7 Trips Through Time and Space, page 6
“Yes. You are entitled to know. A General Products hull is an artificially generated molecule whose interatomic bonds are artifically strengthened by a small power source. The strengthened bonds are proof against any kind of impact, and against heat into the millions of degrees. But when enough atoms had been removed from die molecule by antimatter collisons, the molecule naturally broke down.”
Elephant nodded. I wondered if his voice was gone for good.
“When may we expect you to collect your indemnity? I gather no human was killed. This is fortunate. Our funds are low.”
Elephant switched off the phone. He gulped once or twice, then started to look me in the eye. I think it took all his strength; and if I’d waited for him to speak, I don’t know what he would have said.
“I gloat,” I said. I hate sticky scenes. “Verily I gloat. I was right, you were wrong. If we’d landed on your forsaken planet we’d have gone up in pure light. At this time it gives me great pleasure to say, I Told You So.”
He smiled weakly. “You told me so. Antimatter.”
“Oh, I did, I did. Time after time I said, That Planet’s Haunted! It Will Steal Your Life And Soul, I said. There Have Been Signs in the Heavens to—”
“All right, you bastard, don’t overdo it. I owe you twice my life plus a million stars, and not a penny more.”
“Okay, we’ll drop it. But there’s one thing I want you to remember.”
“If I don’t understand it, it’s dangerous.”
“That’s the one thing I want you to remember besides I Told You So.”
Half of Elephant’s house was buried in the face of Elephant’s cliff. The other half projected into space. Without apparent support. A wide balcony ran round that exposed part, also without apparent support, and without a guard rail. The guardian force field at the edge was naturally invisible.
Elephant was somewhere else, off on his own business. He had missed a pretty good dinner.
Sharrol poured us three after-dinner drinks from a 47
squat green bottle. It was labeled with typical flatlander verbosity: Rothschild Extra Fine Brandy Napoleon 2680. The fluid was clear, with a brown tinge.
“One last question,” said Dianna. “What did the puppeteers want with you?”
“They wanted me to explore the Clouds of Magellan for them. I turned them down.”
The girls stared at me, then at each other. I was a convicted liar. Unfair! I’d told at least half the truth, and the rest was a puppeteer secret. They’d paid me a small “consultant’s fee” to make it a privileged communication. I shrugged it off and gulped at my after-dinner drink.
I was trying to cough it out of my windpipe when Elephant breezed in. “The ship’s ready!” he shouted from the vestibule. “We take off in a week! What’s the trouble, Bay?” By then he was on the balcony.
I got my breathing under control. “Week? Take off? Ship?”
“Didn’t I mention any of this? Gronk. I guess I didn’t. Bay, I want to go back to the protosun. I’ve got a GP 2 hull covered a foot deep in foam plastic. There’s a foot of glass over the windows; we can ditch that if it frosts up. We’ll build up speed with an oversized gravity drag. Want to come along?”
The thing he was carrying was four feet long, metal, covered with rolled cloth which was slightly lumpy. I recognized it as a vacuum flag, with spring wires in it, designed to look as if it’s waving where there’s no wind.
He must have read my expression correctly. “No, idiot, I’m not going to land. What do you take me for? There’s a solid rocket in the mast. I want to plant it on Swoosh from a distance. It should make quite a flash, don’t you agree?”
“You want me to go along?”
“Sure.”
“The ship sounds safe enough. We’ve got a week?”
“Just about. There’s provisioning.”
“I’ll let you know in plenty of time.”
We take off tomorrow. I’ve got a tridie camera bolted solidly to the control board, and a contract with the biggest broadcasting company in known space. They’ll have exclusive rights on the first macroscopic antimatter explosion ever recoded. This time I’ve got a reason for going.
THE CRIME AND THE GLORY OF COMMANDER SUZDAL
Cordwainer Smith
THE BEGINNING
Commander Suzdal was sent forth in a shell-ship to explore the outermost reaches of our galaxy. His ship was called a cruiser, but he was the only man in it. He was equipped with hypnotics and cubes to provide him the semblance of company, a large crowd of friendly people who could be convoked out of his own hallucinations.
The Instrumentality even offered him some choice in his imaginary companions, each of whom was embodied in a small ceramic cube containing the brain of a small animal but imprinted with the personality of an actual human being.
Suzdal, a short, stocky man with -a. jolly smile, was blunt about his needs:
“Give me two good security officers. I can manage the ship, but if I’m going into the unknown, I’ll need help in meeting the strange problems which might show up.”
The loading official smiled at him. “I never heard of a cruiser commander who asked for security officers. Most people regard them as an utter nuisance.”
“That’s all right,” said Suzdal. “I don’t.”
“Don’t you want some chess players?”
“I can play chess,” said Suzdal, “all I want to, using the spare computers. All I have to do is set the power down and they start losing. On full power, they always beat me.”
The official then gave Suzdal an odd look. He did not exactly leer, but his expression became both intimate and a little unpleasant. “What about other companions?” he asked, with a funny little edge to his voice.
“I’ve got books,” said Suzdal, “a couple of thousand. I’m going to be gone only a couple of years Earth time.” “Local-subjective, it might be several thousand years,” said the official, “though all the time will wind back up again as you re-approach Earth. And I wasn’t talking about books,” he repeated, with the same funny, prying lilt to his voice.
Suzdal shook his head with momentary worry, ran his hand through his sandy hair. His blue eyes were forthright and he looked straightforwardly into the official’s eyes. “What do you mean, then, if not books? Navigators? I’ve got them, not to mention the turtle-men. They’re good company, if you just talk to them slowly enough and then give them plenty of time to answer. Don’t forget, I’ve been out before… .”
The official spat out his offer: “Dancing girls. WOMEN. Concubines. Don’t you want any of those? We could even cube your own wife for you and print her mind on a cube for you. That way she could be with you every week that you were awake.”
Sudzal looked as though he would spit on the floor in sheer disgust. “Alice? You mean, you want me to travel around with a ghost of her? How would the real Alice feel when I came back? Don’t tell me that you’re going to put my wife on a mousebrain. You’re just offering me delirium. I’ve got to keep my wits out there with space and time rolling in big waves around me. I’m going to be crazy enough, just as it is. Don’t forget, I’ve been out there before. Getting back to a real Alice is going to be one of my biggest reality factors. It will help me to get home.” At this point, Suzdal’s own voice took on the note of intimate inquiry, as he added, “Don’t tell me that a lot of cruiser commanders ask to go flying around with imaginary wives. That would be pretty nasty, in my opinion. Do many of them do it?”
“We’re here to get you loaded on board ship, not to discuss what other officers do or do not do. Sometimes we think it good to have a female companion on the ship with the commander, even if she is imaginary. If you ever found anything among the stars which took on female form, you’d be mighty vulnerable to it.”
“Females, among the stars? Bosh!” said Suzdal.
“Strange things have happened,” said the official.
“Not that,” said Suzdal. “Pain, craziness, distortion, panic without end, a craze for food—yes, those I can look for and face. They will be there. But females, no. There aren’t any. I love my wife. I won’t make females 50 up out of my own mind. After all, I’ll have the turtle-people aboard, and they will be bringing up their young. I’ll have plenty of family life to watch and to take part in. I can even give Christmas parties for the young ones.” “What kind of parties are those?” asked the official. “Just a funny little ancient ritual that I heard about from an Outer Pilot. You give all the young things presents, once every local-subjective year.”
“It sounds nice,” said the official, his voice growing tired and final. “You still refuse to have a cube-woman on board. You wouldn’t have to activate her unless you really needed her.”
“You haven’t flown, yourself, have you?” asked Suzdal.
It was the official’s turn to flush. “No,” he said, flatly. “Anything that’s in that ship, I’m going to think about. I’m a cheerful sort of man, and very friendly. Let me just get along with my turtle-people. They’re not lively, but they are considerate and restful. Two thousand more years, local-subjective, is a lot of time. Don’t give me additional decisions to make. It’s work enough, running the ship. Just leave me along with my turtle-people. I’ve gotten along with them before.”
“You, Suzdal, are the commander,” said the loading official. “We’ll do as you say.”
“Fine,” smiled Suzdal. “You may get a lot of queer types on this run, but I’m not one of them.”
The two men smiled agreement at one another and the loading of the ship was completed.
The ship itself was managed by turtle-men, who aged very slowly so that while Suzdal coursed the outer rim of-the galaxy and let the thousands of years—local count— go past while he slept in his frozen bed, the turtle-men rose generation by generation, trained their young to work the ship, taught the stories of the earth that they would never see again, and read the computers correctly, to awaken Suzdal only when there was a need for human intervention and for human intelligence. Suzdal awakened from time to time, did his work and then went back. He felt that he had been gone from earth only a few months.
Months indeed! He had been gone more than a subjective ten-thousand years, when he met the siren capsule.
It looked like an ordinary distress capsule. The kind of
thing that was often shot through space to indicate some complication of the destiny of man among the stars. This capsule had apparently been flung across an immense distance, and from the capsule Suzdal got the story of Arachosia.
The story was false. The brains of a whole planet—the wild genius of a malevolent, unhappy race—had been dedicated to the problem of ensnaring and attracting a normal pilot from Old Earth. The story which the capsule sang conveyed the rich personality of a wonderful woman with a contralto voice. The story was true, in part. The appeals were real, in part. Suzdal listened to the story and it sank, like a wonderfully orchestrated piece of grand opera, right into the fibers of his brain. It would have been different if he had known the real story.
Everybody now knows the real story of Arachosia, the bitter terrible story of the planet which was a paradise, which turned into a hell. The story of how people got to be something different from people. The story of what happened way out there in the most dreadful place among the stars.
He would have fled if he knew the real story. He couldn’t understand what we now know:
Mankind could not meet the terrible people of Arachosia without the people of Arachosia following them home and bringing to mankind a grief greater than grief, a craziness worse than mere insanity, a plague surpassing all imaginable plagues. The Arachosians had become unpeople, and yet, in their innermost imprinting of their personalities, they remained people. They sang songs that exalted their own deformity and that praised themselves for what they had so horribly become, and yet, in their own songs, in their own ballads, the organ tones of the refrain rang out,
And I mourn Man!
They knew what they were and they hated themselves. Hating themselves they pursued mankind.
Perhaps they are still pursuing mankind.
The Instrumentality has by now taken good pains that the Arachosians will never find us again, has flung networks of deception out along the edge of the galaxy to make sure that those lost ruined people cannot find us. 52
The Instrumentality knows and guards our world and all the other worlds of mankind against the deformity which has become Arachosia. We want nothing to do with Arachosia. Let them bunt for us. They won’t find us.
How could Suzdal know that?
This was the first time someone had met the Arachosians, and he met the Arachosians, and he met them only with a message in which an elfin voice sang the elfin song of ruin, using perfectly clear words in the old common tongue to tell a story so sad, so abominable, that mankind has not forgotten it yet. In its essence the story was very simple. This is what Suzdal heard, and what people have learned ever since then.
The Arachosians were settlers. Settlers could go out by sail-ship, trailing behind them the pods. That was the first way.
Or they could go out by planoform ship, ships piloted by skillful men, who went into space-two and came out again and found man.
Or for very long distances indeed, they could go out in the new combination. Individual pods packed into an enormous shell-ship, a gigantic version of Suzdal’s own ship. The sleepers frozen, the machines waking, the ship fired to and beyond the speed of light, flung below space, coming out at random and homing on a suitable target. It was a gamble, but brave men took it. If no target was found, their machines might -course space forever, while the bodies, protected by freezing as they were, spoiled bit by bit, and while the dim light of life went out in the individual frozen brains.
The shell-ships were the answers of mankind to an over-population, which neither the old planet Earth nor its daughter planets could quite respond to. The shell-ships took the bold, the reckless, the romantic, the willful, sometimes the criminals out among the stars. Mankind lost track of these ships, over and over again. The advance explorers, the organized Instrumentality, would stumble upon human beings, cities and cultures, high or low, tribes or families, where the shell-ships had gone on, far, far beyond the outermost limits of mankind where the instruments of search had found an earth-like planet, and the shellship, like some great dying insect, had dropped to the planet, awakened its people, broken open, and destroyed itself with its delivery of newly re-bom men and women, to settle a world.
Arachosia looked like a good world to the men and women who came to it. Beautiful beaches, with cliffs like endless rivieras rising above. Two bright big moons in the sky, a sun not too far away. The machines had pre-tested the atmosphere and sampled the water, had already scattered the forms of old earth life into the atmosphere and in the seas so that as the people awakened they heard the singing of earth birds and they knew that earth fish had already been adapted to the oceans and flung in, there to multiply. It seemed a good life, a rich life. Things went well.
Things went very, very well for the Arachosians.
This is the truth.
This was, thus far, the story told by the capsule.
But here they diverged.
The capsule did not tell the dreadful, pitiable truth about Arachosia. It invented a set of plausible lies. The voice that came telepathically out of the capsule was that of a mature, warm happy female—some woman of early middle age with a superb speaking contralto.
Suzdal almost fancied that he talked to it, so real was the personality. How could he know that he was being beguiled, trapped?
It sounded right, really right.
“And then,” said the voice, “the Arachosian sickness has been hitting us. Do not land. Stand off. Talk to us. Tell us about medicine. Our young die, without reason. Our farms are rich, and the wheat here is more golden than it was on earth, the plums more purple, the flowers whiter. Everything does well—except people.
“Our young die …” said the womanly voice, ending in a sob.
“Are there any symptoms?” thought Suzdal, and almost as though it had heard his question, the capsule went on.
“They die of nothing. Nothing which our medicine can test, nothing which our science can show. They die. Our population is dropping. People, do not forget us! Man, whoever you are, come quickly, come now, bring help! But for your own sake, do not land. Stand off-planet and view us through screens so that you can take word back to the Home of Man about the lost children of mankind among the strange and outermost stars!”
Strange, indeed!
The truth was far stranger, and very ugly indeed.
Suzdal was convinced of the truth of the message. He had been selected for the trip because he was good-natured, intelligent, and brave: this appeal touched all three of his qualities.
Later, much later, when he was arrested, Suzdal was asked, “Suzdal, you fool, why didn’t you test the message? You’ve risked the safety of all the mankinds for a foolish appeal!”
“It wasn’t foolish!” snapped Suzdal. “That distress capsule had a sad, wonderful womanly voice and the story checked out true.”
“With whom?” said the investigator, flatly and dully.
Suzdal sounded weary and sad when he replied to the point. “It checked out with my books. With my knowledge.” Reluctantly he added “And with my own judgment… .”
“Was your judgment good?” said the investigator.
“No,” said Suzdal, and let the single word hang on the air as though it might be the last word he would ever speak.
But it was Suzdal himself who broke the silence when he added, “Before I set course and went to sleep, I activated my security officers in cubes and had them check the story. They got the real story of Arachosia, all right. They cross-ciphered it out of patterns in the distress capsule and they told me the whole real story very quickly, just as I was waking up.”
