The Rediscovery of Man

by Cordwainer Smith

  Suzdal remained calm. He coded the genetic cats. He loaded them into life-bombs. He adjusted the controls of his chronopathic machine illegally, so that instead of reaching one second for a ship of eighty thousand tons, they reached two million years for a load of less than four kilos. He flung the cats into the nameless moon of Arachosia.

  And he flung them back in time, And he knew he did not have to wait.

  He didn’t.

  The Gotland Suzdal Mode

  The cats came. Their ships glittered in the naked sky above Arachosia. Their little combat craft attacked. The cats who had not existed a moment before, but who had then had two million years in which to follow a destiny printed into their brains, printed down their spinal cords, etched into the chemistry of their bodies and personalities. The cats had turned into people of a kind, with speech, intelligence, hope, and a mission. Their mission was to reach Suzdal, to rescue him, to obey him, and to damage Arachosia.

  The cat ships screamed their battle warnings.

  “This is the day of the year of the promised age. And now come cats!”

  The Arachosians had waited for battle for four thousand years and now they got it. The cats attacked them. Two of the cat craft recognized Suzdal, and the cats reported, “Oh Lord, oh God, oh Maker of all things, oh Commander of Time, oh Beginner of Life, we have waited since Everything began to serve You, to serve Your Name, to obey Your Glory!

  May we live for You, may we die for You. We are Your people.”

  Suzdal cried and threw his message to all the cats.

  “Harry the klopts but don’t kill them all!”

  He repeated, “Harry them and stop them until I escape.” He flung his cruiser into non space and escaped.

  Neither cat nor Arachosian followed him.

  And that’s the story, but the tragedy is that Suzdal got back.

  And the Arachosians are still there and the cats are still there.

  Perhaps the Instrumentality knows where they are, perhaps the Instrumentality does not. Mankind does not really want to find out. It is against all law to bring up a form of life superior to man.

  Perhaps the cats are. Perhaps somebody knows whether the Arachosians won and killed the cats and added the cat science to their own and are now looking for us somewhere, probing like blind men through the stars for us true human beings to meet, to hate, to kill. Or perhaps the cats won.

  Perhaps the cats are imprinted by a strange mission, by weird hopes of serving men they don’t recognize. Perhaps they think we are all Arachosians and should be saved only for some particular cruiser commander, whom they will never see again. They won’t see Suzdal, because we know what happened to him.

  The Trial of Suzdal

  Suzdal was brought to trial on a great stage in the open world.

  His trial was recorded. He had gone in when he should not have gone in. He had searched for the Arachosians without waiting and asking for advice and of Man reinforcements. What business was it of his to relieve a distress ages old? What business indeed?

  And then the cats. We had the records of the ship to show that something came out of that moon. Spacecraft, things with voices, things that could communicate with the human brain. We’re not even sure, since they transmitted directly into the receiver computers, that they spoke an Earth language. Perhaps they did it with some sort of direct telepathy. But the crime was, Suzdal had succeeded.

  By throwing the cats back two million years, by coding them to survive, coding them to develop civilization, coding them to come to his rescue, he had created a whole new world in less than one second of objective time.

  His chronopathic device had flung the little life-bombs back to the wet earth of the big moon over Arachosia and in less time than it takes to record this, the bombs came back in the form of a fleet built by a race, an Earth race, though of cat origin, two million years old.

  The court stripped Suzdal of his name and said, “You will not be named Suzdal any longer.”

  The court stripped Suzdal of his rank.

  “You will not be a commander of this or any other navy, neither imperial nor of the Instrumentality.”

  The court stripped Suzdal of his life.

  “You will not live longer, former commander, and former Suzdal.”

  And then the court stripped Suzdal of death.

  “You will go to the planet Shayol, the place of uttermost shame from which no one ever returns. You will go there with the contempt and hatred of mankind. We will not punish you. We do not wish to know about you any more. You will live on, but for us you will have ceased to exist.”

  That’s the story. It’s a sad, wonderful story. The Instrumentality tries to cheer up all the different kinds of mankind by telling them it isn’t true, it’s just a ballad.

  Perhaps the records do exist. Perhaps somewhere the crazy klopts of Arachosia breed their boyish young, deliver their babies, always by Caesarean, feed them always by bottle, generations of men who have known fathers and who have no idea of what the word mother might be. And perhaps the Arachosians spend their crazy lives in endless battle with intelligent cats who are serving a mankind that may never come back.

  That’s the story.

  Furthermore, it isn’t true.

  Golden the Ship Was—Oh! Oh! Oh!

  The Lord Tedesco returned to his apartments and to the current for plugging into the centers of pleasure in his brain. But as he arranged himself on the air-jet his hand stopped on its mission to press the button which would start the current. He realized, suddenly, that he had pleasure. The contemplation of the golden ship and of what he had accomplished alone, deceptive, without the praise of all the worlds for his solitary daring gave even greater pleasure than that of the electric current. And he sank back on the jet of air and thought of the golden ship, and his pleasure was greater than any he had ever experienced before.

  On Earth, the Lords of the Instrumentality gracefully acknowledged that the golden ship had destroyed all life on Raumsog’s planet. Homage was paid to them by the many worlds of mankind. Lovaduck, his idiot, his little girl, and the monitor were taken to hospitals. Their minds were erased of all recollection of their accomplishments.

  Lovaduck himself appeared before the Lords of the Instrumentality. He felt that he had served on the golden ship and he did not remember what he had done. He knew nothing of a chronopathic idiot. And he remembered nothing of his little “vehicle.” Tears poured down his face when the Lords of the Instrumentality gave him their highest decorations and paid him an immense sum of money. They said: “You have served well and you are discharged. The blessings and the thanks of mankind will forever rest upon you . . .”

  Lovaduck went back to his estates wondering that his service should have been so great. He wondered, too, in the centuries of the rest of his life, how any man such as himself could be so tremendous a hero and never quite remember how it was accomplished.

  On a very remote planet, the survivors of a Raumsog cruiser were released from internment. By special orders, direct from Earth, their memories had been discoordinated so that they would not reveal the pattern of defeat. An obstinate reporter kept after one spaceman. After many hours of hard drinking the survivor’s answer was still the same:

  “Golden the ship was oh! oh! oh!

  Golden the ship was oh! oh! oh!”

  The Dead Lady of Clown Town

  I

  You already know the end the immense drama of the Lord Jestocost, seventh of his line, and how the cat-girl C” mell initiated the vast conspiracy. But you do not know the beginning, how the first Lord Jestocost got his name, because of the terror and inspiration which his mother, Lady Goroke, obtained from the famous real-life drama of the dog-girl D’joan. It is even less likely that you know the other story the one behind D’joan. This story is sometimes mentioned as the matter of the “nameless witch,”

  which is absurd, because she really had a name. The name was “Elaine,” an ancient and forbidden one.

&nbs
p; Elaine was a mistake. Her birth, her life, her career were all mistakes. The ruby was wrong. How could that have happened?

  Go back to An-fang, the Peace Square at An-fang, the Beginning Place at An-fang, where all things start. Bright it was.

  Red Square, dead square, clear square, under a yellow sun.

  This was Earth Original, Manhome itself, where Earthport thrusts its way up through hurricane clouds that are higher than the mountains.

  An-fang was near a city, the only living city with a pre-atomic name. The lovely meaningless name was Meeya Meefia, where the lines of ancient roadways, untouched by a wheel for thousands of years, forever paralleled the warm, bright, clear beaches of the Old South East.

  The headquarters of the People Programmer was at An-fang, and there the mistake happened: A ruby trembled. Two tourmaline nets failed to rectify the laser beam. A diamond noted the error. Both the error and the correction went into the general computer.

  The error assigned, on the general account of births for Fomalhaut III, the profession of “lay therapist, female, intuitive capacity for correction of human physiology with local resources.”

  On some of the early ships they used to call these people witch women because they worked unaccountable cures. For pioneer parties, these lay therapists were invaluable; in settled post-Riesmannian societies, they became an awful nuisance. Sickness disappeared with good conditions, accidents dwindled down to nothing, medical work became institutional.

  Who wants a witch, even a good witch, when a thousand-bed hospital is waiting with its staff eager for clinical experience… and only seven out of its thousand beds filled with real people?

  (The remaining beds were filled with lifelike robots on which the staff could practice, lest they lose their morale. They could, of course, have worked on under people animals in the shape of human beings, who did the heavy and the weary work which remained as the caput mortuum of a really perfected economy but it was against the law for animals, even when they were under people to go to a human hospital. When under people got sick, the Instrumentality took care of them in slaughterhouses. It was easier to breed new under people for the jobs than it was to repair sick ones. Furthermore, the tender, loving care of a hospital might give them ideas. Such as the idea that they were people. This would have been bad, from the prevailing point of view. Therefore the human hospitals remained almost empty while an under person who sneezed four times or who vomited once was taken away, never to be ill again. The empty beds kept on with the robot patients, who went through endless repetitions of the human patterns of injury or disease.) This left no work for witches, bred and trained.

  Yet the ruby had trembled; the program had indeed made a mistake; the birth-number for a “lay therapist, general, female, immediate use” had been ordered for Fomalhaut III.

  Much later, when the story was all done down to its last historic detail, there was an investigation into the origins of Elaine. When the laser had trembled, both the original order and the correction were fed simultaneously into the machine. The machine recognized the contradiction and promptly referred both papers to the human supervisor, an actual man who had been working on the job for seven years.

  He was studying music, and he was bored. He was so close to the end of his term that he was already counting the days to his own release. Meanwhile he was rearranging two popular songs.

  One was The Big Bamboo, a primitive piece which tried to evoke the original magic of man. The other was about a girl, Elaine, Elaine, whom the song asked to refrain from giving pain to her loving swam. Neither of the songs was important; but between them they influenced history, first a little bit and then very much.

  The musician had plenty of time to practice. He had not had to meet a real emergency in all his seven years. From time to time the machine made reports to him, but the musician just told the machine to correct its own errors, and it infallibly did so.

  On the day that the accident of Elaine happened, he was trying to perfect his finger work on the guitar, a very old instrument believed to date from the pre-space period. He was playing The Big Bamboo for the hundredth time.

  The machine announced its mistake with an initial musical chime. The supervisor had long since forgotten all the instructions which he had so worrisomely memorized seven long years ago. The alert did not really and truly matter, because the machine invariably corrected its own mistakes whether the supervisor was on duty or not.

  The machine, not having its chime answered, moved into a second-stage alarm. From a loudspeaker set in the wall of the room, it shrieked in a high, clear human voice, the voice of some employee who had died thousands of years earlier: “Alert, alert! Emergency. Correction needed. Correction needed!”

  The answer was one which the machine had never heard before, old though it was. The musician’s fingers ran madly, gladly over the guitar strings and he sang clearly, wildly back to the machine a message strange beyond any machine’s belief: Beat, beat the Big Bamboo! Beat, beat, beat the Big Bamboo for me … Hastily the machine set its memory banks and computers to work, looking for the code reference to “bamboo,” trying to make that word fit the present context. There was no reference at all.

  The machine pestered the man some more.

  “Instructions unclear. Instructions unclear. Please correct.”

  “Shut up,” said the man.

  “Cannot comply,” stated the machine.

  “Please state and repeat, please state and repeat, please state and repeat.”

  “Do shut up,” said the man, but he knew the machine would not obey this. Without thinking, he turned to his other tune and sang the first two lines twice over: Elaine, Elaine, go cure the pain!

  Elaine, Elaine, go cure the pain!

  Repetition had been inserted as a safeguard into the machine, on the assumption that no real man would repeat an error. The name

  “Elaine” was not correct number code, but the fourfold emphasis seemed to confirm the need for a “lay therapist, female.” The machine itself noted that a genuine man had corrected the situation card presented as a matter of emergency.

  “Accepted,” said the machine.

  This word, too late, jolted the supervisor away from his music.

  “Accepted what?” he asked.

  There was no answering voice. There was no sound at all except for the whisper of slightly-moistened warm air through the ventilators.

  The supervisor looked out the window. He could see a little of the blood-black red color of the Peace Square of An-fang; beyond lay the ocean, endlessly beautiful and endlessly tedious.

  The supervisor sighed hopefully. He was young.

  “Guess it doesn’t matter,” he thought, picking up his guitar.

  (Thirty-seven years later, he found out that it did matter.

  The Lady Goroke herself, one of the Chiefs of the Instrumentality, sent a Subchief of the Instrumentality to find out who had caused D’joan. When the man found that the witch Elaine was the source of the trouble, she sent him on to find out how Elaine had gotten into a well-ordered universe. The supervisor was found. He was still a musician. He remembered nothing of the story. He was hypnotized. He still remembered nothing. The subchief invoked an emergency and Police Drug Four (“clear memory”) was administered to the musician. He immediately remembered the whole silly scene, but insisted that it did not matter. The case was referred to Lady Goroke, who instructed the authorities that the musician be told the whole horrible, beautiful story of D’joan at Fomalhaut the very story which you are now being told and he wept. He was not punished otherwise, but the Lady Goroke commanded that those memories be left in his mind for so long as he might live.) The man picked up his guitar, but the machine went on about its work.

  It selected a fertilized human embryo, tagged it with the freakish name

  “Elaine,” irradiated the genetic code with strong aptitudes for witchcraft, and then marked the person’s card for training in medicine, transportation by sail-ship to F
omalhaut III, and release for service on the planet.

  Elaine was born without being needed, without being wanted, without having a skill which could help or hurt any existing human being. She went into life doomed and useless.

  It is not remarkable that she was misbegotten. Errors do happen. Remarkable was the fact that she managed to survive without being altered, corrected, or killed by the safety devices which mankind has installed in society for its own protection.

  Unwanted, unused, she wandered through the tedious months and useless years of her own existence. She was well fed, richly clothed, variously housed. She had machines and robots to serve her, under people to obey her, people to protect her against others or against herself, should the need arise. But she could never find work; without work, she had no time for love; without work or love, she had no hope at all.

  If she had only stumbled into the right experts or the right authorities, they would have altered or re-trained her. This would have made her into an acceptable woman; but she did not find the police, nor did they find her. She was helpless to correct her own programming, utterly helpless. It had been imposed on her at An-fang, way back at An-fang, where all things begin.

  The ruby had trembled, the tourmaline failed, the diamond passed unsupported. Thus, a woman was born doomed.

  II

  Much later, when people made songs about the strange case of the dog-girl D’joan, the minstrels and singers had tried to imagine what Elaine felt like, and they had made up The Song of Elaine for her. It is not authentic, but it shows how Elaine looked at her own life before the strange case of D’joan began to flow from Elaine’s own actions: Other women hate me.