Cordwainer Smith - The Planet Buyer

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THE PLANET BUYER
a science-fiction novel by
CORDWAINER SMITH
For Ted,
my own true wife, with love
THE PLANET BUYER
A PYRAMID BOOK-Published… October 1964
A shorter version of this book appeared in Galaxy Science
fiction for April, 1964, under the title: "The Boy Who Bought
Old Earth"
Copyright, © 1964 by Cordwainer Smith
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
PYRAMID BOOKS are published by Pyramid Publications,
Inc. 444 Madison Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10022, U.S.A.
Table of Contents
THEME AND PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE: At the Gate of the Garden of Death
CHAPTER TWO: The Trial
CHAPTER THREE: Anger of the Onseck
CHAPTER FOUR: The Old Broken Treasures in the Gap
CHAPTER FIVE: The Quarrel at the Dinner Table
CHAPTER SIX: The Palace of the Governor of Night
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Eye Upon the Sparrow
CHAPTER EIGHT: FOE Money, SAD Money
CHAPTER NINE: Traps, Fortunes and Watchers
CHAPTER TEN: The Nearby Exile
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Hospitality and Entrapment
CHAPTER TWELVE: The High Sky Flying
EPILOGUE AND CODA
Theme and Prologue
Story, place and time—these are the essentials.
1
The story is simple. There was a boy who bought the planet Earth. We
know that, to our cost. It only happened once, and we have taken pains
that it will never happen again. He came to Earth, got what he wanted,
and got away alive, in a series of very remarkable adventures. That's the
story.
2
The place? That's Old North Australia. What other place could it be?
Where else do the farmers pay ten million credits for a handkerchief, five
for a bottle of beer? Where else do people lead peaceful lives, untouched by
militarism, on a world which is booby-trapped with death and things
worse than death? Old North Australia has stroon—the santaclara
drug—and more than a thousand other planets clamor for it. But you can
get stroon only from Norstrilia—that's what they call it, for short—because
it is a virus which grows on enormous, misshapen sheep. The sheep were
taken from Earth to start a pastoral system; they ended up as the greatest
of imaginable treasures. The simple farmers became simple billionaires,
but they kept their farming ways. They started tough and they got
tougher. People get pretty mean if you rob them and hurt them for almost
three thousand years. They get obstinate. They avoid strangers, except for
sending out spies and a very occasional tourist. They don't mess with
other people, and they're death, death inside out and turned over twice, if
you mess with them.
Then one of their kids showed up on Earth and bought it. The whole
place, lock, stock and underpeople.
That was a real embarrassment for Earth.
And for Norstrilia, too.
If it had been the two governments, Norstrilia would have collected all
the eye-teeth on earth and sold them back at compound interest. That's
the way Norstrilians do business. Or they might have said, "Skip it,
cobber. You can keep your wet old ball. We've got a nice dry world of our
own." That's the temper they have. Unpredictable.
But a kid had bought Earth, and it was his.
Legally he had the right to pump up the Sunset Ocean, shoot it into
space, and sell water all over the inhabited galaxy.
He didn't.
He wanted something else.
The Earth authorities thought it was girls, so they tried to throw girls
at him of all shapes, sizes, smells and ages— all the way from young ladies
of good family down to dog-derived undergirls who smelled of romance all
the time, except for the first five minutes after they had had hot antiseptic
showers. But he didn't want girls. He wanted postage stamps.
That baffled both Earth and Norstrilia. The Norstrilians are a hard
people from a harsh planet, and they think highly of property. (Why
shouldn't they? They have most of it.) A story like this could only have
started in Norstrilia.
3
What's Norstrilia like?
Somebody once singsonged it up, like this:
"Gray lay the land, oh. Gray grass from sky to sky. Not near the weir,
dear. Not a mountain, low or high—only hills and gray gray. Watch the
dappled dimpled twinkles blooming on the star bar.
"That is Norstrilia.
"All the muddy glubbery is gone—all the poverty, the waiting and the
pain. People fought their way away, their way away from monstrous
forms. People fought for hands and noses, eyes and feet, man and woman.
They got it all back again. Back they came from daylight nightmares,
centuries when monstrous men, sucking the water around the pools,
dreamed of being men again. They found it. Men they were again, again,
far away from a horrid when.
"The sheep, poor beasties, did not make it. Out of their sickness they
distilled immortality for man. Who says research could do it? Research,
besmirch! It was a pure accident. Smack up an accident, man, and you've
got it made.
"Beige-brown sheep lie on blue-gray grass while the clouds rush past,
low overhead, like iron pipes ceilinging the world.
"Take your pick of sick sheep, man, it's the sick that pays. Sneeze me a
planet, man, or cough me up a spot of life-forever. If it's barmy there,
where the noddies and trolls like you live, it's too right here.
"That's the book, boy.
"If you haven't seen it, you haven't seen Norstrilia. If you did see it, you
wouldn't believe it. If you got there, you wouldn't get off alive.
"Mother Hilton's littul kittons wait for you down there. Little pets they
are, little little little pets. Cute little things, they say. Don't you believe it.
No man ever saw them and walked away alive. You won't either. That's the
final dash, flash. That's the utter clobber, cobber.
"Charts call the place Old North Australia."
We can suppose that that is what it is like.
4
Time: first century of the Rediscovery of Man.
When C'mell lived.
About the time they polished off Shayol, like wiping an apple on the
sleeve.
Long deep into our own time. Fifteen thousand years after the bombs
went up and the boom came down on Old, Old Earth.
Recent, see?
5
What happens in the story?
Read it.
Who's there?
It starts with Rod McBan—who had the real name of Roderick
Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan. But you can't tell a
story if you call the main person by a name as long as Roderick Frederick
Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan. You have to do what his
neighbors did—call him Rod McBan. The old ladies always said, "Rod
McBan the hundred and fifty-first…" and then sighed. Flurp a squirt at
them, friends. We don't need numbers. We know his family was
distinguished. We know the poor kid was born to troubles.
Why shouldn't he have troubles?
He was born to inherit the Station of Doom.
He almost failed the Garden of Death.
The Onseck was after him.
His father had died out in the dirty part of space, where people never
find nice clean deaths.
When he got in trouble, he trusted his computer.
The computer gambled, and it won Earth.
He went to Earth.
That was history itself—that and C'mell beside him.
At long, long last he got his rights and he came home.
That's the story. Except for the details.
They follow.
CHAPTER ONE: At the Gate of the Garden of
Death
Rod McBan faced the day of days. He knew what it was all about, but he
could not really feel it. He wondered if they had tranquilized him with
half-refined stroon, a product so rare and precious that it was never, never
sold off-planet.
He knew that by nightfall he would be laughing and giggling and
drooling in one of the Dying Rooms, where the unfit were put away to thin
out the human breed, or else he would stand forth as the oldest landholder
on the planet, Chief Heir to the Station of Doom. The farm had been
salvaged by his great32-grandfather who had bought an ice-asteroid,
crashed it into the farm over the violent objections of his neighbors, and
learned clever tricks with artesian wells which kept his grass growing
while the neighbors' fields turned from gray-green to blowing dust. The
McBans had kept the sarcastic old name for their farming station, the
Station of Doom.
By night, Rod knew, the station would be his.
Or he would be dying, giggling his way to death in the killing place
where people laughed and grinned and rollicked about while they died.
He found himself humming a bit of a rhyme that had always been a
part of the tradition of Old North Australia:
We kill to live, and die to grow—
That's the way the world must go!
He'd been taught, bone-deep, that his own world was a very special
world—envied, loved, hated and dreaded across the galaxy. He knew that
he was part of a very special people. Other races and kinds of men farmed
crops, or raised food, or designed machines, and manufactured weapons.
Norstrilians did none of these things. From their dry fields, their sparse
wells, their enormous sick sheep, they refined immortality itself.
And sold it for a high, high price.
Rod McBan walked a little way into the yard. His home lay behind him.
It was a log cabin built out of Daimoni beams—beams uncuttable,
unchangeable, solid beyond all expectations of solidity. They had been
purchased as a matched set thirty-odd planet-hops away and brought to
Old North Australia by photosails. The cabin was a fort which could
withstand even major weapons, but it was still a cabin, simple inside and
with a front yard of scuffed dust. The last red bit of dawn was whitening
into day. Rod knew that he could not go far.
He could hear the women out behind the house, the kinswomen who
had come to barber and groom him for the triumph—or the other.
They never knew how much he knew. Because of his affliction, they had
thought around him for years, counting on his telepathic deafness to be
constant. Trouble was, it wasn't; lots of times he heard things which
nobody intended him to hear. He even remembered the sad little poem
they had about the young people who failed to pass the test for one reason
or another and had to go to the Dying House instead of coming forth as
Norstrilian citizens and fully recognized subjects of
Her-Majesty-the-Queen. (Norstrilians had not had a real queen for some
fifteen thousand years, but they were strong on tradition and did not let
mere facts boggle them.) How did the little poem run, "This is the house of
the long ago… "? In its own gloomy way it was cheerful.
He erased his own footprint from the dust and suddenly he
remembered the whole thing. He chanted it softly to himself:
This is the house of the long ago,
Where the old ones murmur an endless woe,
Where the pain of time is an actual pain,
At the Gate of the Garden of Death
And things once known always come again.
Out in the garden of death, our young
Have tasted the valiant taste of fear,
With muscular arm and reckless tongue,
They have won, and lost, and escaped us here.
This is the house of the long ago.
Those who die young do not enter here,
Those living on know that hell is near,
The old ones who suffer have willed it so.
Out in the garden of death, the old
Look with awe on the young and bold.
It was all right to say that they looked with awe at the young and bold,
but he hadn't met a person yet who did not prefer life to death. He'd heard
about people who chose death—of course he had—who hadn't? But the
experience was third-hand, fourth-hand, fifth-hand.
He knew that some people had said of him that he would be better off
dead, just because he had never learned to communicate telepathically
and had to use old spoken words like outworlders or barbarians.
Rod himself certainly didn't think he would be better dead.
Indeed, he sometimes looked at normal people and wondered how they
managed to go through life with the constant silly chatter of other people's
thoughts running through their minds. In the times that his mind lifted,
so that he could "hier" for a while, he knew that hundreds or thousands of
minds rattled in on him with unbearable clarity; he could even "hier" the
minds that thought they had their telepathic shields up. Then, in a little
while, the merciful cloud of his handicap came down on his mind again
and he had a deep unique privacy which everybody on Old North Australia
should have envied.
His computer had said to him once, "The words hier and spiek are
corruptions of the words hear and speak. They are always pronounced in
the second rising tone of voice, as though you were asking a question
under the pressure of amusement and alarm, if you say the words with
your voice. They refer only to telepathic communications between persons
or between persons and underpeople."
"What are underpeople?" he had asked.
"Animals modified to speak, to understand, and usually to look like
men. They differ from cerebrocentered robots in that the robots are built
around an actual animal mind, but are mechanical and electronic relays,
while underpeople are composed entirely of Earth-derived living tissue."
"Why haven't I ever seen one?"
"They are not allowed on Norstrilia at all, unless they are in the service
of the defense establishments of the Commonwealth."
"Why are we called a Commonwealth, when all the other places are
called worlds or planets?"
"Because you people are subjects of the Queen of England."
"Who is the Queen of England?"
"She was an Earth ruler in the Most Ancient Days, more than fifteen
thousand years ago."
"Where is she now?"
"I said," said the computer, "that it was fifteen thousand years ago."
"I know it," Rod had insisted, "but if there hasn't been any Queen of
England for fifteen thousand years, how can we be her subjects?"
"I know the answer in human words," the reply had been from the
friendly red machine, "but since it makes no sense to me, I shall have to
quote it to you as people told it to me. 'She bloody well might turn up one
of these days. Who knows? This is Old North Australia out here among the
stars and we can dashed well wait for our own Queen.' She might have
been off on a trip when Old Earth went sour." The computer had clucked a
few times in its odd ancient voice and had then said hopefully, in its
toneless voice, "Could you restate that so that I could program it as part of
my memory-assembly?"
"It doesn't mean much to me. Next time I can hier other minds
thinking I'll try to pick it out of somebody else's head."
That had been about a year ago, and Rod had never run across the
answer.
Last night he had asked the computer a more urgent question:
"Will I die tomorrow?"
"Question irrelevant. No answer available."
"Computer!" he had shouted, "you know I love you."
"You say so."
"I started your historical assembly up after repairing you, when that
part had been thinkless for hundreds of years."
"Correct."
"I crawled down into this cave and found the personal controls, where
great14-grandfather had left them when they became obsolete."
"Correct."
"I'm going to die tomorrow and you won't even be sorry."
"I did not say that," said the computer.
"Don't you care?"
"I was not programmed for emotion. Since you yourself repaired me,
Rod, you ought to know that I am the only all-mechanical computer
functioning in this part of the galaxy. I am sure that if I had emotions I
would be very sorry indeed. It is an extreme probability, since you are my
only companion. But I do not have emotions. I have numbers, facts,
language, and memory—that is all."
"What is the probability, then, that I will die tomorrow in the Giggle
Room?"
"That is not the right name. It is the Dying House."
"All right, then, the Dying House."
"The judgment on you will be a contemporary human judgment based
upon emotions. Since I do not know the individuals concerned, I cannot
make a prediction of any value at all."
"What do you think is going to happen to me, computer?"
"I do not really think, I respond. I have no input on that topic."
摘要：

THEPLANETBUYERascience-fictionnovelbyCORDWAINERSMITHForTed,myowntruewife,withloveTHEPLANETBUYERAPYRAMIDBOOK-Published…October1964AshorterversionofthisbookappearedinGalaxySciencefictionforApril,1964,underthetitle:"TheBoyWhoBoughtOldEarth"Copyright,©1964byCordwainerSmithAllRightsReservedPrintedintheUn...

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