talk together, Lieutenant. I am going to have another man sit with me and it will give you some idea of what your life is leading you toward. You know perfectly well that you have asked for deep space and that so far as I’m concerned you’ve gotten it. The question is now, ‘Do you really want it?’ Do you want to take it? Is that all that you wanted to abridge courtesy for?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the lieutenant.

  “You didn’t have to call for the courtesy sign for that kind of a question. You could have asked me even within the limits of service. Let’s not get too psychological. We don’t need to, do we?”

  Again the general gave the lieutenant a heavy smile.

  Wallenstein gestured to the aide, who sprang to attention.

  Wallenstein said, “Send him in.”

  The aide said, “Yes, sir.”

  The two men waited expectantly. With a springy, lively, quick, happy step a strange lieutenant entered the room.

  Gordon Greene had never seen anybody quite like this lieutenant. The lieutenant was old, almost as old as the general. His face was cheerful and unlined. The muscles of his cheeks and forehead bespoke happiness, relaxation, an assured view of life. The lieutenant wore the three highest decorations of his service. There weren’t any others higher and yet there he was, an old man and still a lieutenant.

  Lieutenant Greene couldn’t understand it. He didn’t know who this man was. It was easy enough for a young man to be a lieutenant but not for a man in his seventies or eighties. People that age were colonels, or retired, or out.

  Or they had gone back to civilian life.

  Space was a young man’s game.
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  The general himself arose in courtesy to his contemporary. Lieutenant Greene’s eyes widened. This too was odd. The general was not known to violate courtesy at all irregularly.

  “Sit down, sir,” said the strange old lieutenant.

  The general sat.

  “What do you want with me now? Do you want to talk about the Nancy routine one more time?”

  “The Nancy routine?” asked the general blindly.

  “Yes, sir. It’s the same story I’ve told these youngsters before. You’ve heard it and I’ve heard it, there’s no use of pretending.”

  The strange lieutenant said, “My name’s Karl Vonderleyen. Have you ever heard of me?”

  “No, sir,” said the young lieutenant.

  The old lieutenant said, “You will.”

  “Don’t get bitter about it, Karl,” said the general. “A lot of other people have had troubles, besides you. I went and did the same things you did, and I’m a general. You might at least pay me the courtesy of envying me.”

  “I don’t envy you, General. You’ve had your life, and I’ve had mine. You know what you’ve missed, or you think you do, and I know what I’ve had, and I’m sure I do.”

  The old lieutenant paid no more attention to the commander in chief. He turned to the young man and said,

  “You’re going to go out into space and we are putting on a little act, a vaudeville act. The general didn’t get any Nancy. He didn’t ask for Nancy. He didn’t turn for help. He got out into the Up-and-Out, he pulled through it. Three years of it. Three years that are closer to three million years, I suppose. He went through hell and he came back. Look at his face. He’s a success. He’s an utter, blasted success, sitting there worn out, tired, and, it would seem, hurt. Look at me. Look at me carefully, Lieutenant. I’m a failure. I’m a lieutenant and the Space Service keeps me that way.”

  The commander in chief said nothing, so Vonderleyen talked on.

  “Oh, they will retire me as a general, I suppose, when the time comes. I’m not ready to retire. I’d just as soon stay in the Space Service as anything else. There is not much to do in this world. I’ve had it.”

  “Had what, sir?” Lieutenant Greene dared to ask.

  “I found Nancy. He didn’t,” he said. “That’s as simple as it is.”

  The general cut back into the conversation. “It’s not that bad and it’s not that simple, Lieutenant Greene. There seems to be something a little wrong with Lieutenant Vonderleyen today. The story is one we have to tell you and it is something you have to make up your own mind on. There is no regulation way of handling it.”

  The general looked very sharply at Lieutenant Greene.

  “Do you know what we have done to your brain?”

  “No, sir.” Greene felt uneasiness rising in him.

  “Have you heard of the sokta virus?”

  “The what, sir?”

  “The sokta virus. Sokta is an ancient word, gets its name from Chosenmal, the language of Old Korea. That was a country west of where Japan used to be. It means ‘maybe’ and it is a ‘maybe’ that we put inside your head. It is a tiny crystal, more than microscopic. It’s there. There is actually a machine on the ship, not a big one because we can’t waste space; it has resonance to detonate the virus. If you detonate sokta, you will be like him. If you don’t, you will be like me—assuming, in either case, that you live. You may not live and you may not get back, in which case what we are talking about is academic.”

  The young man nerved himself to ask, “What does this do to me? Why do you make this big fuss over it?”

  “We can’t tell you too much. One reason is it is not worth talking about.”

  “You mean you really can’t, sir?”

  The general shook his head sadly and wisely.

  “No, I missed it, he got it, and yet it somehow gets out beyond the limits of talking.”

  At this point while he was telling the story, many years later, I asked my cousin, “Well, Gordon, if they said you can’t talk about it, how can you?”

  “Drunk, man, drunk,” said the cousin. “How long do you think it took me to wind myself up to this point? I’ll never tell it again—never again. Anyhow, you’re my cousin, you don’t count. And I promised Nancy I wouldn’t tell anybody.”

  “Who’s Nancy?” I asked him.

  “Nancy’s what it’s all about. That is what the story is. That’s what those poor old goops were trying to tell me in the office. They didn’t know. One of them, he had Nancy; the other one, he hadn’t.”

  “Is Nancy a real person?”

  With that he told me the rest of the story.

  The interview was harsh. It was clean, stark, simple, direct. The alternatives were flat. It was perfectly plain that Wallenstein wanted Greene to come back alive. It was actual space command policy to bring the man back as a live failure instead of letting him become a dead hero. Pilots were not that common. Furthermore, morale would be worsened if men were told to go out on suicide operations.

  The whole thing was psychological and before Greene got out of the room he was more confused than when he went in.

  They kept telling them, both of them in their different ways—the general happily, the old lieutenant unhappily—that this was serious. The grim old general was very cheerful about telling him. The happy lieutenant kept being very sympathetic.

  Greene himself wondered why he could be so sympathetic toward the commanding general and be so perfectly carefree about a failed old lieutenant. His sympathies should have been the other way around.

  Fifteen hundred million miles later, four months later in ordinary time, four lifetimes later by the time which he’d gone through, Greene found out what they were talking about. It was an old psychological teaching. The men died if they were left utterly alone. The ships were designed to be protected against that. There were two men on each ship. Each ship had a lot of tapes, even a few quite unnecessary animals; in this case a pair of hamsters had been included on the ship. They had been sterilized, of course, to avoid the problem of feeding the young, but nevertheless they made a little family of their own in a miniature of life’s happiness on Earth.

  Earth was very far away.

  At that point, his copilot died.

  Everything that had threatened Greene then came true.

  Greene suddenly realized what they were talking about.

  The hamsters were his one hope. He thrust his face close to their cage and talked to them. He attributed moods to them. He tried to live their lives with them, all as if they were people.

  As if he, himself, were a part of people still alive and not out there with the screaming silence beyond the thin wall of metal. There was nothing to do except to roam like a caged animal in machinery which he would never understand.

  Time lost its perspectives. He knew he was crazy and he knew that by training he could survive the partial craziness. He even realized that the instability in his own personality which had made him think that he wouldn’t fit the Space Service probably contributed to the hope that went in with service to this point.

  His mind kept coming back to Nancy and to the sokta virus.

  What was it they had said?

  They had told him that he could waken Nancy, whoever Nancy was. Nancy was no pet name of his. And yet somehow or other the virus always worked. He only needed to move his head toward a certain point, press the resonating stud on the wall, one pressure, his mission would fail, he would be happy, he would come home alive.

  He couldn’t understand it. Why such a choice?

  It seemed three thousand years later that he dictated his last message back to Space Service. He didn’t know what would happen. Obviously, that old lieutenant, Vonderleyen, or whatever his name was, was still alive. Equally obviously the general was alive. The general had pulled through. The lieutenant hadn’t.

  And now, Lieutenant Greene, fifteen hundred million miles out in space, had to make his choice. He made it. He decided to fail.

&nbs
p; But he wanted, as a matter of discipline, to speak up for the man who was failing and he dictated, for the records of the ship when it got back to Earth, a very simple message concluding with an appeal for justice.

  “…and so, gentlemen, I have decided to activate the stud. I do not know what the reference to Nancy signifies. I have no concept of what the sokta virus will do except that it will make me fail. For this I am heartily ashamed. I regret the human weakness that has driven me to this. The weakness is human and you, gentlemen, have allowed for it. In this respect, it is not I who is failing, but the Space Service itself in giving me an authorization to fail. Gentlemen, forgive the bitterness with which I say good-bye to you in these seconds, but now I do say good-bye.”

  He stopped dictating, blinked his eyes, took one last look at the hamsters—what might they be by the time the sokta virus went to work?—pressed the stud and leaned forward.

  Nothing happened. He pressed the stud again.

  The ship suddenly filled with a strange odor. He couldn’t identify the odor. He didn’t know what it was.

  It suddenly came to him that this was new-mown hay with a slight tinge of geraniums, possibly of roses, too, on the far side. It was a smell that was common on the farm a few years ago where he had gone for a summer. It was the smell of his mother being on the porch and calling him back to a meal, and of himself, enough of a man to be indulgent even toward the woman in his own mother, enough of a child to turn happily back to a familiar voice.

  He said to himself, “If this is all there is to that virus, I can take it and work on with continued efficiency.”

  He added, “At fifteen hundred million miles out, and nothing but two hamsters for years of loneliness, a few hallucinations won’t hurt me any.”

  The door opened.

  It couldn’t open.

  The door opened nevertheless.

  At this point, Greene knew a fear more terrible than anything else he had ever encountered. He said to himself, “I’m crazy, I’m crazy,” and stared at the opening door.

  A girl stepped in. She said, “Hello, you there. You know me, don’t you?”