Lord of the Afternoon
Page 4
In the 150th century, the only remnants of the murkins are “those spectacular surface roads that people see every time they look down on Earth from nearby space.” Undoubtedly they were “a wild, gifted, wanton people”20, and their highways continue to be an inexplicable monument:
“Think of the million of vehicles that ran on those roads, the people filled with greed and rage and hate, rushing past each other with their engines on fire. They say that fifty thousand a year were killed on the roads alone. We could call that a war. What people they must have been, to rush day and night and to build things which would help other people to rush even more! They were different from us. They must have been wild, dirty, free. Lusting for life, perhaps, in a way that we do not. We can easily go a thousand times faster than they ever went, but who, nowadays, bothers to go? Why go? It’s the same there as here, except for a few fighters or technicians.”21
Dark Times
The last world wars have left the planet in a state of near chaos. We can assume that all technology was not lost, because the exploration of space is resumed at the end of this era, albeit at levels nowhere close those of the 20th century. There are islands of civilization inhabited by “true men”, but the majority of the planet has lapsed into barbarism. This peripheral place, called The Wild, is a common element of apocalyptic science fiction.
Creatures mentioned only in passing survive in the Wild: the Unforgiven, the Wild Ones, the Morons and the Beasts. The “final weapons” of the old wars still prowl about, destroying everything that crosses their path. The Menschenjäger (man-hunters) are multi-armed robots programmed by the Sixth Reich to destroy anyone that does not think like a German. The
Kaskaskia Effect is an American weapon, a cloud that paralyzes everything: “Only simple men with clean thoughts can live inside it.” Of course Germans and Americans became extinct years before. “The Government of the World had long since been left to the Morons by the true men who had no interest in such things as politics and administration [...] The true men wanted the Morons to go on breeding, to carry reports, to gather up a few necessaries, and to distract the other inhabitants of the world enough to let the true men have the quiet and contemplation which their exalted but weary temperaments demanded.”22
Many opt for the contemplative life; they renounce action in order to cultivate the soul and repudiate material civilization. “The ones who came after the Ancient World fell [...] were far beyond the limitations of the human form. They conquered death. They did not have sickness. They did not need love. They sought to be abstractions lying outside of time. And they died ... they died terribly. Some became monsters, preying on the remnants of true men for reasons which ordinary men could not even begin to understand. Others were like oysters, wrapped up in their own sainthood”23.
These last ones are the Jwindz Jo, at times called Perfects, who were originally a sect of Chinesian philosophers that held sway “over the souls.” As the “true men” of the era were accustomed to synthetic products, the Jwindz conquered them by supplying them with drugs that obliterated their will. A few Jwindz aspired to “a kind of esthetic perfection”, but the rest “have sought to remake man in their own image.” A colony of Jwindz (ascetics and rationalists) still appears in one of the last stories, “On the Sand Planet (1963).
The Jwindz built the “Chinese” megacity on Aojou-Nanbien, a monstrous conglomeration whose ruins still cover the Australia of the 160th century.24 Ultimately, thirty million people were amassed there. But Aojou also falls, and the Menschenjäger and Savages exterminate its survivors.25
The most explicit source for this period is the story “Mark Elf” (1957). In the text it is dated circa 18,000 A.D., but other signs also situate it here.
“Mark Elf” begins with an escape. In the final days of the Third Reich, the Red Army is about to take the base at Pardubice, the departure point from which the Nazis plan to establish a colony on the moon. Faced with imminent collapse, base director Heinz Horst Ritter Vom Acht tries to save his three daughters from the disaster by sending each to space in her own rocket. They remain in suspended animation, orbiting for centuries, until someone figures out how to bring them back down to Earth.
The names of Vom Acht’s daughters are Karla, Juli and Carlotta.
The first to awake is Carlotta, who descends to Earth in response to a telepathic call from Laird, one of the “true men”. “Mark Elf” is the story of her arrival.
“The Queen of the Afternoon” (written in 1955 and completed by Genevieve Linebarger in 1978) adds to the information about this period, though its co-author unavoidably introduces certain anachronisms.
In this story, Carlotta and Laird are married. Thanks to rejuvenation technology, they live together for two hundred years and found the Vomact dynasty. When Carlotta arrived, the Jwindz inhabited cities surrounded by electric fences, but the world was recovering. The Fighting Trees purified the contaminated soil, and grass covered the ocean floor.
The true men served as the police force of the Jwindz. They were their instruments: hence the expression “instrumentality”. “We have been serving men,” Carlotta says. “We should have been serving mankind.” Laird adds, “What we want to do is to set up a real Instrumentality —not a force for the service of the Jwindz, but one for the service of man. We are determined that never again shall man betray his own image. We will establish the Instrumentality of Mankind, one benevolent but not manipulative.”26
When Carlotta is about to die, she asks Laird to draw the capsule containing her sister down to Earth so that she can take her place. Skillfully, Juli and Laird defeat the Jwindz and create the Instrumentality, of which they will be its first Lords.
Juli lives long enough to know her most famous descendants, the Scanners, who will travel to space. When she begins to grow old, Laird renounces his immortality so that they can spend their final years together.
In the end, both witness the arrival of Karla, who returns to Earth “to find her own man and her own fate”. It was a story that was never written.
The Von Acht sisters, from whom the Vomact dynasty descends, give the “gift of vitality”, which humankind was on the verge of losing, back to the world.27
The Vomacts have an ambiguous lineage, infamous for being almost evil: “Vomact was said to be a descendent of some ancient Lady who has traversed, in an illegitimate and inexplicable fashion, some hundred of years of time in a single night. Her name, Lady Vomact, had passed into legend, but her blood and their archaic lust for mastery lived on in the mute masterful body of her descendent [...], wondering what untraceable mutation had left the Vomact kin as predators among mankind.”28
Most Vomact are cruel, ambitious and inhumane: one controls a genuine inferno, the planet Shayol. Yet others are benevolent: doctors, psychiatrists, therapeutic figures that perhaps descended from another sister. The Instrumentality has inherited all the family contradictions.
The First Space Age
The power that the Instrumentality wields over the true men is more spiritual than political, though involves some of both. Under its guidance, men undertake the colonization of The Wild and soon begin to think about travelling to outer space.
While vast regions are still sunk in savagery, a kind of world government still exists – The Earth Authority. A “cosmopolitan terrestrial language” is spoken, while attempts are made to rebuild ancient European cultures. The average life span is 160 years.29
The expansion of humankind throughout the Galaxy occurs in three stages. Far from the epic scale of science fiction, this “conquest of space” is a pitiful and, at times, grotesque process.
The story “When the People Fell” (1959) describes the mass emigration of Chinese to the planet Venus, which the world government has authorized them to colonize. Enormous amoebas called loudies (“the old” in Chinese) that hover several centimeters
above the ground populate the Venusian planet. Loudies only deign to speak to humans to say: “Why don’t you leave us in peace and return to Earth?” The creatures cannot be exterminated with traditional means because they emit toxic substances when they die.
An overpopulated China, with seventeen billion inhabitants, is able to conquer a hostile world solely by force of numbers. The Chinese arrive in old warships, surplus from the “last of the old dirty wars.”30 Millions of nondies (men), needies (women) and showhices (children) land on Venus and form enclosures with their arms, suffocating all the Venusians they meet. They die like flies when their precarious parachutes fail to open, or perish as a result of the poison spread by the loudies, but meanwhile the survivors are already building the first houses.
In this era, Humans undergo significant physical and mental transformations on the initial space voyages. Only Scanners and habermans are able to drive their spaceships (the former are volunteers, the latter convicted criminals). Both mutilate themselves in order to adapt physically to the spacecrafts and thus sacrifice the possibility of leading a normal life, some to achieve social prestige and others to gain their freedom.
“Scanners Live in Vain” (1950) relates the crisis of the Brotherhood of Scanners, a hermetic society that for seven centuries has devoted itself to nothing more than self-perpetuation. When a Scanner discovers how to avoid mutilation, substituting the habermans for colonies of oysters, the guild sentences him to death, refusing to tolerate the democraticization of their profession.
In the story “The Good Friends” (1963), another element typical of this era appears: hypnotic illusions that help the crew of a shipwrecked spacecraft to endure loneliness through hallucinations of a party with friends. A similar illusion appears in “Nancy” (1959), where an astronaut’s loneliness is mitigated through the presence of a virtual female with all the charms of his first love.
The Second Space Age
The technology of the Second Space Age is based on the use of “solar wind”. New photonic spacecraft have sails with a surface area of several miles, and the luminous pressure of sunlight pushes them toward other star systems, towing huge adiabatic pods that transport the frozen bodies of the colonists.
“Think Blue, Count Two” (1962) is a rare “triangle” that violently confronts two youths and is ultimately overcome thanks to hallucinatory defenses. “The Lady Who Sailed the Soul” (1960) is the love story of two pilots literally light years apart.
The authority of the Instrumentality is deferred to throughout the more than two hundred worlds inhabited by hominids, the descendants of the earthly colonists. The interstellar sailboats make the merchants of Viola Siderea rich and allow Australian shepherds to settle in Norstrilia.
The Instrumentality is already an institution of galactic scope that maintains order among the different worlds. It ensures a kind of Pax Romana, guarantees the balance of planetary power and prevents dangerous regional hegemonies from cropping up. The catch is that it can only preserve its power by rigorously censuring information and prohibiting the spread of religion.
At this point, there is a hiatus in the chronology, as no other dates are mentioned until the 130th century. Roger Zelazny explains that he “once lost three thousand years. It was the period between 6,000 and 9,000 A.D. They were contained in a pocketsize notebook with a red spine. He inadvertently left it on a table in a dockside restaurant in the Isle of Rhodes. When he checked back it was gone, and though he offered a reward for its return, it never showed up. It contained hundreds of handwritten pages of notes on characters, plots, ideas —the bones of stories he wanted to write one day. It may still be around somewhere. Had he lived, maybe he could have reconstructed it.”31
Zelazny’s source is the interview with the journalist Bready, who dated the loss in August 1965.
The missing period seems to cover more than three millenniums. Many stories might have sprung from this roughly sketched framework, but Cordwainer Smith never attempted to rewrite his notes. Why did he lose interest in this period, preferring instead to delve deeper into the epic of the underpeople? Perhaps we will find an answer in the vicissitudes of his life and the shifting sands of political circumstances.
The Third Space Age
In this era, a new technological revolution permits expanding the frontiers of colonization even further. The “cronoplast” or “jonasoidal effect” (similar to the “hyperspace” of science fiction) makes possible planoform voyages, that is, crossing Space-Two. We learn of its discovery in the story “The Colonel Came Back from Nothing-at-all” (1955), which can be seen as a sketch of “Drunkboat” (1963).
The life of the Go-Captains that pilot the spaceships on their “hops” through Space-Two is described in “The Burning of the Brain” (1958). Captain Magno Taliano is able to bring his craft into port without the use of navigational charts but dies in the process.
Go-Captains also must confront energy formations of interstellar space that paralyze their crafts and destroy their minds. The best weapon for fighting them happens to be the predatory instinct of the domestic cat. Space-Two navigators are pinlighters mentally attuned to their cats. With accurate flashes of light, the human and feline minds are able to eradicate this threat, which humans perceive as a dragon and cats as a monstrous rat.
“The Game of Rat and Dragon” (1955) is Cordwainer Smith’s most famous story. Through the symbiosis between a pinlighter and his cat, the reader is able, momentarily, to view the world from a feline perspective.32
The terrestrial animals that accompanied humans on their cosmic expansion begin to be indispensable. Some have already been humanized through science or the mutations that took place during the Dark Times.
The colonization of the Galaxy has by now extended very far. Avoiding the conventional monsters of science fiction, Cordwainer Smith prefers to populate the cosmos with variations of the human form. He hardly even mentions other forms of life, which for the most part are infrahuman, such as the dromozoa, carcinogenic parasites of the planet Shayol, or the cannibalistic race in “Three to a Given Star”, descendants of terrestrial chickens. The apicians of the planet Gustible are similar to ducks, though not from our world.
Non-human species seem to participate in the galactic dance festival in “No, No, Not Rogov!”. “[S]ome eyes that watched had retinas. Some had crystalline cones.”
While humankind has severed its ties with Earth, it continues to venerate it as Manhome or Mother Earth. Our planet has ceased to be a power, yet it is the seat of the Instrumentality. In the inhabited Galaxy there is one Empire, along with regional powers such as Viola Siderea and Norstrilia.
Viola Siderea is an extremely wealthy planet that went broke when planoform spacecraft replaced luminescent sailing ships and altered all the trade routes. It has become a kind of Turtle Island of space, a world of pirates, assassins and professional larceners “adapted by time and genetics to their deadly tasks.”33 A motley Brotherhood of Thieves, they live by pillaging.
Australian ranchers colonized Norstrilia. It is the richest world in the universe, with a monopoly on the immortality drug stroon or santaclara. Norstrilians are telepathic, absurdly conservative and persist in proud isolation.
Exposed to strange ecosystems, the human species has assumed fanciful shapes and behaviors. The race of “hominids”, created on the basis of variations of terrestrial anatomy and psychology, are worthy of the fantasies of Stapledon. Among them are:
• “The little tiny men, about the size of a walnut, from the Solid Planet.”34
• The blind artisans of the planet Olympia35 “who promenade under numbered clouds36” and have a radar mounted on their foreheads.37
• The “rainmen” of Amazonas Triste, a damp and membranous hide covering their bodies. They must live at all times in a rainy climate, or under a shower.38
• The heavy men fr
om Wereld Schemering who, crushed by gravity, drag themselves across the surface of their world.39
• The daimoni, or pale ghostly giants. They are of human origin, but nobody knows where they come from. Excellent architects, their buildings are indestructible. Their professional services are in demand on Earth, where they have built an Earthport. They are practically immortal and avoid contact with other races.40
Even stranger life forms are mentioned in one text: “men with shells; men so thin that they looked like insects; a race of smiling, foolish giants, shepherded by a race of devoted dogs, more intelligent than themselves; water-people; lipsticked hermaphrodites with enormous beards and fluting voices; carcinomas which had taken over men; giants rooted in the earth.”41
The underpeople, created through genetic manipulation of terrestrial animals to be used as slaves, merit a separate chapter.
The cycle of the Instrumentality and the underpeople
In the centuries prior to the Rediscovery of Man (circa 16,000), human beings have devolved into a dangerous state of stagnation again.
The Instrumentality guarantees everyone a kind of “happiness” that in reality amounts to nothing more than an innocuous life, one without risk or hope. Generally it operates in the shadows and acts only when the system is threatened, employing its power decisively.