Cordwainer Smith - The complete Instrumentality of Mankind

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THE REDISCOVERY OF MAN
The Complete Instrumentality of Mankind Stories of Cordwainer Smith
* marks major stories
Introductions and commentaries by J.J. Pierce
file 1
Introductions 2
No, No, Not Rogov! 15
War No. 81-Q 29
Mark Elf 37
The Queen of the Afternoon 47
*Scanners Live In Vain 67
file 2
*The Lady Who Sailed the Soul 2
When the People Fell 20
Think Blue, Count Two 29
The Colonel Came Back From the Nothing-At-All 51
*The Game of Rat and Dragon 58
The Burning of the Brain
70
From Gustible's Planet 77
Himself In Anachron
82
*The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal 88
Golden the Ship Was -- Oh! Oh! Oh! 100
file 3
*The Dead Lady of Clown Town 2
*Under Old Earth
file 4
Drunkboat 2
*Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons 25
*Alpha Ralpha Boulevard 42
*The Ballad of Lost C'mell 64
*A Planet Called Shayol 79
file 5
Quest of the Three Worlds (Casher O'Neill series)
Introduction 2
On the Gem Planet 5
On the Storm Planet
On the Planet
Three To a Given Star
Down To a Sunless Sea
1st Introduction (from The Best of Cordwainer Smith)
Cordwainer Smith: The Shaper of Myths
In an obscure and short-lived magazine called Fantasy Book, there
appeared in 1950 a story called "Scanners Live in Vain."
No one had ever heard of the author, Cordwainer Smith. And it
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appeared for a time that he would never be heard from again in the world of
science fiction.
But "Scanners Live in Vain" was a story that refused to die, and its
republication in two anthologies encouraged the elusive Smith to begin
submitting to other SF markets.
Today, be is recognized as one of the most creative SF writers of
modern times. But, paradoxically, be is one of the least known or
understood. Until shortly before his death, his very identity was a closely
guarded secret.
Not that Dr. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913-66) was ashamed of
science fiction. He was proud of the field, and had even boasted once to the
Baltiiiiore Sitn that SF had attracted more Ph.D's than any other branch of
fiction.
But he was a sensitive, emotional writer.-- and reluctant to become
involved with his readers -- to be forced to "explain" himself in a way that
might destroy the spontaneity of his work.
Beyond that, he prohably enjoyed being a man of mystery, as elusive
as some of the allusions in his stories. Smith was a mythmaker in science
fiction, and perhaps it takes a somewhat mythical figure to create true
myths.
A new acquaintance unsure of the number of syllables, in Dr.
Linebarger's name would be answered by a significant gesture to the three
Chinese characters on his tie. Only later would he learn the characters
stood for Lin Bah Loh, or "Forest of Incandescent Bliss" -- the name given
him as godson to Sun Yat Sen, founder of the Chinese Republic.
Dr. Linebarger's life was certainly severel cuts above the ordinary.
At the age of seventeen, he negotiated a silver loan for China on behalf of
his father -- Sun's legal advisor and one of the financiers of the
Revolution of 1911. He later bccime a colonel in U.S. Army Intelligence,
despite partial blindness and general ill health -- he once shocked guests
it a dinner party by downing a "cocktail" of hydrochloric acid to aid his
digestion.
Although born in Milwaukee -- his father winted to be sure that as a
natural-born citizen his son would be eligible for the presidency --
Linebarger spent his forniative 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.
When World War II broke out, he used his position on the Operations
Planning and Intelligence Board to draft a set of qualifications for in
intelligence operative in China that only he could meect -- so off he went
to Chungking as an Army lieutenant. By war's end, he was a major.
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 Brisish 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 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.
But even in childhood, his thoughts had turned to fiction --
including science fiction. Like many budding SF writers, he discovered the
genre at an early age. Since he was living in Germany at the time, he added
to the familiar classics of Verne, Wells, Doyle and others such works as
Alfred Doblin's Giganten to his list of favorites.
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He was only fifteen when his first SF story, "War No. 81-Q," was
published. But unfortunately, no one seems to remember where. According to
his widow, Genevieve, the story was bylined Anthony Bearden -- a pseudonym
later used for poetry published in little magazines. Two examples of this
poetry appear in Norstrilia, also published by Ballantine.
During the 1930s, Dr. Linebarger began keeping a secret notebook --
part personal diary, part story ideas. Then in 1937, he began writing
serious stories, mostly set in ancient or modern China, or in contemporary
locales elsewhere. None were ever published, but their range -- some use the
same Chinese narrative techniques that later turn up in SF works like "The
Dead Lady of Clown Town" -- is remarkable.
While back in China, he took on the name Felix C. Forrest -- a pun
on his Chinese name -- for two psychological novels mailed home in
installments and published after the war. Ria and Carola were remarkable
novels for their feminine viewpoint and for the subtle interplay of cultural
influences behind the interplay of character. Under the name of Carmichael
Smith, Dr. Linebarger wrote Atomsk, a spy thriller set in the Soviet Union.
But his career in science fiction came about almost by accident. He
may have submitted some stories to Amazing while still in China during the
war; but if so, nothing ever came of them. It was during idle hours at the
Pentagon after his return that he turned an idea that had been bothering him
into "Scanners Live in Vain."
The story was almost written in vain, for it was rejected by every
major publication in the field. Fantasy Book, to which it was submitted five
years later as a last resort, did not even pay for it. Although he had
written another Cordwaiiier Smith story, "Himself in Anachron" (recently
adapted by his widow for Harlan Ellison's .anthology Last Dangerous Visions)
in 1946, he may well have despaired of any recognition in the genre.
But there were readers who took notice. Never mind that Fantasy Book
had never before published a worthwhile story, never mind that the author
was a total unknown. "Scanners Live in Vain" got to them.
"Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from
anger..."
It was more than just the bizarre situation that attracted attention
-- it was the way it was treated. From the opening lines, readers became
part of Martel's universe -- a universe as real as our own, for all its
strangeness. They were intrigued, and no doubt mystified.
What was this Instrumentality of Mankind, which even the Scanners
held in awe? What were the Beasts and the manshonyaggers and the Unforgiven?
One could sense their importance to the hero, but beyond that -- only
wonder. Smith clearly knew more about this universe than he let on -- more,
in fact, than he ever would let on. His universe had been forming in his
mind at least since the time he wrote his first published story in 1928, and
it took further shape in his secret notebook during the 1930s and 1940s.
Already in "War No. 81-Q," his widow recalls, he had made reference
to the Instrumentality -- that all-powerful elite hierarchy that was to
become central to the Cordwainer Smith stories twenty years and more latcr.
Even the word may have had far more significance than it would ippeir at
first.
Linebarger had been raised in a High Church Episcopalian family --
his grandfather was a minister -- and was devoutly religious. The word
"Instrumentality" has a distinct religious connotation, for in Roman
Catholic and Episcopalian theology the priest performing the sacraments is
the "instrumentality" of God Himself.
At the time he wrote "War No. 81-Q," young Linebarger was also
having a fling with Communism -- a tendency his father eventually cured by
sending him on a trip to the Soviet Union for his eighteenth birthday. But
he remained struck by the sense of vocation and conviction of historical
destiny to which Communism appealed.
In Cordwainer Smith's epic of the future, the Instrumentality of
Mankind has the hallmarks of both a political elite and a priesthood. Its
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hegemony is that, not of the galactic empire so typical of less imaginative
SF, but of something far more subtle and pervasive -- at once political and
spiritual. Its lords see themselves not as mere governors or bureaucrats or
politicians, but as in struments of human destiny itself.
Linebarger's sense of religion infused his work in other ways, and
not merely in references to the Old Strong Religion and the Holy Insurgency
of Norstrilia and other late works.
There is, for example, the emphasis on quasi-religious ritual --
compare, for instance, the Code of the Scanners to the Saying of the Law in
H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau. Furthermore, there is the strong sense
of vocation expressed by the Scanners, sailors, pinlighters, Go-captains and
the lords themselves -- something very spiritual, even if not expressed in
religious terms.
But Linebarger was no mere Christian apologist who used SF as a
vehicle for Orthodox religious messages like those of, say, C.S. Lewis. He
was also a social and psychological thinker, whose experience with diverse
cultures gave him peculiar and seemingly contradictory ideas about human
nature and morality.
He could, for example, admire the samurai values of fantasy, courage
and honor, and he showed his appreciation of Oriental art and literature in
the furnishing of his home -- and his fiction. Yet he was so horrified by
the tradition-bound fatalism and indifference to human life he found in the
Orient that he became obsessed with the sanctity of life on any terms, as
something too precious to sacrifice to iny concept of honor or morality --
Oriental or Occidental.
While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrendor of thousands
of Chinese troops who considered it shameful to give up their arms. He
drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could surrender by shouting the
Chinese words for "love," "duty" "humanity" and "virue" -- words that
happened, when pronounced in that order, to sound like "I surrender" in
English. He considered this act to be the single most worthwhile thing he
had done in his life.
Linebarger's attitude is reflected in the apparently casual manner
in which matters such as brainwashing are treated in his SF. For the Hunter
and Elaine at the end of "The Dead Lady of Clown Town," that is a more
humane, if less "honorable" fate than death. Throughout the Smith canon,
life is usually placed before honor, no matter how much the Oriental codes
of honor and formality may permeate the hybrid culture of the future.
Yet Linebarger felt there was a meaning to life beyond mere living.
"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," his
Australian friend Arthur Burns once remarked; and it is this exploration of
human -- and more than human destiny that gives Smith's work its unity.
Behind the invented cultures, behind the intricacies of plot and the
joy or suffering of characters, there is Smith the philosopher, striving in
a manner akin to that of Teilhard de Chardin (although there is no evidence
of any direct influence) to reconcile science and religion, to create a
synthesis of Christianity and evolution that will shed light on the nature
of man and the meaning of history.
The stories in this volume, collected in their proper order for the
first time, form part of a vast historical cycle taking place over some
fifteen thousand years. They are based on material from Linebarger's
original notebook ind a second notebook -- unfortunately lost -- that he
began keeping in the 1950s as new problems began to concern him.
Mankind is still baunted by the Ancient Wars and the Dark Age that
followed as this volume opens with "Scanners Live in Vain." Other stories,
one unpublished, hint at millennia of historical stasis, during which the
true men sought inhuman perfection behind the eicctronic pales of their
cities, while leaving the Wild to survivors of the Ancient World -- the
Beasts, manshonyaggers and Unforgiven.
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Into this future came the VomAcht sisters, daughters of a German
scientist who placed them in satellites in suspended animation at the close
of World War II. Rcturning to Earth in the latter days of the Dark Age, they
bring the "gift of vitality" -- a concept that seems to have meant to Smith
what the "life force" meant to Bergson and Shaw -- back to mankind. Founders
of the Vomact family, they represent a force in human nature that can be
either good or evil, but is perhaps ultimately beyond either, and a
necessary means for the working out of human destiny through evolution.
The dual nature of the Vomacts and the force they represent is
symbolized in the origin of their name: "Acht" is a German word with a
double meaning: "proscribed" or "forbidden" and "care" or "attention." And
the Vomacts alternate as outlaws and benefactors, throughout the Smith epic.
But the gift of vitality sets a new cycle of history in motion --
the heroic age of the Scanners, pinlighters and Go-captains. What stands out
in these early stories is the starkness of the emotional impact -- the
impact of strange new experiences and relationships, whether of the
telepathic symbiosis of men and partners in "The Game of Rat and Dragon" or
the woman become a functioning part of her spacecraft in "The Lady Who
Sailed the Soul."
Some of Linebarger's own experiences went into his work. Captain Wow
was the name of one of his cats at his Washington home when he wrote "The
Game of Rat and Dragon" at a single sitting one day in 1954. Cat Melanie was
later to inspire C'mell, heroine of the underpeople, who were created by men
from mere inimals. Then, too, Linebarger's frequent stays in hospitals,
dependent on medical technology, give him a feel for the linkage of man and
machine.
But in "The Burning of the Brain," we already begin to see signs of
the Pleasure Revolution, a trend which Linebarger detested in his own time
and which he saw putting an end to the heroic age in his imagined future.
Near immortality -- thanks to the santaclara drug, or stroon, grown in
Norstrilia -- makes life less desperate, but also less meaningful.
Real experience gives way to synthetic experience; in "Golden the
Ship Was, Oh, 0h, Oh" (as in "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul," which was also
coauthored by Genevieve Linebarger), the hero seeks pleasure directly from
an electric current -- and only an epoch-making crisis affords him a chance
to see that there is a better way.
Under the ruthless benevolence of the Instrumentality, a bland
utopia takes shape. Men are freed of the fear of death, the burden of labor,
the risks of the unknown -- but deprived of hope and freedom. The
underpeople, created to do the labor of mankind, are more human than their
creators. The gift of vitality, seemingly, has been lost, and history come
to a stop.
In these stories, it is the underpeople -- and the more enlightened
lords of the Instrumentility who heed them -- who hold the salvation of
humanity in their hands. In "The Dead Lady of Clown Town," the despised,
animal-derived workers and robots must teach humans the meaning of humanity
in order to free mankind from its seeming euphoria.
Lord Jestocost is inspired by the martyrdom of the dog-woman D'joan;
and Santuna is transformed by the experiences in "Under Old Earth" into the
Lady Alice More. Together, they become the architects of the Rediscovery of
man -- bringing back freedom, risk, uncertainty and even evil.
Parallelling these events are glimpses of other parts of the
universe of the Instrumentality. In "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons," we
learn why Old North Australia is the most heavily defended planet in the
galaxy; but Viola Sidcrea is just as strange. And where else in science
fiction is there a world like "A Planet Nanied Shayol," where a daring
conception in biological engineering is wedded to a classic vision of Hell?
Oriental narrative techniques especially in "Te Dead Lady of Clown
Town" and "The Ballad of Lost C'mell" are prominent in the later stories. So
is the sense of myth, whereby the just-mentioned stories are supposedly
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explanations of popular legends. But just how much of what is told "Under
Old Earth" ever really took place?
Smith creates a sense of immense time having passed. To Paul and
Virginia, newly freed by the Rediscovery of Man in "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,"
our own age is lost in the dim past and is seen only through layer upon
layer of half-forgotten history. Smith's effect has rarely been duplicated
-- the first half of Robert Silverberg's Nightwings is perhaps the most
successful approximation.
Smith's universe remains infinitely greater than our knowledge of it
-- we shall never know what empire once conquered Earth and brought tribute
up that fabulous boulevard; nor the identity of the Robot, the Rat and the
Copt, whose visions are referred to in Norstrilia and elsewhere; nor what
ultimately becomes of the cat-people created in "The Crime and Glory of
Commander Suzdal."
Then there is that unfulfilled sense of anticipation -- where was
Smith leading us? What comes after the Rediscovery of Man and the liberation
of the underpeople by C'mell? Linebarger gives hints of a common destiny for
man and underpeople -- some religious fulfillment of history, perhaps. But
they remain hints.
The work of Cordwainer Smith will always retain its enigmas. But
that is part of its appeal. In reading his stories, we are caught up in
experiences as real as life itself-and just as mysterious.
-- Jonn J. Pierce
Berkeley Heights, New Jersey
January, 1975
2nd Introduction (from The Rediscovery of Man)
It's trite to say, of course, but there has never been another
science fiction writer like Cordwainer Smith.
Smith was never a very prolific SF writer, as evidenced by the fact
that nearly all of his short fiction can be encompassed in a single omnibus
volume like this. He was never a very popular writer, as evidenced by the
fact that most of his work has usually been out of print. Nor has he been a
favorite of the critics, as evidenced by the fact that few citations to his
SF can be found in journals like Science Fiction Studies.
It is impossible to fit Smith's work into any of the neat categories
that appeal to most readers or critics. It isn't hard science fiction, it
isn't military science fiction, it isn't sociological science fiction, it
isn't satire, it isn't surrealism, it isn't post-modernism. For those who
have fallen in love with it over the years, however, it is some of the most
powerful science fiction ever written. It is the kind of fiction that, as
C.S. Lewis once wrote, becomes part of the reader's personal iconography.
You may have already read the story of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger
(1913-66), the man behind Cordwainer Smith, who grew up in China, Japan,
Germany, and France, and became a soldier, diplomat, and respected authority
on Far Eastern affairs. He was the son of Paul Myron Wentworth Linebarger, a
retired American judge who helped finance the Chinese revolution of 1911 and
became the legal advisor to Sun Yat-sen. It was Sun himself who gave young
Paul his Chinese name Lin Bah Loh, or "Forest of Incandescent Bliss." (His
father had been dubbed Lin Bah Kuh, or "Forest of 1,000 Victories.") In
time, the younger Linebarger became the confidant of Chiang Kai-shek, and,
like his father, wrote about China. Still later, he was in demand at the
Department of Asiatic Politics at Johns Hopkins University, where he shared
his own expertise with members of the diplomatic corps. And that isn't
counting his years as an operative in China during World War II, or as a
"visitor to small wars thereafter, from which he became perhaps the world's
leading authority on psychological warfare.
He wrote the book on psychological warfare-under his own name, as
with all his non-fiction. But he was very shy about his fiction. He wrote
two novels, Ria and Carola, both unusual due to their female protagonists
and international settings, under the name Felix C. Forrest, a play on his
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Chinese name. But when people found out who "Forrest" was, he couldn't write
any more. He tried a spy thriller, Atomsk, as Carmichael Smith, but was
found out again. He even submitted a manuscript for another novel under his
wife's name, but nobody was fooled. Although Linebarger wrote at least
partial drafts of several other novels, he was never able to interest
publishers, and it appears he never really tried that hard. He might have
had a distinguished, if minor, career as a novelist -- it is an odd
coincidence that Herma Briffault, widow of Robert Briffault, to whose novels
of European politics Frederik PohI would later compare Ria and Carola, had
in fact read Carola in manuscript; only she compared it to the work of Jean
Paul Sartre!
Yet it isn't only a matter of happenstance, of opportunities
elsewhere denied, that Paul M.A. Linebarger became a science fiction writer.
In fact, he was writing SF before he wrote anything else. From his early
teens, he turned out an incredible volume of juvenile SF, under titles like
"The Books of Futurity" -- some bad imitations of Edgar Rice Burroughs,
others clumsily satirical or incorporating Chinese legends or folklore. One
of these efforts contained, as an imaginary "review," the genesis of "The
Fife of Bodidharma," published over 20 years later in its final form. At the
age of 15, he even had an SF story published -- "War No. 81-Q," which
appeared in The Adjutant, the official organ of his high school cadet corps
in Washington, DC, in June 1928. Because he used the name of his cousin,
Jack Bearden, for the hero, Bearden decided to get back with a story of his
own, "The Notorious C39"; but Bearden's story actually made it into Amazing
Stories. More than 30 years later, Linebarger rewrote "War No. 8l-Q" for his
first collection of Cordwainer Smith SF stories, You Will Never Be the Same,
but it didn't make the cut.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Linebarger continued to write short
fiction -- some SF, some fantasy, some contemporary or Chinese historical.
The manuscripts, including those of the earliest Cordwainer Smith stories,
were eventually bound in a red-leather volume now in the hands of a daughter
living in Oregon. Most of these stories were apparently never submitted for
publication, but Linebarger did send two of the fantasies -- "Alauda Dalma"
and "The Archer and the Deep" -- to Unknown in 1942. (If you don't recognize
the titles, it is because Unknown turned them down: the latter didn't fare
any better with Judith Merril in 1961.) Then in 1945, recently returned from
China and facing idle hours in some sort of desk job at the Pentagon, he
wrote another of the manuscripts included in the bound volume, the one that
was to put him on the literary map -- "Scanners Live in Vain."
You doubtless know that it was "Scanners" which introduced the
Instrumentality of Mankind, although only as a shadowy background to the
bizarre tale of the cyborged space pilots who are dead though they live, and
would rather kill than live with a new discovery that has made their
sacrifice and its attendant rituals obsolete. Yet however shadowy, that
background -- with its references to the Beasts and the manshonyaggers and
the Unforgiven, and the implications of some terrible dark age from which
humanity has only just emerged -- suggests a long period of gestation for
the story and, possibly, the existence of earlier stories with the same
background. Only there is no evidence of any such thing; to the contrary, at
least some of the background appears to date back to a note Linebarger wrote
to himself January 7, 1945, for a projected story, "The Weapons," set in a
"future or imaginary world" in which humanity must always be on guard
against old weapons, "perpetual and automatic," surviving from some old and
forgotten war. In that note, we can see the genesis of the manshonyaggers,
the German killing machines (from menschenjager, or hunter of men) first
referred to in "Scanners Live in Vain."
Can Paul Linebarger have thought up an entire future history in the
time it took to write "Scanners Live in Vain"? It is probably a lot more
complicated than that; it may well be that a number of ideas that had been
floating around in his head for years, without ever being set down on paper,
suddenly gelled when he had the inspiration for the story. It didn't take
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long for the universe of "Scanners Live in Vain" to take shape, however, for
the story had been written within a few months of that note for "The
Weapons." On July 18, 1945, it was submitted to John W. Campbell, Jr. at
Astounding Science Fiction -- who rejected it as "too extreme." That proved
to be the first of several rejections, until "Scanners Live in Vain" finally
found a home at Fantasy Book in 1950. The only related story that Linebarger
wrote before then was "Himself in Anachron," dated 1946. Never published in
a magazine, it was later slated (like the revised "War No. 81-Q") for
inclusion in You Will Never Be the Same, under the title "My Love Is Lost in
the Null of Nought" or "She Lost Her Love in the Null of Nought," but
Linebarger wasn't able to deliver a revised manuscript in time. Although he
may have written such a revision at a later date, none can be found in his
literary papers, and the present version was adapted by his widow Genevieve
from the 1946 draft.
The career of Cordwainer Smith might have been stillborn, with only
one published and one unpublished story to show for it. Fortunately, Smith
soon had a few champions, most notably Frederik PohI, who didn't have the
foggiest idea who the author was but knew a stellar performance when he saw
one. By including "Scanners Live in Vain" in an anthology, Pohl rescued it
from the obscurity of Fantasy Book, and that led a few years later to
Linebarger's submission of "The Game of Rat and Dragon" to Galaxy: the rest,
as they say, is history. A great deal may not be told until the hoped-for
publication of a biography of Linebarger by Alan C. Elms, who has done
exhaustive interviews with his friends and family as well as researching all
his papers. Among other things, Elms has the low-down on how it happened
that the young Linebarger knew L. Ron Hubbard. (It wasn't a mere fluke that
one of Linebarger's own unpublished works was Pathematics, his revisionist
take on Hubbard's Dianetics.)
It is important to understand some crucial facts about his life that
have previously been overlooked: for example, although he was a devout
Episcopalian late in life, he was only a nominal Methodist (his father's
church) at the time he wrote "Scanners Live in Vain." He originally joined
the Episcopal Church as a compromise with his second wife, who was raised as
a Catholic. Only about 1960 did he become a believer in any deep sense, and
only then did the religious imagery and Christian message become strong in
his SF works. The change in spiritual orientation that maLks his later work
is thus a genuine change, not merely a change of emphasis. There are also
all kinds of details about the life of Paul M.A. Linebarger, his family and
friends, that bear on his work -- as we shall see when Elms' researches bear
fruit.
The strictly literary history, however, is fascinating in itself. In
spite of such major gaps as the loss of Linebarger's main notebook for the
Instrumentality saga in 1965, and the apparent disappearance of the
dictabelts on which his widow recalled that he had recorded notes for or
even drafts of stories never committed to paper, it is possible to
reconstruct a lot of this literary history from Linebarger's literary
papers, now at the University of Kansas (although some, including more
juvenilia, and such oddities as an early poem titled "An Ode to My Buick,"
mistakenly ended up at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the repository
for papers relating to his military, diplomatic, and scholarly career).
Among these literary papers are any number of variant (mostly partial)
manuscripts for stories already familiar to us, false starts for stories
never completed, notebooks with ideas for stories never written, and
rliscellaneous correspondence.
The story of the Instrumentality saga has been told before: the
Ancient Wars, the Dark Age, the renaissance of humanity in the time of the
Scanners, the romantic age of exploration by sailship, the discoveries of
planoforming and stroon that bind together the myriad worlds and usher in a
bland utopia of ease and plenty, the twin revolutions of the underpeople's
Holy Insurgency and the Instrumentality's Rediscovery of Man. The stories in
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this volume tell it all better than any summary can. Smith had it all worked
out, of course; he even offered to supply a chronology for You Will Never Be
the Same, which would undoubtedly have been far superior to the one I
supplied for The Best of Cordwainer Smith for Del Rey Books. But the saga
was never conceived as a seamless whole, however much Linebarger worked to
develop the overall framework that would embrace both his original
conception and his later one.
His working method seemed to be to develop several strands of
thought and weave them together, or perhaps let them weave themselves
together. This is first evident in the genesis of "Scanners," in which ideas
ofa future dark age, automatic weapons, the Vomact family, the Scanners
themselves, and even the Instrumentality suddenly come together. Subsequent
stories developed that background. Both "Mark Elf" and the original
two-chapter fragment of "The Queen of the Afternoon" backtracked to the end
of the Dark Age (the latter made no mention of the underpeople in that
version, nor did it hint at any Christian themes). "The Game of Rat and
Dragon" took the saga forward to the heroic age of planoforming, and the
vision of the far future in "No, No, Not Rogov!" hinted at a secular
apotheosis for human history. Both "When the People Fell" and "The Burning
of the Brain" are snapshots of different periods in the same history, as
well as compeHing stories in themselves.
In 1958, Linebarger began writing a novel called Star-Craving Mad,
which was his first attempt at what eventually became Norstrilia. But the
initial version of the story is far different from that we know today. There
is no Rediscovery of Man, nor any Holy Insurgency. Lord Jestocost and
"Arthur McBan CLI" both figure here, but in different guises: Jestocost is
simply a cruel but shrewd tyrant, whose name ("cruelty" in Russian) has none
of the ironic meaning we now associate with it; while McBan is a man of
action who comes to the aid of the underpeople only for the love of C'mell.
And the rebellion of the underpeople is nothing more than an uprising of the
oppressed, like the French Revolution to which it is compared. The
E'telekeli appears, but as a future Jacobite rather than a spiritual sage.
Linebarger was developing an ironic theme, but it had to do with true men
having inadvertently created a race of supermen in the form of the
underpeople.
Linebarger apparently wasn't satisfied with the way the story was
going, for it was abandoned after a few chapters. Several other false starts
over the next year failed to get Star-Craving Mad moving again, and a severe
illness which Genevieve Linebarger later remembered as the genesis of
Norstrilia may have actually been the genesis of a spiritual rebirth that
changed the entire thrust of the Instrumentality saga. As in the case of
"Scanners Live in Vain," however, Paul Linebarger was evidently thinkmg
along several lines at once before they all came together.
Even in the original draft of Star-Craving Mad there is one hint of
the Rediscovery of Man, but it remains only a hint. C'mell's father
C'mackintosh is not an athlete, but a "licensed robber" at a "savage park"
in Mississippi: such parks are a means for humanity to "keep the peace
within its own troubled and complex soul," but they are apparently a
longstanding institution, not a revolutionary development. In an early false
start for "The Ballad of Lost C'mell," Lord Redlady has unleashed ancient
diseases on Earth, but not as part of a spiritual revolution: the idea to
discourage invasions by developing immunities among Earthmen to patho-gens
that can then be used as weapons against outsiders. In another false start,
for a story called "Strange Men and Doomed Ladies," Lord Jestocost proposes
to end the policy of euthanasia for "spoiled" people such as the crippled,
the sickly, the stupid, and even the overly-brilliant: "Let them be, and let
us see." But this seems to be an isolated idea, unrelated to any grand plan.
The false start for "The Ballad of Lost C'mell" ("Where Is the Which
of the What She Did") also opens with a prologue that recounts the entire
history of Earth. Our times are the Second Ancient Days; they came before
the First Ancient Days, but were discovered later. The First Ancient Days
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came either before or after the Long Nothing (a summary of the chronology
contradicts the narrative). Civilization was restored by the Dwellers, who
brought the cities back into shape around the ruins left by the Daimoni,
including Earthport Gulosan. It was during the time of the Dwellers that
humanity discovered Space3 and overcame the rule of the perfect men. But
that was all long before the time of C'mell. The Originals, invaders from
space, overcame the Dwellers, but were later overthrown by an alliance of
true men and underpeople. Then came the Bright, who "did things with music
and dance, with picture and word, which had never been done before." They
also built the peace square at An-fang, and (another contradiction) had
something to do with the "fall of the perfect men and the temporary rule of
Lord Redlady." Then came a time of troubles, the High Cruel Years, followed
by another invasion by the Pure ("men of earth who had been gone too long"),
who still rule Earth at the time of the story.
Although the Dwellers may be the true men of "Mark Elf," and the
rule of the Bright may have something to do with the Bright Empire mentioned
in Norstrilia, nothing in the canon ~f stories we know seems to relate to
the Originals or the High Cruel Years or the Pure. Linebarger was apparently
reshaping his vision of the far future almost to the moment he wrote "Alpha
Ralpha Boulevard," in which it all crystallized. (The "Where Is the Which of
the What She Did" fragment has the narrator recalling that "the most blessed
of computers burned out on Alpha Ralpha Boulevard," but assigns this to the
long-past age of the Dwellers.) During the same period, Linebarger was
reshaping "The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All," a
then-unpublished story about the discovery of planoforming, into the story
of Artyr Rambo's mystical experience in Space3. The story went through
several partial drafts (one titled "Archipelagoes of Stars"), which used
different approaches capturing the poetic experience of Arthur Rimbaud. One
version quotes Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre itself, as a prophecy of Space3, and
asks, "How knew it he, all the fine points of it -- He an ancient was!"
Another draft opens, "They put him into a box, a box. They shot him to the
end of time... Then, when it was all over, people discovered that another
man, also a singer, had written it all down in the Most Ancient World." The
final version, of course, is far more subtle; it was typical of Linebarger
to make his stories less straightforward and more allusive in such details.
Although most of the background for the Instrumentality saga was
contained in a notebook that Linebarger accidentally left in a restaurant in
Rhodes in 1965, another notebook begun during the last year of his life
contains ideas for several stories that were never written. Because they are
notes to himself, they can be as cryptic as the lyrics of a David Lynch
song. But some are clear enough, as far as they go, including those for "The
Robot, the Rat, and the Copt," which was originally conceived as a single
story but later was a cycle of four stories, like the Casher O'Neill series.
We know from references in published stories that the Robot, the Rat, and
the Copt were to bring back a Christian revelation from Space3, but the
notes don't add much to that, except to confirm that this new dimension is
where Christ "had really been and always was experienced." The rat was to
have been named R'obert, however, and there was to have been a Coptic
planet. (A list of Coptic names -- including Shenuda or "God Lives" --
appear in an entirely different notebook, a ring binder titled "New Science
Fiction by Cordwainer Smith," which also includes most of the false starts
and first drafts already referred to.)
Some of the ideas seem relatively trivial: a forlorn suitor has the
crushed head of his true love, killed in an accident, regrown on Shayol, and
reimplanted with her personality; a Go-Captain who has a mysterious (but
unspecified) experience in space is treated as a madman on his conservative
homeworld. Another story was to have been set on a remote, prosperous world
where one-parents gamble on the futures of their newly-issued children; this
would evidently have shed more light on the sequential system of
child-raising by one-parents, two-parents, and three-parents alluded to in
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摘要：

file:///F|/rah/Cordwainer%20Smith/Smith,%20Cordwainer%20-%20...ality%20of%20Mankind%20-THE%20REDISCOVERY%20OF%20MAN%201.txtTHEREDISCOVERYOFMANTheCompleteInstrumentalityofMankindStoriesofCordwainerSmith*marksmajorstoriesIntroductionsandcommentariesbyJ.J.Piercefile1Introductions2No,No,NotRogov!15WarN...

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