The Rediscovery of Man

by Cordwainer Smith

  “Cat, you call yourself. Cat! You’re a pig, you’re adog, you’re an animal. You may be working for Earth but don’ t ever get the idea that you’ re as good as a person. I think it’s a crime that the Instrumentality lets monsters like you greet real human beings from outside! I can’t stop it. But may the Bell help you, girl, if you ever touch a real Earth man! If you ever get near one! If you ever try tricks here! Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” C’mell had said. To herself she thought, “That poor thing doesn’t know how to select her own clothes or how to do her own hair. No wonder she resents somebody who manages to be pretty.”

  Perhaps the policewoman thought that raw hatred would be shocking to C’ mell. It wasn’t. Underpeople were used to hatred, and it was not any worse raw than it was when cooked with politeness and served like poison. They had to live with it.

  But now, it was all changed.

  She had fallen in love with Jestocost. Did he love her?

  Impossible. No, not impossible. Unlawful, unlikely, indecent yes, all these, but not impossible. Surely he felt something of her love. If he did, he gave no sign of it.

  People and under people had fallen in love many times before.

  The under people were always destroyed and the real people brainwashed. There were laws against that kind of thing. The scientists among people had created the under people had given them capacities which real people did not have (the fifty-meter jump, the tele path two miles underground, the turtle-man waiting a thousand years next to an emergency door, the cowman guarding a gate without reward), and the scientists had also given many of the under people the human shape. It was handier that way. The human eye, the five-fingered hand, the human size these were convenient for engineering reasons. By making under people the same size and shape as of Man people, more or less, the scientists eliminated the need for two or three or a dozen different sets of furniture. The human form was good enough for all of them.

  But they had forgotten the human heart.

  And now she, C’mell, had fallen in love with a man, a true man old enough to have been her own father’s grandfather.

  But she didn’t feel daughterly about him at all. She remembered that with her own father there was an easy comradeship, an innocent and forthcoming affection, which masked the fact that he was considerably more catlike than she was. Between them there was an aching void of forever-unspoken words things that couldn’t quite be said by either of them, perhaps things that couldn’t be said at all. They were so close to each other that they could get no closer. This created enormous distance, which was heart-breaking but unutterable. Her father had died, and now this true man was here with all the kindness “That” sit,” she whispered to herself.

  “With all the kindness that none of these passing men have ever really shown. With all the depth which my poor under people can never get. Not that it’s not in them. But they’re born like dirt, treated like dirt, put away like dirt when they die. How can any of my own men develop real kindness? There’s a special sort of majesty to kindness. It’s the best part there is to being people. And he has whole oceans of it in him. And it’s strange, strange, strange that he’s never given his real love to any human woman.”

  She stopped, cold.

  Then she consoled herself and whispered on, “Or if he did, it’s so long ago that it doesn’t matter now. He’s got me. Does he know it?”

  IV

  The Lord Jestocost did know, and yet he didn’t. He was used to getting loyalty from people, because he offered loyalty and honor in his daily work. He was even familiar with loyalty becoming obsessive and seeking physical form, particularly from women, children, and under people He had always coped with it before. He was gambling on the fact that C’mell was a wonderfully intelligent person, and that as a girly girl working on the hospitality staff of the Earthport police, she must have learned to control her personal feelings.

  “We’re born in the wrong age,” he thought, “when I meet the most intelligent and beautiful female I’ve ever met, and then have to put business first. But this stuff about people and under people is sticky. Sticky. We’ve got to keep personalities out of it.”

  So he thought. Perhaps he was right.

  If the nameless one, whom he did not dare to remember, commanded an attack on the Bell itself, that was worth their lives. Their emotions could not come into it. The Bell mattered; justice mattered; the perpetual return of mankind to progress mattered. He did not matter, because he had already done most of his work. C’mell did not matter, because their failure would leave her with mere under people forever. The Bell did count.

  The price of what he proposed to do was high, but the entire job could be done in a few minutes if it were done at the Bell itself.

  The Bell, of course, was not a Bell. It was a three dimensional situation table, three times the height of a man. It was set one story below the meeting room, and shaped roughly like an ancient bell. The meeting table of the Lords of the Instrumentality had a circle cut out of it, so that the Lords could look down into the Bell at whatever situation one of them called up either manually or telepathically. The Bank below it, hidden by the floor, was the key memory-bank of the entire system.

  Duplicates existed at thirty-odd other places on Earth. Two duplicates lay hidden in interstellar space, one of them beside the ninety-million-mile gold-colored ship left over from the war against Raumsog and the other masked as an asteroid.

  Most of the Lords were off-world on the business of the Instrumentality.

  Only three besides Jestocost were present the Lady Johanna Gnade, the Lord Issan Olascoaga, and the Lord William Notfrom-here. (The Not-from-heres were a great Norstrilian family which had migrated back to Earth many generations before.) The E’telekeli told Jestocost the rudiments of a plan.

  He was to bring C’mell into the chambers on a summons.

  The summons was to be serious.

  They should avoid her summary death by automatic justice, if the relays began to trip.

  C’mell would go into partial trance in the chamber.

  He was then to call the items in the Bell which E’telekeli wanted traced. A single call would be enough. E’telekeli would take the responsibility for tracing them. The other Lords would be distracted by him, E’telekeli.

  It was simple in appearance.

  The complication came in action.

  The plan seemed flimsy, but there was nothing which Jestocost could do at this time. He began to curse himself for letting his passion for policy involve him in the intrigue. It was too late to back out with honor; besides, he had given his word; besides, he liked C’mell as a being, not as a girly girl and he would hate to see her marked with disappointment for life. He knew how the under people cherished their identities and their status.

  With heavy heart but quick mind he went to the council chamber. A dog- of Man girl, one of the routine messengers whom he had seen many months outside the door, gave him the minutes.

  He wondered how C’mell or E’telekeli would reach him, once he was inside the chamber with its tight net of telepathic intercepts.

  He sat wearily at the table And almost jumped out of his chair.

  The conspirators had forged the minutes themselves, and the top item was: “C’mell daughter to C” mackintosh, cat stock (pure), lot 1138, confession of. Subject: conspiracy to export homuncular material. Reference: planet De Prinsensmacht.”

  The Lady Johanna Gnade had already pushed the buttons for the planet concerned. The people there, Earth by origin, were enormously strong but they had gone to great pains to maintain the original Earth appearance. One of their first-men was at the moment on Earth. He bore the title of the Twilight Prince (Prins van de Schemering) and he was on a mixed diplomatic and trading mission.

  Since Jestocost was a little late, C’ mell was being brought into the room as he glanced over the minutes.

  The Lord Not-from-here asked Jestocost if he would preside.

  �
�I beg you. Sir and Scholar,” he said, “to join me in asking the Lord Issan to preside this time.”

  The presidency was a formality. Jestocost could watch the Bell and Bank better if he did not have to chair the meeting too.

  C’mell wore the clothing of a prisoner. On her it looked good.

  He had never seen her wearing anything but girly girl clothes before. The pale-blue prison tunic made her look very young, very human, very tender, and very frightened. The cat family showed only in the fiery cascade of her hair and the lithe power of her body as she sat, demure and erect.

  Lord Issan asked her: “You have confessed. Confess again.”

  “This man,” and she pointed at a picture of the Twilight Prince, “wanted to go to the place where they torment human children for a show.”

  “What!” cried three of the Lords together.

  “What place?” said the Lady Johanna, who was bitterly in favor of kindness.

  “It’s run by a man who looks like this gentleman here,” said C’mell, pointing at Jestocost. Quickly, so that nobody could stop her, but modestly, so that none of them thought to doubt her, she circled the room and touched Jestocost’s shoulder. He felt a thrill of contact-telepathy and heard bird-cackle in her brain. Then he knew that the E’telekeli was in touch with her.

  “The man who has the place,” said C’mell, “is five pounds lighter than this gentleman, two inches shorter, and he has red hair. His place is at the Cold Sunset corner of Earthport, down the boulevard and under the boulevard. Underpeople, some of them with bad reputations, live in that neighborhood.”

  The Bell went milky, flashing through hundreds of combinations of bad under people in that part of the city. Jestocost felt himself staring at the casual milkiness with unwanted concentration.

  The Bell cleared.

  It showed the vague image of a room in which children were playing Hallowe’en tricks.

  The Lady Johanna laughed, “Those aren’t people. They’re robots. It’s just a dull old play.”

  “Then,” added C’mell, “he wanted a dollar and a shilling to take home. Real ones. There was a robot who had found some.”

  “What are those?” said Lord Issan.

  “Ancient money the real money of old America and old Australia,” cried Lord William.

  “I have copies, but there are no originals outside the state museum.” He was an ardent, passionate collector of coins.

  “The robot found them in an old hiding place right under Earthport.”

  Lord William almost shouted at the Bell.

  “Run through every hiding place and get me that money.”

  The Bell clouded. In finding the bad neighborhoods it had flashed every police point in the northwest sector of the tower.

  Now it scanned all the police points under the tower, and ran dizzily through thousands of combinations before it settled on an old toolroom. A robot was polishing circular pieces of metal.

  When Lord William saw the polishing, he was furious.

  “Get that here,” he shouted.

  “I want to buy those myself!”

  “All right,” said Lord Issan.

  “It’s a little irregular, but all right.”

  The machine showed the key search devices and brought the robot to the escalator.

  The Lord Issan said, “This isn’t much of a case.”

  C’mell sniveled. She was a good actress.

  “Then he wanted me to get a homunculus egg. One of the E-type, derived from birds, for him to take home.”

  Issan put on the search device.

  “Maybe,” said C’mell, “somebody has already put it in the disposal series.”

  The Bell and Bank ran through all the disposal devices at high speed. Jestocost felt his nerves go on edge. No human being could have memorized these thousands of patterns as they flashed across the Bell too fast for human eyes, but the brain reading the Bell through his eyes was not human. It might even be locked into a computer of its own. It was, thought Jestocost, an indignity for a Lord of the Instrumentality to be used as a human spyglass.

  The machine blotted up.

  “You’re a fraud,” cried the Lord Issan.

  “There’s no evidence.”

  “Maybe the offworlder tried,” said the Lady Johanna.

  “Shadow him,” said Lord William.

  “If he would steal ancient coins he would steal anything.”

  The Lady Johanna turned to C’mell.

  “You’re a silly thing. You have wasted our time and you have kept us from serious inter-world business.” “It is inter-world business,” wept C’mell. She let her hand slip from Jestocost’s shoulder, where it had rested all the time. The body to-body relay broke and the telepathic link broke with it.

  “We should judge that,” said Lord Issan.

  “You might have been punished,” said Lady Johanna. The Lord Jestocost had said nothing, but there was a glow of happiness in him. If the E’telekeli was half as good as he seemed, the under people had a list of checkpoints and escape routes which would make it easier to hide from the capricious sentence of painless death which human authorities meted out.

  V

  There was singing in the corridors that night.

  Underpeople burst into happiness for no visible reason.

  C’mell danced a wild cat dance for the next customer who came in from out world stations, that very evening. When she got home to bed, she knelt before the picture of her father C’mackintosh and thanked the E’telekeli for what Jestocost had done.

  But the story became known a few generations later, when the Lord Jestocost had won acclaim for being the champion of the under people and when the authorities, still unaware of E’telekeli, accepted the elected representatives of the under people as negotiators for better terms of life; and C’mell had died long since.

  She had first had a long, good life.

  She became a female chef when she was too old to be a girly girl Her food was famous. Jestocost once visited her. At the end of the meal he had asked, “There’s a silly rhyme among the under people No human beings know it except me.”

  “I don’t care about rhymes,” she said.

  “This is called

  “The what-she-did.” ” C’ mell blushed all the way down to the neckline of her capacious blouse.

  She had filled out a lot in middle age. Running the restaurant had helped.

  “Oh, that rhyme!” she said.

  “It’s silly.”

  “It says you were in love with a hominid.”

  “No,” she said.

  “I wasn’t.” Her green eyes, as beautiful as ever, stared deeply into his. Jestocost felt uncomfortable. This was getting personal. He liked political relationships; personal things made him uncomfortable.

  The light in the room shifted and her cat eyes blazed at him; she looked like the magical fire-haired girl he had known.

  “I wasn’t in love. You couldn’t call it that. ..”

  Her heart cried out. It was you, it was you, it was you.

  “But the rhyme,” insisted Jestocost, “says it was a hominid. It wasn’t that Prins van de Schemering?”

  “Who was he?” C’mell asked the question quietly, but her emotions cried out, Darling, will you never, never know?

  “The strong man.”

  “Oh, him. I’ve forgotten him.”

  Jestocost rose from the table.

  “You’ve had a good life, C’mell.

  You’ve been a citizen, a committeewoman, a leader. And do you even know how many children you have had?”

  “Seventy-three,” she snapped at him.

  “Just because they’re multiple doesn’t mean we don’t know them.”

  His playfulness left him. His face was grave, his voice kindly.

  “I meant no harm, C’mell.”

  He never knew that when he left she went back to the kitchen and cried for a while. It was Jestocost whom she had vainly loved ever since they had been comrades,
many long years ago.

  Even after she died, at the full age of five-score and three, he kept seeing her about the corridors and shafts of Earthport. Many of her great-granddaughters looked just like her and several of them practiced the girly girl business with huge success.

  They were not half-slaves. They were citizens (reserved grade) and they had photo passes which protected their property, their identity, and their rights. Jestocost was the godfather to them all; he was often embarrassed when the most voluptuous creatures in the universe threw playful kisses at him. All he asked was fulfillment of his political passions, not his personal ones. He had always been in love, madly in love With justice itself.

  At last, his own time came, and he knew that he was dying, and he was not sorry. He had had a wife, hundreds of years ago, and had loved her well; their children had passed into the generations of man.

  In the ending, he wanted to know something, and he called to a nameless one (or to his successor) far beneath the world. He called with his mind till it was a scream.

  I have helped your people.

  “Yes,” came back the faintest of faraway whispers, inside his head.

  I am dying. I must know. Did she love me?

  “She went on without you, so much did she love you. She let you go, for your sake, not for hers. She really loved you. More than death. More than life. More than time. You will never be apart.”

  Never apart?

  “Not, not in the memory of man,” said the voice, and was then still.

  Jestocost lay back on his pillow and waited for the day to end.

  A Planet Named Shayol

  I

  There was was a tremendous difference between the liner and the ferry in Mercer’s treatment. On the liner, the attendants made gibes when they brought him his food.

  “Scream good and loud,” said one rat-faced steward, “and then we’ll know it’s you when they broadcast the sounds of punishment on the Emperor’s birthday.”

  The other, fat steward ran the tip of his wet, red tongue over his thick, purple-red lips one time and said, “Stands to reason, man. If you hurt all the time, the whole lot of you would die.