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

by Cordwainer Smith

  Greene said, “No, no, miss, who are you?”

  The girl didn’t answer. She just stood there and she gave him a smile.

  She wore a blue serge skirt cut so that it had broad, vertical stripes, a neat little waist, a belt of the same material, a very simple blouse. She was not a strange girl and she was by no means a creature of outer space.

  She was somebody he had known and known well. Perhaps loved. He just couldn’t place her—not at that moment, not in that place.

  She still stood staring at him. That was all.

  It all came to him. Of course. She was Nancy. She was not just that Nancy they were talking about, she was his Nancy, his own Nancy he had always known and never met before.

  He managed to pull himself together and say it to her, “How do I know you if I don’t know you? You’re Nancy and I’ve known you all my life and I have always wanted to marry you. You are the girl I have always been in love with and I never saw you before. That’s funny, Nancy. It’s terribly funny. I don’t understand it, do you?”

  Nancy came over and put her hand on his forehead. It was a real little hand and her presence was dear and precious and very welcome to him. She said, “It’s going to take a bit of thinking. You see, I am not real, not to anybody except you. And yet I am more real to you than anything else will ever be. That is what the sokta virus is, darling. It’s me. I’m you.”

  He stared at her. He could have been unhappy but he didn’t feel unhappy, he was so glad to have her there.

  He said, “What do you mean? The sokta virus has made you? Am I crazy? Is this just a hallucination?”

  Nancy shook her head and her pretty curls spun.

  “It’s not that. I’m simply every girl that you ever wanted. I am the illusion that you always wanted but I am you because I am in the depths of you. I am everything that your mind might not have encountered in life. Everything that you might have been afraid to dig up. Here I am and I’m going to stay. And as long as we are here in this ship with the resonance we will get along well.”

  My cousin at this point began weeping. He picked up a wine flask and poured down a big glass of heavy Dago Red. For a while he cried. Putting his head on the table, he looked up at me and said, “It’s been a long, long time. It’s been a very long time and I still remember how she talked with me. And I see now why they say you can’t talk about it. A man has got to be fearfully drunk to tell about a real life that he had and a good one, and a beautiful one and let it go, doesn’t he?”

  “That’s right,” I said, to be encouraging.

  Nancy changed the ship right away. She moved the hamsters. She changed the decorations. She checked the records. The work went on more efficiently than ever before.

  But the home they made for themselves, that was something different. It had baking smells, and it had wind smells, and sometimes he would hear the rain although the nearest rain by now was one thousand six hundred million miles away, and there was nothing but the grating of cold silence on the cold, cold metal at the outside of the ship.

  They lived together. It didn’t take long for them to get thoroughly used to each other.

  He had been born Giordano Verdi. He had limitations.

  And the time came for them to get even more close than lover and lover. He said, “I just can’t take you, darling. That is not the way we can do it, even in space and not the way, even if you are not real. You are real enough to me. Will you marry me out of the prayer book?”

  Her eyes lit up and her incomparable lips gleamed in a smile that was all peculiarly her own. She said, “Of course.”

  She flung her arms around him. He ran his fingers over the bones of her shoulder. He felt her ribs. He felt the individual strands of her hair brushing his cheeks. This was real. This was more real than life itself, yet some fool had told him that it was a virus—that Nancy didn’t exist. If this wasn’t Nancy, what was it? he thought.

  He put her down and, alive with love and happiness, he read the prayer book. He asked her to make the responses. He said, “I suppose I’m captain, and I suppose I have married you and me, haven’t I, Nancy?”

  The marriage went well. The ship followed an immense perimeter like that of a comet. It went far out. So far that the sun became a remote dot. The interference of the solar system had virtually no effect on the instruments.

  Nancy came to him one day and said, “I suppose you know why you are a failure now.”

  “No,” he said.

  She looked at him gravely. She said, “I think with your mind. I live in your body. If you die while on this ship, I die too. Yet as long as you live, I am alive and separate. That’s funny, isn’t it?”

  “Funny,” he said, an old new pain growing in his heart.

  “And yet I can tell you something which I know with that part of your mind I use. I know without you that I am. I suppose I recognize your technical training and feel it somehow even though I don’t feel the lack of it. I had the education you thought I had and you wanted me to have. But do you see what’s happening? We are working with our brain at almost half-power instead of one-tenth power. All your imagination is going into making me. All your extra thoughts are of me. I want them just as I want you to love me but there are none left over for emergencies and there is nothing left over for the Space Service. You are doing the minimum, that’s all. Am I worth it?”

  “Of course you are worth it, darling. You’re worth anything that any man could ask of the sweetheart, and of love, and of a wife and a true companion.”

  “But don’t you see? I am taking all the best of you. You are putting it into me and when the ship comes home there won’t be any me.”

  In a strange way he realized that the drug was working. He could see what was happening to himself as he looked at his well-beloved Nancy with her shimmering hair and he realized the hair needed no prettying or hairdos. He looked at her clothes and he realized that she wore clothes for which there was no space on the ship. And yet she changed them, delightfully, winsomely, attractively, day in and day out. He ate the food that he knew couldn’t be on the ship. None of this worried him. And now he couldn’t even be worried at the thought of losing Nancy herself. Any other thought he could have rejected from his subconscious mind and could have surrendered to the idea that it was not a hallucination after all.*

  *Note: In the version published in Satellite Science Fiction, the story ended at this point.—Editor.

  This was too much. He ran his fingers through her hair. He said, “I know I’m crazy, darling, and I know that you don’t exist—”

  “But I do exist. I am you. I am a part of Gordon Greene as surely as if I’d married you. I’ll never die until you do because when you get home, darling, I’ll drop back, back into your deeper mind but I’ll live in your mind as long as you live. You can’t lose me and I can’t leave you and you can’t forget me. And I can’t escape to anyone except through your lips. That’s why they talk about it. That’s why it is such a strange thing.”

  “And that’s where I know I’m wrong,” stubbornly insisted Gordon. “I love you and I know you are a phantom and I know you are going away and I know we are coming to an end and it doesn’t worry me. I’ll be happy just being with you. I don’t need a drink. I wouldn’t touch a drug. Yet the happiness is here.”

  They went about their little domestic chores. They checked his graph paper, they stored the records, they put a few silly things into the permanent ship’s record. They then toasted marshmallows before a large fire. The fire was in a handsome fireplace which did not exist. The flames couldn’t have burned but they did. There weren’t any marshmallows on the ship but they toasted them and enjoyed them anyhow.

  That’s the way their life went—full of magic, and yet the magic had no sting or provocation to it, no anger, no hopelessness, no despair.

  They were a very happy couple.

  Even the hamsters felt it. They stayed clean and plump. They ate their food willingly. They got over space nausea. They p
eered at him.

  He let one of them, the one with the brown nose, out and let it run around the room. He said, “You’re a real army character. You poor thing. Born for space and serving out here in it.”

  Only one other time did Nancy take up the question of their future. She said,

  “We can’t have children, you know. The sokta drug doesn’t allow for that. And you may have children yourself but it is going to be funny having them if you marry somebody else with me always there just in the background. And I will be there.”

  They made it back to Earth. They returned.

  As he stepped out of the gate, a harsh, weary medical colonel gave him one sharp glance. He said,

  “Oh, we thought that had happened.”

  “What, sir?” said a plump and radiant Lieutenant Greene.

  “You got Nancy,” said the colonel.

  “Yes, sir. I’ll bring her right out.”

  “Go get her,” said the colonel.

  Greene went back into the rocket and he looked. There was no sign of Nancy. He came to the door astonished. He was still not upset. He said,

  “Colonel, I don’t seem to see her there but I’m sure that she’s somewhere around.”

  The colonel gave him a strange, sympathetic, fatigued smile. “She always will be somewhere around, Lieutenant. You’ve done the minimum job. I don’t know whether we ought to discourage people like you. I suppose you realize that you are frozen in your present grade. You’ll get a decoration, Mission Accomplished. Mission successful, farther than anybody has gone before. Incidentally, Vonderleyen says he knows you and will be waiting over yonder. We have to take you into the hospital to make sure that you don’t go into shock.”

  “At the hospital,” said my cousin, “there was no shock.”

  He didn’t even miss Nancy. How could he miss her when she hadn’t left? She was always just around the corner, just behind the door, just a few minutes away.

  At breakfast time he knew he’d see her for lunch. At lunch, he knew she’d drop by in the afternoon. At the end of the afternoon, he knew he’d have dinner with her.

  He knew he was crazy. Crazy as he could be.

  He knew perfectly well that there was no Nancy and never had been. He supposed that he ought to hate the sokta drug for doing that to him, but it brought its own relief.

  The effect of Nancy was an immolation in perpetual hope, the promise of something that could never be lost, and a promise of something that cannot be lost is often better than a reality which can be lost.

  That’s all there was to it. They asked him to testify against the use of the sokta drug and he said,

  “Me? Give up Nancy? Don’t be silly.”

  “You haven’t got her,” said somebody.

  “That’s what you think,” said my cousin, Lieutenant Greene.

  The Fife of Bodidharma

  Music (said Confucius) awakens the mind, propriety finishes it, melody completes it.

  —The Lun Yu, Book VIII, Chapter 8

  I

  It was perhaps in the second period of the proto-Indian Harappa culture, perhaps earlier in the very dawn of metal, that a goldsmith accidentally found a formula to make a magical fife. To him, the fife became death or bliss, an avenue to choosable salvations or dooms. Among later men, the fife might be recognized as a chancy prediscovery of psionic powers with sonic triggering.

  Whatever it was, it worked! Long before the Buddha, long-haired Dravidian priests learned that it worked.

  Cast mostly in gold despite the goldsmith’s care with the speculum alloy, the fife emitted shrill whistlings but it also transmitted supersonic vibrations in a narrow range—narrow and intense enough a range to rearrange synapses in the brain and to modify the basic emotions of the hearer.

  The goldsmith did not long survive his instrument. They found him dead.

  The fife became the property of priests; after a short, terrible period of use and abuse, it was buried in the tomb of a great king.

  II

  Robbers found the fife, tried it and died. Some died amid bliss, some amid hate, others in a frenzy of fear and delusion. A strong survivor, trembling after the ordeal of inexpressibly awakened sensations and emotions, wrapped the fife in a page of holy writing and presented it to Bodidharma the Blessed One just before Bodidharma began his unbelievably arduous voyage from India across the ranges of the spines of the world over to far Cathay.

  Bodidharma the Blessed One, the man who had seen Persia, the aged one bringing wisdom, came across the highest of all mountains in the year that the Northern Wei dynasty of China moved their capital out of divine Loyang. (Elsewhere in the world where men reckoned the years from the birth of their Lord Jesus Christ, the year was counted as Anno Domini 554, but in the high land between India and China the message of Christianity had not yet arrived and the word of the Lord Gautama Buddha was still the sweetest gospel to reach the ears of men.)

  Bodidharma, clad by only a thin robe, climbed across the glaciers. For food he drank the air, spicing it with prayer. Cold winds cut his old skin, his tired bones; for a cloak he drew his sanctity about him and bore within his indomitable heart the knowledge that the pure, unspoiled message of the Lord Gautama Buddha had, by the will of time and chance themselves, to be carried from the Indian world to the Chinese.

  Once beyond the peaks and passes he descended into the cold frigidity of high desert. Sand cut his feet but the skin did not bleed because he was shod in sacred spells and magical charms.

  At last animals approached. They came in the ugliness of their sin, ignorance, and shame. Beasts they were, but more than beasts—they were the souls of the wicked condemned to endless rebirth, now incorporated in vile forms because of the wickedness with which they had once rejected the teachings of eternity and the wisdom which lay before them as plainly as the trees or the nighttime heavens. The more vicious the man, the more ugly the beast: this was the rule. Here in the desert the beasts were very ugly.

  Bodidharma the Blessed One shrank back.

  He did not desire to use the weapon, “O Forever Blessed One, seated in the Lotus Flower, Buddha, help me!”

  Within his heart he felt no response. The sinfulness and wickedness of these beasts was such that even the Buddha had turned his face gently aside and would offer no protection to his messenger, the missionary Bodidharma.

  Reluctantly Bodidharma took out his fife.

  The fife was a dainty weapon, twice the length of a man’s finger. Golden in strange, almost ugly forms, it hinted at a civilization which no one living in India now remembered. The fife had come out of the early beginnings of mankind, had ridden across a mass of ages, a legion of years, and survived as a testimony to the power of early men.

  At the end of the fife was a little whistle. Four touch holes gave the fife pitches and a wide variety of combinations of notes.

  Blown once the fife called to holiness. This occurred if all stops were closed.

  Blown twice with all stops opened the fife carried its own power. This power was strange indeed. It magnified every chance emotion of each living thing within range of its sound.

  Bodidharma the Blessed One had carried the fife because it comforted him. Closed, its notes reminded him of the sacred message of the Three Treasures of the Buddha which he carried from India to China. Opened, its notes brought bliss to the innocent and their own punishment to the wicked. Innocence and wickedness were not determined by the fife but by the hearers themselves, whoever they might be. The trees which heard these notes in their own treelike way struck even more mightily into the earth and up to the sky reaching for nourishment with new but dim and treelike hope. Tigers became more tigerish, frogs more froggy, men more good or bad, as their characters might dispose them.

  “Stop!” called Bodidharma the Blessed One to the beasts.

  Tiger and wolf, fox and jackal, snake and spider, they advanced.

  “Stop!” he called again.

  Hoof and claw, sting and tooth, eyes alive,
they advanced.

  “Stop!” he called for the third time.

  Still they advanced. He blew the fife wide open, twice, clear and loud.

  Twice, clear and loud.

  The animals stopped. At the second note, they began to thresh about, imprisoned even more deeply by the bestiality of their own natures. The tiger snarled at his own front paws, the wolf snapped at his own tail, the jackal ran fearfully from his own shadow, the spider hid beneath the darkness of rocks, and the other vile beasts who had threatened the Blessed One let him pass.

  Bodidharma the Blessed One went on. In the streets of the new capital at Anyang the gentle gospel of Buddhism was received with curiosity, with calm, and with delight. Those voluptuous barbarians, the Toba Tartars, who had made themselves masters of North China, now filled their hearts and souls with the hope of death instead of the fear of destruction. Mothers wept with pleasure to know that their children, dying, had been received into blessedness. The Emperor himself laid aside his sword in order to listen to the gentle message that had come so bravely over illimitable mountains.

  When Bodidharma the Blessed One died he was buried in the outskirts of Anyang, his fife in a sacred onyx case beside his right hand. There he and it both slept for thirteen hundred and forty years.

  III

  In the year 1894 a German explorer—so he fancied himself to be—looted the tomb of the Blessed One in the name of science.

  Villagers caught him in the act and drove him from the hillside.

  He escaped with only one piece of loot, an onyx case with a strange copperlike fife. Copper it seemed to be, although the metal was not as corroded as actual copper should have been after so long a burial in intermittently moist country. The fife was filthy. He cleaned it enough to see that it was fragile and to reveal the un-Chinese character of the declarations along its side.

  He did not clean it enough to try blowing it: he lived because of that.