Genometry

by Gardner Dozois

  The television was set up high on the wooden altar, between Winter’s haggard face and Spring’s swollen belly.

  My Chrome found an electrical cord and a channel, then fought with the antenna until we had a clear picture and sound. The broadcast was from Boreal City, from one of the giant All-Family temples. For a moment, I thought there was a mistake. My Chrome was walking toward me, finally ready to sit, and I was thinking that nothing would happen. We would watch the service from Boreal, then have our feast, and everyone would laugh about this very strange misunderstanding.

  Then the temple vanished.

  Suddenly I was looking at an old person standing behind a forest of microphones, and beside her, looking young and strange, was a very homely girl.

  Huge, she was.

  She had a heavy skull, and thick hair sprouted from both her head and her face.

  But I didn’t say one word about her appearance. I sat motionless, feeling more lost than ever, and my Chrome slid in beside me, and her mother sat beside her.

  Everyone in the temple said, “Oh my!” when they saw that ugly girl.

  They sounded very impressed and very silly, and I started laughing, then bit down on my tongue.

  To the world, the old woman announced, “My name is Corvus. This is my child. Today is her sixteenth birthday.”

  The pregnant sister leaned and asked her mother, “How soon till we get ours?”

  Mother Chrome leaned, and loud enough for everyone to hear, she said, “Very soon. It’s already sent.”

  I asked my Chrome, “What’s sent?”

  “The pollen,” she whispered. “We’re supposed to get one of the very first shipments. Corvus promised it to Mother years ago.”

  What pollen? I wondered.

  “I’ll need help with the fertilizations,” said her mother. “And a physician’s hands would be most appreciated.”

  She was speaking to my Chrome.

  On television, the woman was saying, “My child represents a breakthrough. By unlocking ancient, unused genes, then modifying one of her nuclear bodies, we have produced the first of what should be hundreds, perhaps thousands of special children whose duty and honor it will be to prepare us for our future!”

  “I’ll stay here with you,” I promised my Chrome. “As long as necessary.”

  Then the hairy girl was asked to say something. Anything. So she stepped up to the microphones, gave the world this long, strange smile, then with the deepest, slowest voice that I had ever heard, she said, “Bless us all. I am pleased to serve.”

  I had to laugh.

  Finally.

  My Chrome’s eyes stabbed at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, not really meaning it. Then I was laughing harder, admitting, “I expected it to look prettier. You know? With a nice orange neck, or some brightly colored hair.”

  My Chrome was staring.

  Like never before, she was studying me.

  “What’s wrong?” I finally asked.

  Then I wasn’t laughing. I sat up straight, and because I couldn’t help myself, I told all the Chromatellas, “I don’t care how smart you know you are. What you’re talking about here is just plain stupid!”

  I said, “Insane.”

  Then I said, “It’s my world, too. Or did you forget that?”

  And that’s when my Chrome finally told me, “Shut up,” with the voice that ended everything. “Will you please, for once, you idiot-bitch, think and shut up!”

  A PLANET NAMED SHAYOL

  Cordwainer Smith

  The late Cordwainer Smith—in real life Dr. Paul M.A. Linebarger, scholar, statesman, and author of the definitive text (still taught today) on the art of psychological warfare—was a writer of enormous talents who, from 1948 until his untimely death in 1966, produced a double handful of some of the best short fiction this genre has ever seen: “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” “A Planet Named Shayol,” “On the Storm Planet,” “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell,” “The Dead Lady of Clown Town,” “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” “The Lady Who Sailed the Soul,” “Under Old Earth,” “Scanners Live in Vain”—as well as a large number of lesser, but still fascinating stories, all twisted and blended and woven into an interrelated tapestry of incredible lushness and intricacy. Smith created a baroque cosmology unrivaled even today for its scope and complexity: a millennia-spanning future history, logically outlandish and elegantly strange, set against a vivid, richly colored, mythically intense universe where animals assume the shape of men, vast planoform ships whisper through multidimensional space, immense sick sheep are the most valuable objects in the universe, immortality can be bought, and the mysterious Lords of the Instrumentality rule a hunted Earth too old for history . . .

  It is a cosmology that looks as evocative and bizarre today in the ’00s as it did in the ’60s; certainly for sheer sweep and daring of conceptualization, in its vision of how different and strange the future will be, it rivals any contemporary vision conjured up by Young Turks such as Bruce Sterling and Greg Bear, and I suspect that it is timeless.

  In the nightmarish and yet hallucinatorally beautiful story that follows, decades ahead of its time both stylistically and conceptually, he takes us to one of the strangest worlds ever imagined in science fiction, a literal hell where the sufferings of the damned themselves are turned to a socially useful function by the most sophisticated of genetic technologies, for a vivid lesson in sin, redemption, and transfiguration . . .

  Cordwainer Smith’s books include the novel Norstrilia and the collections Space Lords—one of the landmark collections of the genre—The Best of Cordwainer Smith, Quest of the Three Worlds, Stardreamer, You Will Never Be The Same, and The Instrumentality of Mankind. As Felix C. Forrest, he wrote two mainstream novels, Ria and Carola, and as Carmichael Smith he wrote the thriller Atomsk.

  His most recent book is the posthumous collection The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, Massachusetts, 07101-0203, $24.95), a huge book that collects almost all of his short fiction, and which will certainly stand as one of the very best collections of the decade—and a book that belongs in every complete science fiction collection.

  1

  There was a tremendous difference between the liner and the ferry in Mercer’s treatment. On the liner, the attendants made gibes when they brought him his food.

  “Scream good and loud,” said one rat-faced steward, “and then we’ll know it’s you when they broadcast the sounds of punishment on the Emperor’s birthday.”

  The other fat steward ran the tip of his wet, red tongue over his thick, purple-red lips one time and said, “Stands to reason, man. If you hurt all the time, the whole lot of you would die. Something pretty good must happen, along with the—whatchamacallit. Maybe you turn into a woman. Maybe you turn into two people. Listen, cousin, if it’s real crazy fun, let me know . . .” Mercer said nothing. Mercer had enough troubles of his own not to wonder about the daydreams of nasty men.

  At the ferry it was different. The biopharmaceutical staff was deft, impersonal, quick in removing his shackles. They took off all his prison clothes and left them on the liner. When he boarded the ferry, naked, they looked him over as if he were a rare plant or a body on the operating table. They were almost kind in the clinical deftness of their touch. They did not treat him as a criminal, but as a specimen.

  Men and women, clad in their medical smocks, they looked at him as though he were already dead.

  He tried to speak. A man, older and more authoritative than the others, said firmly and clearly, “Do not worry about talking. I will talk to you myself in a very little time. What we are having now are the preliminaries, to determine your physical condition. Turn around, please.”

  Mercer turned around. An orderly rubbed his back with a very strong antiseptic.

  “This is going to sting,” said one of the technicians, “but it is nothing serious or painful. We are determining the toughness of the
different layers of your skin.”

  Mercer, annoyed by this impersonal approach, spoke up just as a sharp little sting burned him above the sixth lumbar vertebra. “Don’t you know who I am?”

  “Of course we know who you are,” said a woman’s voice. “We have it all in a file in the corner. The chief doctor will talk about your crime later, if you want to talk about it. Keep quiet now. We are making a skin test, and you will feel much better if you do not make us prolong it.”

  Honesty forced her to add another sentence: “And we will get better results as well.”

  They had lost no time at all in getting to work.

  He peered at them sidewise to look at them. There was nothing about them to indicate that they were human devils in the antechambers of hell itself. Nothing was there to indicate that this was the satellite of Shayol, the final and uttermost place of chastisement and shame. They looked like medical people from his life before he committed the crime without a name.

  They changed from one routine to another. A woman, wearing a surgical mask, waved her hand at a white table.

  “Climb up on that, please.”

  No one had said “please” to Mercer since the guards had seized him at the edge of the palace. He started to obey her and then he saw that there were padded handcuffs at the head of the table. He stopped.

  “Get along, please,” she demanded. Two or three of the others turned around to look at both of them.

  The second “please” shook him. He had to speak. These were people, and he was a person again. He felt his voice rising, almost cracking into shrillness as he asked her. “Please. Ma’am, is the punishment going to begin?”

  “There’s no punishment here,” said the woman. “This is the satellite. Get on the table. We’re going to give you your first skin-toughening before you talk to the head doctor. Then you can tell him all about your crime—”

  “You know my crime?” he said, greeting it almost like a neighbor.

  “Of course not,” said she, “but all the people who come through here are believed to have committed crimes. Somebody thinks so or they wouldn’t be here. Most of them want to talk about their personal crimes. But don’t slow me down. I’m a skin technician, and down on the surface of Shayol you’re going to need the very best work that any of us can do for you. Now get on that table. And when you are ready to talk to the chief you’ll have something to talk about besides your crime.”

  He complied.

  Another masked person, probably a girl, took his hands in cool, gentle fingers and fitted them to the padded cuffs in a way he had never sensed before. By now he thought he knew every interrogation machine in the whole empire, but this was nothing like any of them.

  The orderly stepped back. “All clear, Sir and Doctor.”

  “Which do you prefer?” said the skin technician. “A great deal of pain or a couple of hours’ unconsciousness?”

  “Why should I want pain?” said Mercer.

  “Some specimens do,” said the technician, “by the time they arrive here. I suppose it depends on what people have done to them before they got here. I take it you did not get any of the dream-punishments.”

  “No,” said Mercer. “I missed those.” He thought to himself, I didn’t know that I missed anything at all.

  He remembered his last trial, himself wired and plugged in to the witness stand. The room had been high and dark. Bright blue light shone on the panel of judges, their judicial caps a fantastic parody of the episcopal mitres of long, long ago. The judges were talking, but he could not hear them. Momentarily the insulation slipped and he heard one of them say, “Look at that white, devilish face. A man like that is guilty of everything. I vote for Pain Terminal.” “Not Planet Shayol?” said a second voice. “The dromozoa place,” said a third voice. “That should suit him,” said the first voice. One of the judicial engineers must then have noticed that the prisoner was listening illegally. He was cut off. Mercer then thought that he had gone through everything which the cruelty and intelligence of mankind could devise.

  But this woman said he had missed the dream-punishments. Could there be people in the universe even worse off than himself? There must be a lot of people down on Shayol. They never came back.

  He was going to be one of them; would they boast to him of what they had done, before they were made to come to this place?

  “You asked for it,” said the woman technician. “It is just an ordinary anesthetic. Don’t panic when you awaken. Your skin is going to be thickened and strengthened chemically and biologically.”

  “Docs it hurt?”

  “Of course,” said she. “But get this out of your head. We’re not punishing you. The pain here is just ordinary medical pain. Anybody might get it if they needed a lot of surgery. The punishment, if that’s what you want to call it, is down on Shayol. Our only job is to make sure that you are fit to survive after you are landed. In a way, we are saving your life ahead of time. You can be grateful for that if you want to be. Meanwhile, you will save yourself a lot of trouble if you realize that your nerve endings will respond to the change in the skin. You had better expect to be very uncomfortable when you recover. But then, we can help that, too.” She brought down an enormous lever and Mercer blacked out.

  When he came to, he was in an ordinary hospital room, but he did not notice it. He seemed bedded in fire. He lifted his hand to see if there were flames on it. It looked the way it always had, except that it was a little red and a little swollen. He tried to turn in the bed. The fire became a scorching blast which stopped him in mid-turn. Uncontrollably, he moaned.

  A voice spoke. “You are ready for some pain killer.”

  It was a girl nurse. “Hold your head still,” she said, “and I will give you half an amp of pleasure. Your skin won’t bother you then.”

  She slipped a soft cap on his head. It looked like metal but it felt like silk.

  He had to dig his fingernails into his palms to keep from thrashing about on the bed.

  “Scream if you want to,” she said. “A lot of them do. It will just be a minute or two before the cap finds the right lobe in your brain.”

  She stepped to the corner and did something which he could not see.

  There was the flick of a switch.

  The fire did not vanish from his skin. He still felt it; but suddenly it did not matter. His mind was full of delicious pleasure which throbbed outward from his head and seemed to pulse down through his nerves. He had visited the pleasure palaces, but he had never felt anything like this before.

  He wanted to thank the girl, and he twisted around in the bed to see her. He could feel his whole body flash with pain as he did so, but the pain was far away. And the pulsating pleasure which coursed out of his head, down his spinal cord and into his nerves was so intense that the pain got through only as a remote, unimportant signal.

  She was standing very still in the corner.

  “Thank you, nurse,” said he.

  She said nothing.

  He looked more closely, though it was hard to look while enormous pleasure pulsed through his body like a symphony written in nerve messages. He focused his eyes on her and saw that she too wore a soft metallic cap.

  He pointed at it.

  She blushed all the way down to her throat.

  She spoke dreamily. “You looked like a nice man to me. I didn’t think you’d tell on me . . .”

  He gave her what he thought was a friendly smile, but with the pain in his skin and the pleasure bursting out of his head, he really had no idea of what his actual expression might be. “It’s against the law,” he said. “It’s terribly against the law. But it is nice.”

  “How do you think we stand it here?” said the nurse. “You specimens come in here talking like ordinary people and then you go down to Shayol. Terrible things happen to you on Shayol. Then the surface station sends up parts of you, over and over again. I may see your head ten times, quick-frozen and ready for cutting up, before my two years are
up. You prisoners ought to know how we suffer,” she crooned, the pleasure-charge still keeping her relaxed and happy. “You ought to die as soon as you get down there and not pester us with your torments. We can hear you screaming, you know. You keep on sounding like people even after Shayol begins to work on you. Why do you do it, Mr. Specimen?” She giggled sillily. “You hurt our feelings so. No wonder a girl like me has to have a little jolt now and then. It’s real, real dreamy and I don’t mind getting you ready to go down on Shayol.” She staggered over to his bed. “Pull this cap off me, will you? I haven’t got enough will power left to raise my hands.”

  Mercer saw his hand tremble as he reached for the cap.

  His fingers touched the girl’s soft hair through the cap. As he tried to get his thumb under the edge of the cap, in order to pull it off, he realized this was the loveliest girl he had ever touched. He felt that he had always loved her, that he always would. Her cap came off. She stood erect, staggering a little before she found a chair to hold to. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

  “Just a minute,” she said in her normal voice. “I’ll be with you in just a minute. The only time I can get a jolt of this is when one of you visitors gets a dose to get over the skin trouble.”

  She turned to the room mirror to adjust her hair. Speaking with her back to him, she said, “I hope I didn’t say anything about downstairs.”

  Mercer still had the cap on. He loved this beautiful girl who had put it on him. He was ready to weep at the thought that she had had the same kind of pleasure which he still enjoyed. Not for the world would he say anything which could hurt her feelings. He was sure she wanted to be told that she had not said anything about “downstairs”—probably shop talk for the surface of Shayol—so he assured her warmly, “You said nothing. Nothing at all.”

  She came over to the bed, leaned, kissed him on the lips. The kiss was as far away as the pain; he felt nothing; the Niagara of throbbing pleasure which poured through his head left no room for more sensation. But he liked the friendliness of it. A grim, sane corner of his mind whispered to him that this was probably the last time he would ever kiss a woman, but it did not seem to matter.