The Rediscovery of Man

by Cordwainer Smith

  She had been talking straight ahead, not to me, as though the memory were a little ugly.

  Then she turned her face to me. The brown eyes looked into my eyes as though she were searching for my soul. (Soul. There’s a word we have in French, and there is nothing quite like it in the Old Common Tongue.) She brightened and pleaded with me: “Let’s not be dull on the new day. Let’s be good to the new us, Paul. Let’s do something really French, if that’s what we are to be.

  “A cafe,” I cried.

  “We need a cafe. And I know where one is.”

  “Where?”

  “Two under grounds over. Where the machines come out and where they permit the homunculi to peer in the window.” The thought of homunculi peering at us struck the new me as amusing, though the old me had taken them as much for granted as windows or tables. The old me never met any, but knew that they weren’t exactly people, since they were bred from animals, but they looked just like people, and they could talk. It took a Frenchman like the new me to realize that they could be ugly, or beautiful, or picturesque. More than picturesque: romantic.

  Evidently Virginia now thought the same, for she said, “But they’renette just adorable. What is the cafe called?”

  “The Greasy Cat,” said I. The Greasy Cat. How was I to know that this led to a nightmare between high waters, and to the winds which cried?

  How was I to suppose that this had anything to do with Alpha Ralpha Boulevard?

  No force in the world could have taken me there, if I had known.

  Other new-French people had gotten to the cafe before us.

  A waiter with a big brown moustache took our order. I looked closely at him to see if he might be a licensed homunculus, allowed to work among people because his services were indispensable; but he was not. He was pure machine, though his voice rang out with old-Parisian heartiness, and the designers had even built into him the nervous habit of mopping the back of his hand against his big moustache, and had fixed him so that little beads of sweat showed high up on his brow, just below the hairline.

  “Mamselle? M’sieu? Beer? Coffee? Red wine next month.

  The sun will shine in the quarter after the hour and after the half hour At twenty minutes to the hour it will rain for five minutes so that you can enjoy these umbrellas. I am a native of Alsace.

  You may speak French or German to me.”

  “Anything,” said Virginia.

  “You decide, Paul.”

  “Beer, please,” said I. “Blonde beer for both of us.”

  “But certainly, M’sieu,” said the waiter.

  He left, waving his cloth wildly over his arm.

  Virginia puckered up her eyes against the sun and said, “I wish it would rain now. I’ve never seen real rain.”

  “Be patient, honey.”

  She turned earnestly to me.

  “What is

  “German,” Paul?”

  “Another language, another culture. I read they will bring it to life next year. But don’t you like being French?”

  “I like it fine,” she said.

  “Much better than being a number. But, Paul ” And then she stopped, her eyes blurred with perplexity.

  “Yes, darling?”

  “Paul,” she said, and the statement of my name was a cry of hope from some depth of her mind beyond new me, beyond old me, beyond even the contrivances of the Lords who moulded us. I reached for her hand.

  Said I, “You can tell me, darling.”

  “Paul,” she said, and it was almost weeping, “Paul, why does it all happen so fast? This is our first day, and we both feel that we may spend the rest of our lives together. There’s something about marriage, whatever that is, and we’re supposed to find a priest, and I don’t understand that, either.

  Paul, Paul, Paul, why does it happen so fast? I want to love you. I do love you. But I don’t want to be made to love you. I want it to be the real me,” and as she spoke, tears poured from her eyes though her voice remained steady enough.

  Then it was that I said the wrong thing.

  “You don’t have to worry, honey. I’m sure that the Lords of the Instrumentality have programmed everything well.”

  At that, she burst into tears, loudly and uncontrollably. I had never seen an adult weep before. It was strange and frightening.

  A man from the next table came over and stood beside me, but I did not so much as glance at him.

  “Darling,” said I, reasonably, “darling, we can work it out ” “Paul, let me leave you, so that I may be yours. Let me go away for a few days or a few weeks or a few years. Then, if if if I do come back, you’ll know it’s me and not some program ordered by a machine. For God’s sake, Paul for God’s sake!” In a different voice she said, “What is God, Paul?

  They gave us the words to speak, but I do not know what they mean.” The man beside me spoke.

  “I can take you to God,” he said.

  “Who are you?” said I. “And who asked you to interfere?”

  This was not the kind of language that we had ever used when speaking the Old Common Tongue when they had given us a new language they had built in temperament as well.

  The stranger kept his politeness he was as French as we but he kept his temper well.

  “My name,” he said, “is Maximilien Macht, and I used to be a Believer.”

  Virginia’s eyes lit up. She wiped her face absentmindedly while staring at the man. He was tall, lean, sunburned. (How could he have gotten sunburned so soon?) He had reddish hair and a moustache almost like that of the robot waiter.

  “You asked about God, Mamselle,” said the stranger.

  “God is where he has always been around us, near us, in us.”

  This was strange talk from a man who looked worldly. I rose to my feet to bid him goodbye. Virginia guessed what I was doing and she said: “That’s nice of you, Paul. Give him a chair.”

  There was warmth in her voice.

  The machine waiter came back with two conical beakers made of glass. They had a golden fluid in them with a cap of foam on top. I had never seen or heard of beer before, but I knew exactly how it would taste. I put imaginary money on the tray, received imaginary change, paid the waiter an imaginary tip. The Instrumentality had not yet figured out how to have separate kinds of money for all the new cultures, and of course you could not use real money to pay for food or drink. Food and drink are free.

  The machine wiped his moustache, used his serviette (checked red and white) to dab the sweat off his brow, and then looked inquiringly at Monsieur Macht.

  “M’sieu, you will sit here?”

  “Indeed,” said Macht.

  “Shall I serve you here?”

  “But why not?” said Macht.

  “If these good people permit.”

  “Very well,” said the machine, wiping his moustache with the back of his hand. He fled to the dark recesses of the bar.

  All this time Virginia had not taken her eyes off Macht.

  “You are a Believer?” she asked.

  “You are still a Believer, when you have been made French like us? How do you know you’re you? Why do I love Paul? Are the Lords and their machines controlling everything in us? I want to be me. Do you know how to be me?”

  “Not you, Mamselle,” said Macht.

  “That would be too great an honor. But I am learning how to be myself. You see,” he added, turning to me, “I have been French for two weeks now, and I know how much of me is myself, and how much has been added by this new process of giving us language and danger again.”

  The waiter came back with a small beaker. It stood on a stem, so that it of Man looked like an evil little miniature of Earthport. The fluid it contained was milky white.

  Macht lifted his glass to us.

  “Your health!”

  Virginia stared at him as if she were going to cry again.

  When he and I sipped, she blew her nose and put her handkerchief away. It was the first time I had ever see
n a person perform that act of blowing the nose, but it seemed to go well with our new culture.

  Macht smiled at both of us, as if he were going to begin a speech. The sun came out, right on time. It gave him a halo, and made him look like a devil or a saint.

  But it was Virginia who spoke first.

  “You have been there?”

  Macht raised his eyebrows a little, frowned, and said, “Yes,” very quietly.

  “Did you get a word?” she persisted.

  “Yes.” He looked glum, and a little troubled.

  “What did it say?”

  For answer, he shook his head at her, as if there were things which should never be mentioned in public.

  I wanted to break in, to find out what this was all about.

  Virginia went on, heeding me not at all: “But it did say something!”

  “Yes,” said Macht.

  “Was it important?”

  “Mamselle, let us not talk about it.”

  “We must,” she cried.

  “It’s life or death.” Her hands were clenched so tightly together that her knuckles showed white. Her beer stood in front of her, untouched, growing warm in the sunlight.

  “Very well,” said Macht, “you may ask … I cannot guarantee to answer.”

  I controlled myself no longer.

  “What’s all this about?”

  Virginia looked at me with scorn, but even her scorn was the scorn of a lover, not the cold remoteness of the past.

  “Please, Paul, you wouldn’t know. Wait a while. What did it say to you, M’sieu Macht?”

  “That I, Maximilien Macht, would live or die with a brown haired girl who was already betrothed.” He smiled wryly.

  “And I do not even quite know what ‘betrothed’ means.”

  “We’ll find out,” said Virginia.

  “When did it say this?”

  “Who is ‘it’?” I shouted at them.

  “For God’s sake, what is this all about?”

  Macht looked at me and dropped his voice when he spoke: “The Abba-dingo.” To her he said, “Last week.”

  Virginia turned white.

  “So it does work, it does, it does. Paul darling, it said nothing to me. But it said to my aunt something which I can’t ever forget!”

  I held her arm firmly and tenderly and tried to look into her eyes, but she looked away. Said I, “What did it say?”

  “Paul and Virginia.”

  “So what?” said I. I scarcely knew her. Her lips were tense and compressed. She was not angry. It was something different, worse. She was in the grip of tension. I suppose we had not seen that for thousands of years, either.

  “Paul, seize this simple fact, if you can grasp it. The machine gave that woman our names but it gave them to her twelve years ago.”

  Macht stood up so suddenly that his chair fell over, and the waiter began running toward us.

  “That settles it,” he said.

  “We’re all going back.”

  “Going where?” I said.

  “To the Abba-dingo.”

  “But why now?” said I; and, “Will it work?” said Virginia, both at the same time.

  “It always works,” said Macht, “if you go on the northern side.”

  “How do you get there?” said Virginia.

  Macht frowned sadly.

  “There’s only one way. By Alpha Ralpha Boulevard.” Virginia stood up. And so did I. Then, as I rose, I remembered. Alpha Ralpha Boulevard. It was a ruined street hanging in the sky, faint as a vapor trail. It had been a processional highway once, where conquerors came down and tribute went up. But it was ruined, lost in the clouds, closed to mankind for a hundred centuries.

  “I know it,” said I. “It’s ruined.”

  Macht said nothing, but he stared at me as if I were an outsider . . .

  Virginia, very quiet and white of countenance, said, “Come along.”

  “But why,” said I. “Why?”

  “You fool,” she said, “if we don’t have a God, at least we have a machine. This is the only thing left on or off the world which the Instrumentality doesn’t understand. Maybe it tells the future.

  Maybe it’s an un-machine. It certainly comes from a different time. Can’t you use it, darling? If it says we’re us, we’re us.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “Then we’re not.” Her face was sullen with grief.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If we’re not us,” she said, “we’re just toys, dolls, puppets that the Lords have written on. You’re not you and I’m not me. But if the Abba-dingo, which knew the names Paul and Virginia twelve years before it happened if the Abba-dingo says that we are us, I don’t care if it’s a predicting machine or a god or a devil or a what. I don’t care, but I’ll have the truth.”

  What could I have answered to that? Macht led, she followed, and I walked third in single file. We left the sunlight of The Greasy Cat; just as we left, a light rain began to fall.

  The waiter, looking momentarily like the machine that he was, stared straight ahead. We crossed the lip of the underground and went down to the fast expressway.

  When we came out, we were in a region of fine homes. All were in ruins. The trees had thrust their way into the buildings.

  Flowers rioted across the lawn, through the open doors, and blazed in the roofless rooms. Who needed a house in the open, when the population of Earth had dropped so that the cities were commodious and empty?

  Once I thought I saw a family of homunculi, including little ones, peering at me as we trudged along the soft gravel road.

  Maybe the faces I had seen at the edge of the house were fantasies.

  Macht said nothing.

  Virginia and I held hands as we walked beside him. I could have been happy at this odd excursion, but her hand was tightly clenched in mine. She bit her lower lip from time to time. I knew it mattered to her she was on a pilgrimage. (A pilgrimage was an ancient walk to some powerful place, very good for body and soul.) I didn’t mind going along. In fact, they could not have kept me from coming, once she and Macht decided to leave the cafe. But I didn’t have to take it seriously.

  Did I?

  What did Macht want?

  Who was Macht? What thoughts had that mind learned in two short weeks? How had he preceded us into a new world of danger and adventure? I did not trust him. For the first time in my life I felt alone. Always, always, up to now, I had only to think about the Instrumentality and some protector leaped fully armed into my mind. Telepathy guarded against all dangers, healed all hurts, carried each of us forward to the one hundred and forty-six thousand and ninety-seven days which had been allotted us. Now it was different. I did not know this man, and it was on him that I relied, not on the powers which had shielded and protected us.

  We turned from the ruined road into an immense boulevard. The pavement was so smooth and unbroken that nothing grew on it, save where the wind and dust had deposited random little pockets of earth.

  Macht stopped.

  “This is it,” he said.

  “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard.”

  We fell silent and looked at the causeway of forgotten empires.

  To our left the boulevard disappeared in a gentle curve. It led far north of the city in which I had been reared. I knew that there was another city to the north, but I had forgotten its name. Why should I have remembered it? It was sure to be just like my own.

  But to the right To the right the boulevard rose sharply, like a ramp. It disappeared into the clouds. Just at the edge of the cloud-line there was a hint of disaster. I could not see for sure, but it looked to me as though the whole boulevard had been sheared off by unimaginable forces. Somewhere beyond the clouds there stood the Abba-dingo, the place where all questions were answered … Or so they thought.

  Virginia cuddled close to me.

  “Let’s turn back,” said I. “We are city people. We don’t know anything about ruins.”

  “You can i
f you want to,” said Macht.

  “I was just trying to do you a favor.”

  We both looked at Virginia.

  She looked up at me with those brown eyes. From the eyes there came a plea older than woman or man, older than the human race. I knew what she was going to say before she said it. She was going to say that she had to know.

  Macht was idly crushing some soft rocks near his foot.

  At last Virginia spoke up: “Paul, I don’t want danger for its own sake. But I meant what I said back there. Isn’t there a chance that we were told to love each other? What sort of a life would it be if our happiness, our own selves, depended on a thread in a machine or on a mechanical voice which spoke to us when we were asleep and learning French? It may be fun to go back to the old world. I guess it is. I know that you give me a kind of happiness which I never even suspected before this day. If it’s really us, we have something wonderful, and we ought to know it.

  But if it isn’t ” She burst into sobs.

  I wanted to say, “If it isn’t, it will seem just the same,” but the ominous sulky face of Macht looked at me over Virginia’s shoulder as I drew her to me. There was nothing to say.

  I held her close.

  From beneath Macht’s foot there flowed a trickle of blood.

  The dust drank it up.

  “Macht,” said I, “are you hurt?”

  Virginia turned around, too.

  Macht raised his eyebrows at me and said with unconcern, “No. Why?”

  “The blood. At your feet.”

  He glanced down.

  “Oh, those,” he said, “they’re nothing. Just the eggs of some kind of an un-bird which does not even fly.”

  of Man “Stop it!” I shouted telepathically, using the Old Common Tongue. I did not even try to think in our new-learned French.

  He stepped back a pace in surprise.

  Out of nothing there came to me a message: thank you thank you good great go home please thank you good great go away man bad man bad man bad… Somewhere an animal or bird was warning me against Macht. I thought a casual thanks to it and turned my attention to Macht.

  He and I stared at each other. Was this what culture was?

  Were we now men? Did freedom always include the freedom to mistrust, to fear, to hate?