Personified animals such as the cats Sardanápal in Ria and Pete in Carola, respectively, already make an appearance in the Felix C. Forrest novels.
The talking animals in the early stories of Cordwainer Smith –the “companions” in “The Game of Rat and Dragon” or the bear in “Mark Elf” –were different from other animal creatures of science fiction, such as Clifford Simak’s dogs (City, 1953). By comparison, the underpeople are both more animalistic and more human. They are as different from Aesop as they are from Walt Disney.
The underpeople are derived from terrestrial animals whose genetic structure was modified for carrying out servile tasks. Technically, today we would call them “parahumans”. For reasons of efficiency, they were given the appearance and intelligence of humans, although they retain certain features that reveal their animal origin. Some are breathtakingly beautiful, like C’mell, while others are grotesque and repulsive. “The human eye, the five-fingered hand, the human size —they were convenient for engineering reasons. [...] The human form was good enough for all of them. But they had forgotten the human heart.”
The underpeople are found on nearly every inhabited planet, with the exception of Norstrilia, coexisting with hominids —the descendants of humans— and “true men”.
Throwbacks to the ancient past, the underpeople continue to use proper names instead of the numbers that identify humans, though these appellations are always preceded by the initial that signals their species of origin, such as “D” for dog or “C” for cat.
The law defines them as homunculi and grants them a status similar to animals and robots. The latter are for the most part cyborgs, that is, machines controlled by inferior animal brains, mainly birds.
For this reason, when the robot police are ordered to quell the uprising of the underpeople, “the unbelievable... the event for which the stars and the worlds were unprepared” occurs.54
The robots mutiny and declare their support for the animals, remembering that they have something in common.
When the underpeople exceed determined parameters of shape and size, they are killed and cremated. Their academic failures are punished with death.55 When they get sick, they are destroyed. Hospitals always refuse them treatment, even when the rooms are empty, to ensure that they never get the “idea that they were people.”56 Not allowed to marry, they are barely permitted to live as couples.57
In a society in which economic disparities no longer exist, a monetary economy supports the underpeople with the aim of preventing their emancipation. “Human beings and hominids had lived so long in an affluent society that they did not know what it meant to be poor. But the Lords of Instrumentality had decreed that underpersons —derived from animal stock— should live under the economics of the Ancient World; they had to have their own kind of money to pay for their rooms, their food, their possessions and the education of their children. If they become bankrupt, they went to the Poorhouse, where they were killed painlessly by means of gas.”58
Abuse of underpersons is not illegal, for they are considered little more than things. Refugees from the tunnel of Fomalhaut III are purposely contaminated with germs,59 while D’joan’s crusade ends in a massacre.
The underpeople are subjected to a strict form of apartheid. Sexual relations between people and underpeople are punished with death for the latter and brainwashing for the former.60 While it is genetically impossible for this type of sexual congress to result in conception,61 rumor has it that this is not always the case.62
The very idea of emancipating the underpeople seems illogical: “People never loved underpeople. They used them, like chairs or door handles. Since when did a door handle demand the Charter of Ancient Rights?”63
The degradation of the underpeople is universal and reaches absurd extremes. It is said that Lady Panc Ashash was one of the few not prejudiced against them, this “because she was dead.” Some believe the underpeople are “morally repulsive”,64 that “they were just animals, things in the shape of man. Underpeople. Dirt.” Many underpeople hate themselves. “We’re dirt, we’re nothing, we’re things that are less than machines. We hide in the earth like dirt and when people kill us they do not weep.”65
Jestocost, the first Lord that tries to improve the condition of the underpeople, reflects: “We have set up the standards of the toughest kind of survival for these people and we give them the most terrible incentive, life itself, as the condition of absolute progress. What fools we are to think that they will not overtake us!”
After meeting C’mell, a traveler visiting Earth for the first time exclaims, “Manhome they call it! Manhome my eye! The only smart person on it is a female cat!”66
C’mell sums up the situation in the following way: “They found that we [underpeople] are better than they are at almost anything. Real work, that is, not statesmanship like running the Instrumentality and the Earth government [...] They used to have secure lives of four hundred years, a common language, and a standard conditioning. They were dying off, just for being too perfect. One way to get better would have been to kill off us underpeople, but they couldn’t count on robots [...] So they need underpeople.”67
The prophetess of the underpeople is D’joan, a girl of canine stock. In “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”, “a dog philosopher” is mentioned that defends the privilege of dogs to be closer to humans. D’joan’s oracle is Abba-dingo, a name that combines the biblical Aramaic word for father, “abba,” with the word for wild dog, “dingo”. According to Australian aborigines, dingos communicate with the Dream Time, the supernatural world. “Abba-dingo” is the “dog father” of the underpeople.68
The underpeople are not always passive and resigned to their pariah status. One of their songs, which Lord Sto Odin characterizes as “subversive”, expresses all of their suppressed violence:
I eat my rage
I swallow my grief.
There’s no relief
From pain or age.
Our time comes.
[...]
We undermen
Shove, crush and crash
There’s will be a clash
And thunder when
Our time comes.69
When they embark on their journey to freedom, the underpeople follow the dialectic of all emancipation movements. To begin with, they reclaim their origins in celebration of their own idiosyncrasies and reject the idea of assimilation. As Africans stressed their special ethnic feature (“blackness”), Cordwainer Smith’s creation start by renouncing the name “underpeople” –a stigma of submissiveness– and proclaiming that they are simply “animals”.
When B’dikkat, the bovine Charon of the Hades-like planet Shayol, has a crisis of conscience he states: “You understand people; I only obey them. But this I will not obey. [...] I don’t have people feeling, but I am Earth-born, of Earth blood. I have emotions myself.”70
In a sermon, D’joan speaks of the origin of her people: “Should we be strange to you, we animals of Earth that you have brought to the stars? We shared the same sun, the same oceans, the same sky. We are from Manhome. How do you know that we would not have caught up with you if we had all stayed at home together? My people were dogs. They loved you before you made a woman-shaped thing out of my mother.”71
A’gentur, E’telekeli’s messenger and spokesperson, states: “I’m not an underperson. I’m an animal.” Upon seeing him, Lady Johanna Gnade exclaims: “That being looks like an animal, but I can’t tell whether it is an underperson or a human being.”72
Thanks to Jestocost, the standard of life and status of the underpeople gradually improves. Members of the generation after C’mell possess documents that protect their property, identity and rights. No longer emancipated slaves or freedmen, they have become another kind of citizen.73
A century later, when the religious movement sta
rted by D’joan and encouraged by the Holy Insurgency is triumphing, the Lords of the Underpeople are mentioned and it is said that T’ruth was the first underperson to “really and truly surpass humanity.”74
But the story does not end here. A time is alluded to when “the poem about the people and underpeople [is] getting all mixed up. The mix-up came much later, even after the time of C’mell.”
It may have been in the age of the Lords of the Afternoon.
1 Ferreras, I., op. quote, pg. 56.
2 Ria, p. 241.
3 Pierce (1976).
4 The Underpeople, chapter 1 (not included in Norstrilia).
5 “Scanners Live in Vain”
6 “Drunkboat”
7 “The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal”
8 “Drunkboat”. Curiously, the command “Survive!” is central in Dianetics by L. Ronald Hubbard (1950). Cordwainer Smith studied with Hubbard, and he was one of the first to know his doctrines. Perhaps there is an echo of these ideas in the slogan of the Instrumentality, or a parallel with the trajectory Scientology would follow.
9 “A Planet Named Shayol”
10 “The Lady Who Sailed the Soul”
11 “Drunkboat”
12 Norstrilia, chap. “Counsels, Councils, Consoles and Consuls”
13 Foyster-Burns (1973)
14 “Drunkboat”
15 The Underpeople, chapter 1 (not included in Norstrilia).
16 Norstrilia, chap. “Traps, Fortunes and Watchers”
17 “Golden the Ship Was Oh! Oh! Oh!”
18 “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons”
19 “The Lady Who Sailed The Soul”
20 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
21 “On the Sand Planet”
22 Norstrilia, ch. FOE Money, SAD Money”
23 “Golden the Ship Was Oh! Oh! Oh!”
24 “Three to a Given Star”
25 Pierce (1976)
26 “Under Old Earth”
27 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
28 “The Ballad of Lost C’mell”
29 Norstrilia, ch. “Hospitality and Entrapment”
30 It should be noted that all of these characters already appeared in Star-Craving Mad, the first version of Norstrilia, with very different characterisitcs. The context was one of political revolution: Jestocost was a tyrant, Rod Macban a man of action, and E’telekeli a jacobin.
31 Norstrilia, ch. “Birds, Far Underground”
32 “The Ballad of Lost C’mell”
33 Pg. 38 in the version published in Galaxy and pg. 69 in the book Quest of the Three Worlds.
34 Pg. 74 in Quest of the Three Worlds.
35 “On the Storm Planet”
36 “Felix C. Forrest” quotes this work in Ria, pg. 67.
37 Carola, pg. 276.
38 Norstrilia, ch. “At the Gate of the Garden of Death”
39 “Golden the Ship Was Oh! Oh! Oh!”
40 Norstrilia, ch. “At the Gate of the Garden of Death”
41 Foyster-Burns (1973)
42 Norstrilia, ch. “At the Gate of the Garden of Death”
43 “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons”
44 “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”
45 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
46 Burns (1973)
47 Sandra Meisel (1973) suggests interpreting Waterrock as “rock of water”. As such, it would be an allusion to the rock out of which Moses made water appear for the Israelites. Christian theologists have seen this event as a foreshadowing of baptism.
48 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
49 Norstrilia, ch “His Own Strange Altar”
50 Burns (1973)
51 Foyster-Burns (1973)
52 Norstrilia, ch. “Birds, Far Underground”
53 Elms (1990)
54 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
55 “The Ballad of Lost C’mell”
56 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
57 Norstrilia, ch. “The Nearby Exile”
58 “The Ballad of Lost C’mell”
59 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
60 “The Ballad of Lost C’mell”
61 Norstrilia, ch. “Birds, Far Underground”
62 “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”
63 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
64 “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”
65 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
66 “The Ballad of Lost C’mell”
67 Norstrilia, ch. “Birds, Far Underground”
68 I do not agree with Lewis, who relates “abba” (father) with “dingo (“betray” in Australian slang) to suggest “father of lies”.
69 “Under Old Earth”
70 “A Planet Named Shayol”
71 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
72 The Underpeople, chapter 1 (not included in Norstrilia)
73 “The Ballad of Lost C’mell”
74 “On the Storm Planet”
FIGURES OF LIBERATION
FIGURES OF LIBERATION
The Rediscovery
Established with the aim of “making men happy”, the Instrumentality has liberated human beings from all responsibility. Under its oppressive paternalism, the risk and finiteness of life have been neutralized. Death has become a biological fact not only predictable but strictly programmed, and everyone knows when it is going to occur in advance.
Technological immortality stalls time. Instead of an individual project subject to the eventuality of an unexpected death, the Instrumentality offers routines of activity to fill the four hundred years of life that the law and science guarantee to all. Still, the homogenous and anodyne “happiness” provided by the Instrumentality entails the renunciation of freedom. “The citizens were happy. They had to be happy. If they were found sad, they were calmed and drugged and changed until they were happy again.”1
Only the underpeople are denied the gift of immortality. Subject to all of life’s risks, they know they can be destroyed if they make a mistake or become useless. It is precisely this precarious position, however, that causes them to venerate the mystery of existence.
Finding strength in the Old Strong Religion, the underpeople are not alone in disagreeing with the utopia of the Instrumentality. Among the “true people” rebellious outbreaks against the tedium of utopian life crop up. These are anarchic responses to the status quo. Sun-boy, for instance, breaks every rule there is when attempting to recreate the solar monotheism of the mystic pharaoh Akhenaten.
Santuna explains why she joined Sun-boy: “[I] was running away from the timeless time, the lifeless life, the hopeless hope that the Lords apply to mankind on the surface. They let the robots and the underpeople work, but they freeze the real people in a happiness which has no hope and no escape.”
The question of the underpeople, with whom nobody knows what to do, troubles the most lucid minds of the system. Lord Sto Odin –one of the writer’s masks– engages in severe self-criticism: “We are killing mankind with a bland hopeless happiness which has prohibited news, which has suppressed religion, which has made all history an official secret. I say that the evidence is that we are failing and that mankind, whom we’ve sworn to cherish, is failing too. Failing in vitality, strength, numbers, energy.”
Under these circumstances, the Rediscovery of Man is set into motion, inspired by the “Lady Ru’s aphorism”: “We must be people first and happy later, less we live and die in vain.”2
Disturbed by the futility of the “happy world” and the oppression of the underpeople, Lady Alice More and Lord Jestocost design and implement the Rediscovery.
There is a romantic element to the project, co
nsisting in the recovery of past styles and cultures. First names are now permitted instead of numbers. French and Spanish are spoken again instead of the Common Language. Passions (love, jealousy, envy, revenge, etc.) are allowed to resurface.
The Rediscovery is the grand attempt by the Instrumentality to challenge men and women by returning to them the fundamental risks of the human condition: contingency and death. It is a risky process, for along with mortality reappear violence, revolution, oppression and injustice.
The Rediscovery breathes the spirit of innovation into the various worlds and excites contagious enthusiasm. A witness states: “I myself was the first man to put a postage stamp on a letter, after fourteen-thousand years. I took Virginia to hear the first piano recital. We watched at the eye-machine when cholera was released in Tasmania, and we saw the Tasmanian dancing in the streets, now that they did not have to be protected any more. Everywhere, things became exciting. Everywhere, men and women worked with a wild will to build a more imperfect world.”3
And yet the Rediscovery is not the path that will lead humanity to a purposeful existence. For “true men,” the rediscovery of religion is nothing more than a game, equally as thrilling as donning antiquated clothing or sampling food from the past. The relaxing of censorship, however, does permit the recovery and spread of the spiritual tradition that the underpeople have preserved for centuries.
With the Rediscovery, the roots of the human condition are salvaged; death and finitude triumph again. As the oldest religious traditions teach, death is the final enemy, but it is also a transition to life. Lord Sto Odin states, “the oldest mystery of humankind [is] that man claimed to be afraid of death when the thing he did not understand was life itself.”4
In Linebarger’s first novel, Ria has a metaphysical dream. She is in lunar landscape where a multitude of men and women are suspended in the air, swinging above a dark abyss. Every so often one suddenly springs forth from the depths as another evaporates, though no one seems to notice.
Lord of the Afternoon Page 17