The Rediscovery of Man
Page 38
Hours or centuries.
Who could tell them apart?
The herd went back to its usual life, except that the intervals between needles were much shorter. The once-commander, Suzdal, refused the needle when he heard the news. Whenever he could walk, he followed the Customs Robots around as they photographed, took soil samples, and made a count of the bodies.
They were particularly interested in the mountain of Go-Captain Alvarez and professed themselves uncertain as to whether there was organic life there or not. The mountain did appear to react to super-condamine, but they could find no blood, no heart-beat.
Moisture, moved by the dromozoa, seemed to have replaced the once-human bodily processes.
V
And then, early one morning, the sky opened.
Ship after ship landed. People emerged, wearing clothes.
The dromozoa ignored the newcomers. Mercer, who was in a state of bliss, confusedly tried to think this through until he realized that the ships were loaded to their skins with communications machines; the “people” were either robots or images of persons in other places.
The robots swiftly gathered together the herd. Using wheelbarrows, they brought the hundreds of mindless people to the landing area.
Mercer heard a voice he knew. It was the Lady Johanna Gnade.
“Set me high,” she commanded.
Her form rose until she seemed one-fourth the size of Alvarez.
Her voice took on more volume.
“Wake them all,” she commanded.
Robots moved among them, spraying them with a gas which was both sickening and sweet. Mercer felt his mind go clear. The super-condamine still operated in his nerves and veins, but his cortical area was free of it. He thought clearly.
“I bring you,” cried the compassionate feminine voice of the gigantic Lady Johanna, “the judgment of the Instrumentality on the planet Shayol.
“Item: the surgical supplies will be maintained and the dromozoa will not be molested. Portions of human bodies will be left here to grow, and the grafts will be collected by robots.
Neither man nor homunculus will live here again.
“Item: the under man B’dikkat, of cattle extraction, will be rewarded by an immediate return to Earth. He will be paid twice his expected thousand years of earnings.”
The voice of B’dikkat, without amplification, was almost as loud as hers through the amplifier. He shouted his protest, “Lady, Lady!”
She looked down at him, his enormous body reaching to ankle height on her swirling gown, and said in a very informal tone, “What do you want?”
“Let me finish my work first,” he cried, so that all could hear.
“Let me finish taking care of these people.”
The specimens who had minds all listened attentively. The brainless ones were trying to dig themselves back into the soft earth of Shayol, using their powerful claws for the purpose.
Whenever one began to disappear, a robot seized him by a limb and pulled him out again.
“Item: cephalectomies will be performed on all persons with irrecoverable minds. Their bodies will be left here. Their heads will be taken away and killed as pleasantly as we can manage, probably by an over dosage of super-condamine.”
“The last big jolt,” murmured Commander Suzdal, who stood near Mercer.
“That’s fair enough.”
“Item: the children have been found to be the last heirs of the Empire. An over-zealous official sent them here to prevent their committing treason when they grew up. The doctor obeyed orders without questioning them. Both the official and the doctor have been cured and their memories of this have been erased, so that they need have no shame or grief for what they have done.”
“It’s unfair,” cried the half-man.
“They should be punished as we were!”
The Lady Johanna Gnade looked down at him.
“Punishment is ended. We will give you anything you wish, but not the pain of another. I shall continue.
“Item: since none of you wish to resume the lives which you led previously, we are moving you to another planet nearby. It is similar to Shayol, but much more beautiful. There are no dromozoa.”
At this an uproar seized the herd. They shouted, wept, cursed, appealed. They all wanted the needle, and if they had to stay on Shayol to get it, they would stay.
“Item,” said the gigantic image of the lady, overriding their babble with her great but feminine voice, “you will not have super-condamine on the new planet, since without dromozoa it would kill you. But there will be caps. Remember the caps. We will try to cure you and to make people of you again. But if you give up, we will not force you. Caps are very powerful; with medical help you can live under them many years.”
A hush fell on the group. In their various ways, they were trying to compare the electrical caps which had stimulated their pleasure-lobes with the drug which had drowned them a thousand times in pleasure. Their murmur sounded like assent.
“Do you have any questions?” said the Lady Johanna.
“When do we get the caps?” said several. They were human enough that they laughed at their own impatience.
“Soon,” said she reassuringly.
“Very soon.”
“Very soon,” echoed B’dikkat, reassuring his charges even though he was no longer in control.
“Question,” cried the Lady Da.
“My Lady … ?” said the Lady Johanna, giving the ex-empress her due courtesy.
“Will we be permitted marriage?”
The Lady Johanna looked astonished.
“I don’t know.” She smiled.
“I don’t know any reason why not ” “I claim this man Mercer,” said the Lady Da.
“When the drugs were deepest, and the pain was greatest, he was the one who always tried to think. May I have him?”
Mercer thought the procedure arbitrary but he was so happy that he said nothing. The Lady Johanna scrutinized him and then she nodded. She lifted her arms in a gesture of blessing and farewell.
The robots began to gather the pink herd into two groups.
One group was to whisper in a ship over to a new world, new problems and new lives. The other group, no matter how much its members tried to scuttle into the dirt, was gathered for the last honor which humanity could pay their manhood.
B’dikkat, leaving everyone else, jogged with his bottle across the plain to give the mountain-man Alvarez an especially large gift of delight.
About the Author
Cordwainer Smith (Pseudonym for Dr. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger) (b.1913-d.1966)
Paul Linebarger was born in 1913, the grandson of a clergyman. His father, an eccentric man, had served as a Federal District Judge in the Philippines, but had left this post to work full time for the cause of the Chinese republican reformer Sun Yat Sen, who became Paul's godfather. Paul Linebarger grew up in the retinue of Sun Yat Sen, for his father stayed with Sen during his exile in Japan and throughout his career in China.
Linebarger spent his formative years in Japan, China, France, and Germany. By the time he grew up, he knew six languages and had become intimate with several cultures, both Oriental and Occidental.
He was only twenty- three when he earned his Ph.D. in political science at Johns Hopkins University, where he was later Professor of Asiatic politics for many years. Shortly thereafter, he graduated from editing his father's books to publishing his own highly regarded works on Far Eastern affairs.
After graduating from Johns Hopkins, Linebarger taught at Duke University from 1937 to 1946, but he also served actively in the Army during World War II as a second lieutenant. Pierce writes that "As a Far East specialist he was involved in the formation of the Office of War Information and of the Operation Planning and Intelligence Board. He also helped organize the Army's first psychological warfare section." He was sent to China and put in charge of psychological warfare and of coordinating Anglo- American and Chinese military activities. By
the end of the war, he had risen to the rank of major.
In 1947, he became professor of Asiatic Politics at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
Dr. Linebarger turned his wartime experiences into Psychological Warfare, still regarded as the most authoritative text in the field. As a colonel, he was advisor to the British forces in Malaya, and to the U. S. Eighth Army in Korea. But this self- styled "visitor to small wars" passed up Vietnam, feeling American involvement there was a mistake.
Travels around the world took him to Australia, Greece, Egypt, and many other countries; and his expertise was sufficiently valued that he became a leading member of the Foreign Policy Association and an advisor to President Kennedy.
Linebarger was reared in a High Church Episcopalian family. Alan C. Elms's sketch of the older Linebargers does not lead one to believe either was particularly devout. Paul's father was evidently rather overbearing and placed many demands on his son. His mother was apparently rather self-centered and controlling. At the age of six, young Paul was blinded in his left eye as a result of an accident while playing, and the resulting infection damaged his right eye as well, causing him distress throughout his entire life. A sensitive, introspective, and apparently rather lonely and sickly youth, Paul Linebarger was to develop into a remarkable scholar, thinker, and writer.
At some point in his life, Paul Linebarger became a strongly committed Christian. "He and [his wife] Genevieve went to Sung Mass on Sundays, and he said grace at all meals at home. The faith extended and shaped his powerful imagination' But he simply ignored contemporary religious movements, especially the secularizing ones directed to social problems. The God he had faith in had to do with the soul of man and with the unfolding of history and of the destiny of all living creatures."
The first science fiction story published by Linebarger, under the pseudonym Cordwainer Smith, was "Scanners Live in Vain", in 1949. It had been written, however, in 1945. This story is a full-blown allegory of the coming of the New Covenant, and reveals a very sophisticated understanding both of the Biblical narrative and typology (e.g., the smell of roast lamb reminds the central character of the smell of burning people), and of the theological and philosophical tenets of the Christian religion. Linebarger must have become a serious Christian well before 1945.
Linebarger's own psychological problems, as well as his keen interest in psychological warfare, caused him to explore modern psychiatry and psychoanalysis. These themes, as well as Christian philosophy and allegory, and also psychological warfare, run all through the science fiction he published as Cordwainer Smith.
Table of Contents
The Rediscovery of Man
Enter the SF Gateway
Contents
Scanners Live in Vain
The Lady Who Sailed The Soul
The Game of Rat and Dragon
I. The Table
II. The Shuffle
III. The Deal
IV. The Score
The Burning of the Brain
I. Dolores
II. The Lost Locksheet
III. The Secret of the Old Dark Brain
The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal
The Beginning
The Magic of the Klopts
The Arrival
The Gotland Suzdal Mode
The Trial of Suzdal
Golden the Ship Was—Oh! Oh! Oh!
The Dead Lady of Clown Town
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
Under Old Earth
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons
I
II
III
IV
V
Alpha Ralpha Boulevard
The Ballad of Lost C'mell
I
II
III
IV
V
A Planet Named Shayol
I
II
III
IV
V
About the Author