When the People Fell

by Cordwainer Smith

  He sat up with a grunt of assent.

  She looked at him fondly, possessively, her dark eyes alight with alertness, happiness, and adventure.

  "Can I lift?" she asked, almost timidly.

  When two telepaths worked together, one cleared the vision for both of them as far as their combined minds could reach and then the other sprang, with enormous effort, as far and as fast as possible toward any target which presented itself. They had found strange things, sometimes beautiful or dramatic ones, by this method.

  Casher was already drinking enormous gulps of air, filling his lungs, holding his breath, letting go with a gasp, and then inhaling deeply and slowly again. In this way he reoxygenated his brain very thoroughly for the huge effort of a telepathic dive into the remote depth of space. He did not even speak to her, nor did he telepath a word to her; he was conserving his strength for a good jump.

  He merely nodded to her.

  The Lady Celalta, too, began the deep breathing, but she seemed to need it less than did Casher.

  They were both sitting up, side by side, breathing deeply.

  The cool night sands of Mizzer were around them, the harmless gurgle of the Ninth Nile was beside them, the bright star-cluttered sky of Mizzer was above them.

  Her hand reached out and took hold of his. She squeezed his hand. He looked at her and nodded to her again.

  Within his mind, Mizzer and its entire solar system seemed to burst into flame with a new kind of light. The radiance of Celalta's mind trailed off unevenly in different directions, but there, almost 2° off the pole of Mizzer's ecliptic, he felt something wild and strange, a kind of being which he had never sensed before. Using Celalta's mind as a base, he let his mind dive for it.

  The distance of the plunge left them both dizzy, sitting on the quiet night sands of Mizzer. It seemed to both of them that the mind of man had never reached so far before.

  The reality of the phenomenon was undoubtable.

  There were animals all around them, the usual categories: runners, hunters, jumpers, climbers, swimmers, hiders, and handlers. It was some of the handlers who were intensely telepathic themselves.

  The image of man created an immediate, murderous response.

  "Cackle gabble, gabble cackle, man, man, man, eat them, eat them!"

  Casher and Celalta were both so surprised that they let the contact go, after making sure that they had touched a whole world full of beings, some of them telepathic and probably civilized.

  How had the beings known "man"? Why had their response been immediate? Why anthropophagous and homicidal?

  They took time, before coming completely out of the trance, to make a careful, exact note of the direction from which the danger-brains had shrieked their warning.

  This they submitted to the Instrumentality, shortly after the incident.

  And that was how, unknown to Folly, Samm, and Finsternis, the inhabitants on the third planet of Linschoten XV had come to the attention of mankind.

  IV

  As a matter of fact, the three wanderers later on felt a vague, remote telepathic contact which they sensed as being warmhearted and human, and therefore did not try to track down, with their minds or their weapons. It was O'Neill and Celalta, many years later by Mizzer time, reaching to see what the Instrumentality had done about Linschoten XV.

  Folly, Samm, and Finsternis had no suspicion that the two most powerful telepaths in the human area of the galaxy had stroked them, searched them, felt them through, and seen things about them which the three of them did not know about themselves or about each other.

  Casher O'Neill said to the Lady Celalta, "You got it, too?"

  "A beautiful woman, encased in a little ship?"

  Casher nodded. "A redhead with skin as soft and transparent as living ivory? A woman who was beautiful and will be beautiful again?"

  "That's what I got," said the Lady Celalta. "And the tired old man, weary of his children and weary of his own life because his children were weary of him."

  "Not so old," said Casher O'Neill. "And isn't that a spectacular piece of machinery they put him into? A metal giant. It felt like something about a quarter of a kilometer high. Acid-proof. Cold-proof. Won't he be surprised when he finds that the Instrumentality has rejuvenated his own body inside that monster?"

  "He certainly will be," said the Lady Celalta happily, thinking of the pleasant surprise which lay ahead of a man whom she would never know or see with her own bodily eyes.

  They both fell silent.

  Then said the Lady Celalta, "But the third person . . ." There was a shiver in her voice as though she dared not ask the question. "The third person, the one in the cube." She stopped, as though she could neither ask nor say more.

  "It was not a robot or a personality cube," said Casher O'Neill. "It was a human being all right. But it's crazy. Could you make out, Celalta, as to whether it was male or female?"

  "No," said she, "I couldn't tell. The other two seemed to think that it was male."

  "But did you feel sure?" asked Casher.

  "With that being, I felt sure of nothing. It was human, all right, but it was stranger than any lost hominid we have ever felt around the forgotten stars. Could you tell, Casher, whether it was young or old?"

  "No," said he. "I felt nothing—only a desperate human mind with all its guards up, living only because of the terrible powers of the black cube, the sun-killer in which it rode. I never sensed someone before who was a person without characteristics. It's frightening."

  "The Instrumentality are cruel sometimes," said Celalta.

  "Sometimes they have to be," Casher agreed.

  "But I never thought that they would do that."

  "Do what?" asked Casher.

  Her dark eyes looked at him. It was a different night, and a different Nile, but the eyes were only a very little bit older and they loved him just as much as ever. The Lady Celalta trembled as though she herself might think that the all-powerful Instrumentality could have hidden a microphone in the random sands. She whispered to her lover, "You said it yourself, Casher, just a moment ago."

  "Said what?" He spoke tenderly but fearlessly, his voice ringing out over the cool night sands.

  The Lady Celalta went on whispering, which was very unlike her usual self. "You said that the third person was 'crazy.' Do you realize that you may have spoken the actual literal truth?" Her whisper darted at him like a snake.

  At last, he whispered back, "What did you sense? What could you guess?"

  "They have sent a madman to the stars. Or a mad woman. A real psychotic."

  "Lots of pilots," said Casher, speaking more normally, "are cushioned against loneliness with real but artificially activated psychoses. It gets them through the real or imagined horrors of the sufferings of space."

  "I don't mean that," said Celalta, still whispering urgently and secretly. "I mean a real psychotic."

  "But there aren't any. Not loose, that is," said Casher, stammering with surprise at last. "They either get cured or they are bottled up in thought-proof satellites somewhere."

  Celalta raised her voice a little, just a little, so that she no longer whispered but spoke urgently.

  "But don't you see, that's what they must have done. The Instrumentality made a star-killer too strong for any normal mind to guide. So the Lords got a psychotic somewhere, a real psychotic, and sent a madman out among the stars. Otherwise we could have felt its gender or its age."

  Casher nodded in silent agreement. The air did not feel colder, but he got gooseflesh sitting beside his beloved Celalta on the familiar desert sands.

  "You're right. You must be right. It almost makes me feel sorry for the enemies out near Linschoten XV. Do you see nothing of them this time? I couldn't perceive them at all."

  "I did, a little," said the Lady Celalta. "Their telepaths have caught the strange minds coming at them with a high rate of speed. The telepathic ones are wild with excitement but the others are just going cackle-gabble, cackle-ga
bble with each other, filled with anger, hunger, and the thought of man."

  "You got that much?" he said in wonder.

  "My lord and my lover, I dived this time. Is it so strange that I sensed more than you did? Your strength lifted me."

  "Did you hear what the weapons called each other?"

  "Something silly." He could see her knitting her brows in the bright starshine which illuminated the desert almost the way that the Old Original Moon lit up the nights sometimes on Manhome itself. "It was Folly, and something like 'Superordinated Alien Measuring and Mastery machine' and something like 'darkness' in the Ancient Doyches Language."

  "That's what I got, too," said Casher. "It sounds like a weird team."

  "But a powerful one, a terribly powerful one," said the Lady Celalta. "You and I, my lover and master, have seen strange things and dangers between the stars, even before we met each other, but we never saw anything like this before, did we?"

  "No," said he.

  "Well, then," said she, "let us sleep and forget the matter as much as we can. The Instrumentality is certainly taking care of Linschoten XV, and we two need not bother about it."

  And all that Samm, Folly, and Finsternis knew was that a light touch, unexplained but friendly, had gone over them from the far star region near home. Thought they, if they thought anything about it at all, "The Instrumentality, which made us and sent us, has checked up on us one more time."

  V

  A few years later, Samm and Folly were talking again while Finsternis—guarded, impenetrable, uncommunicating, detectable only by the fierce glow of human life which shone telepathically out of the immense cube—rode space beside them and said nothing.

  Suddenly Folly cried out to Samm loudly, "I can smell them."

  "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 shi
p 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, doing 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.