Cordwainer Smith - The Best of Cordwainer Smith

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THE BEST OF CORDWAINER SMITH
Cordwainer Smith
Edited, with Introduction and Notes , By J. J. Pierce
[22 jul 2002—proofed for #bookz]
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 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, he is recognized as one of the most creative SF writers of modern times. But, paradoxically,
he 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 Baltimore Sun 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 probably 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 several 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 became a colonel in U.S. Army
Intelligence, despite partial blindness and general ill health—he once shocked guests at a dinner party by
downing a "cocktail" of hydrochloric acid to aid his digestion.
Although born in Milwaukee—his father wanted to be sure that as a natural-born citizen his son
would be eligible for the presidency—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.
When World War II broke out, he used his position on the Operations Planning and Intelligence
Board to draft a set of qualifications for an intelligence operative in China that only he could meet-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 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.
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.
He was only fifteen when his first SF story, "War No. 8i-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 19305, 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 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 Cordwainer 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, hut
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. 8i-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 later. Even the word may have had far more significance than it would appear 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. 8i-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 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 instruments 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 any
concept of honor or morality—Oriental or Occidental.
While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrender of thousands of Chinese troops who
considered it shameful to give up their arms. He drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could come
forward waving their guns and shouting Chinese words like "love," "virtue" and "humanity"—words that
just happened, when pronounced in the right order, to sound like "I surrender" in English. He considered
this seemingly cynical 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 and a second notebook—unfortunately lost—that he began keeping in the
1950s as new problems began to concern him.
Mankind is still haunted 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 electronic pales of their cities, while leaving the
Wild to survivors of the Ancient World—the Beasts, manshonyaggers and Unforgiven.
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. Returning 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 under-people, who were created by men
from mere animals. Then, too, Linebarger's frequent stays in hospitals, dependent on medical technology,
gave 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! Oh! Oh!" (as in
"The Lady Who Sailed The Soul," which was also co-authored 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 or 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 Instrumentality 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.
Paralleling 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 Siderea is just as strange. And where else in science fiction is there a world like "A
Planet Named Shayol," where a daring conception in biological engineering is wedded to a classic vision
of Hell?
Oriental narrative techniques, especially in "The 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 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 men 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.
—John J. Pierce
Berkeley Heights, New Jersey January, 1975
SCANNERS LIVE IN VAIN
Here, humanity is still emerging from the Dark Age that is more fully described in the stories
"Queen of the Afternoon" and "Mark Elf" and which reveal the "Beasts" to be mutated
intelligent animals and the "manshonyaggers" to be old German killing machines—taken from
Menschenj tiger, or "hunter of men." At the time Smith wrote the story in 1945, there was an
abandoned shop in his neighborhood called The Little Cranch—what "cranch" meant, he had no
idea—but he used the word anyway. The "ancient lady" ancestress of Vomact was one of the
VomAcht sisters mentioned in Dark Age stories—which one, we don't know.
Mantel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger. He stamped across the room
by judgment, not by sight. When he saw the table hit the floor, and could tell by the expression on Luci's
face that the table must have made a loud crash, he looked down to see if his leg was broken. It was not.
Scanner to the core, he had to scan himself. The action was reflex and automatic. The inventory included
his legs, abdomen, chestbox of instruments, hands, arms, face and back with the mirror. Only then did
Martel go back to being angry. He talked with his voice, even though he knew that his wife hated its
blare and preferred to have him write.
"I tell you, I must cranch. I have to cranch. It's my worry, isn't it?" When Luci answered, he saw
only a part of her words as he read her lips: "Darling ... you're my husband ... right to love you ...
dangerous ... do it ... dangerous ... wait ... "
He faced her, but put sound in his voice, letting the blare hurt her again: "I tell you, I'm going to
cranch."
Catching her expression, he became rueful and a little tender: "Can't you understand what it means
to me? To get out of this horrible prison in my own head? To be a man again—hearing your voice,
smelling smoke? To feel again—to feel my feet on the ground, to feel the air move against my face? Don't
you know what it means?"
Her wide-eyed worrisome concern thrust him back into pure annoyance. He read only a few words
as her lips moved: " ... love you ... your own good ... don't you think I want you to be human? ... your
own good ... too much ... he said ... they said ... "
When he roared at her, he realized that his voice must be particularly bad. He knew that the sound
hurt her no less than did the words: "Do you think I wanted you to marry a scanner? Didn't I tell you
we're almost as low as the habermans? We're dead, I tell you. We've got to be dead to do our work.
How can anybody go to the up-and-out? Can you dream what raw space is? I warned you. But you
married me. All right, you married a man. Please, darling, let me be a man. Let me hear your voice, let
me feel the warmth of being alive, of being human. Let me!"
He saw by her look of stricken assent that he had won the argument. He did not use his voice again.
Instead, he pulled his tablet up from where it hung against his chest. He wrote on it, using the pointed
fingernail of his right forefinger—the talking nail of a scanner—in quick cleancut script: Pls, drlng, whrs
crnching wire?
She pulled the long gold-sheathed wire out of the pocket of her apron. She let its field sphere fall to
the carpeted floor. Swiftly, dutifully, with the deft obedience of a scanner's wife, she wound the cranching
wire around his head, spirally around his neck and chest. She avoided the instruments set in his chest.
She even avoided the radiating scars around the instruments, the stigmata of men who had gone up and
into the out. Mechanically he lifted a foot as she slipped the wire between his feet. She drew the wire
taut. She snapped the small plug into the high-burden control next to his heart-reader. She helped him to
sit down, arranging his hands for him, pushing his head back into the cup at the top of the chair. She
turned then, full-face toward him, so that he could read her lips easily. Her expression was composed.
She knelt, scooped up the sphere at the other end of the wire, stood erect calmly, her back to him.
He scanned her, and saw nothing in her posture but grief which would have escaped the eye of anyone
but a scanner. She spoke: he could see her chest-muscles moving. She realized that she was not facing
him, and turned so that he could see her lips.
"Ready at last?"
He smiled a yes.
She turned her back to him again. (Luci could never bear to watch him go under the wire.) She
tossed the wire-sphere into the air. It caught in the force-field, and hung there. Suddenly it glowed. That
was all. All—except for the sudden red stinking roar of coming back to his senses. Coming back, across
the wild threshold of pain.
When he awakened, under the wire, he did not feel as though he had just cranched. Even though it
was the second cranching within the week, he felt fit. He lay in the chair. His ears drank in the sound of
air touching things in the room. He heard Luci breathing in the next room, where she was hanging up the
wire to cool. He smelt the thousand and one smells that are in anybody's room: the crisp freshness of the
germ-burner, the sour-sweet tang of the humidifier, the odor of the dinner they had just eaten, the smells
of clothes, furniture, of people themselves. All these were pure delight. He sang a phrase or two of his
favorite song:
"Here's to the haberman, Up-and-out!
"Up-oh!-and out-oh!-up-and-out! ..
He heard Luci chuckle in the next room. He gloated over the sounds of her dress as she swished to
the doorway.
She gave him her crooked little smile. "You sound all right. Are you all right, really?"
Even with this luxury of senses, he scanned. He took the flash-quick inventory which constituted his
professional skill. His eyes swept in the news of the instruments. Nothing showed off scale, beyond the
nerve compression hanging in the edge of Danger. But he could not worry about the nerve-box. That
always came through cranching. You couldn't get under the wire without having it show on the
nerve-box. Some day the box would go to Overload and drop back down to Dead. That was the way a
haberman ended. But you couldn't have everything. People who went to the up-and-out had to pay the
price for space.
Anyhow, he should worry! He was a scanner. A good one, and he knew it. If he couldn't scan
himself, who could? This cranching wasn't too dangerous. Dangerous, but not too dangerous.
Luci put out her hand and ruffled his hair as if she had been reading his thoughts, instead of just
following them: "But you know you shouldn't have! You shouldn't!"
"But I did!" He grinned at her.
Her gaiety still forced, she said: "Come on, darling, let's have a good time. I have almost everything
there is in the icebox—all your favorite tastes. And I have two new records just full of smells. I tried them
out myself, and even I liked them. And you know me—"
"Which?"
"Which what, you old darling?"
He slipped his hand over her shoulders as he limped out of the room. (He could never go back to
feeling the floor beneath his feet, feeling the air against his face, without being bewildered and clumsy. As
if cranching was real, and being a haberman was a bad dream. But he was a haberman, and a scanner.
"You know what I meant, Luci. The smells, which you have. Which one did you like, on the record?"
"Well-l-l," said she, judiciously, "there were some lamb chops that were the strangest things—"
He interrupted: "What are lambtchots?"
"Wait till you smell them. Then guess. I'll tell you this much. It's a smell hundreds and hundreds of
years old. They found out about it in the old books."
"Is a lambtchot a beast?"
"I won't tell you. You've got to wait," she laughed, as she helped him sit down and spread his tasting
dishes before him. He wanted to go back over the dinner first, sampling all the pretty things he had eaten,
and savoring them this time with his now—living lips and tongue.
When Luci had found the music wire and had thrown its sphere up into the force-field, he reminded
her of the new smells. She took out the long glass records and set the first one into a transmitter.
"Now sniff!"
A queer, frightening, exciting smell came over the room. It seemed like nothing in this world, nor like
anything from the up-and-out. Yet it was familiar. His mouth watered. His pulse beat a little faster; he
scanned his heartbox. (Faster, sure enough.) But that smell, what was it? In mock perplexity, he grabbed
her hands, looked into her eyes, and growled:
"Tell me, darling! Tell me, or I'll eat you up!"
"That's just right!"
"What?"
"You're right. It should make you want to eat me. It's meat."
"Meat. Who?"
"Not a person," said she, knowledgeably, "a Beast. A Beast which people used to eat. A lamb was
a small sheep—you've seen sheep out in the Wild, haven't you?—and a chop is part of its
middle—here!" She pointed at her chest.
Martel did not hear her. All his boxes had swung over toward Alarm, some to Danger. He fought
against the roar of his own mind, forcing his body into excess excitement. How easy it was to be a
scanner when you really stood outside your own body, haberman-fashion, and looked back into it with
your eyes alone. Then you could manage the body, rule it coldly even in the enduring agony of space. But
to realize that you were a body, that this thing was ruling you, that the mind could kick the flesh and send
it roaring off into panic! That was bad.
He tried to remember the days before he had gone into the haberman device, before he had been
cut apart for the up-and-out. Had he always been subject to the rush of his emotions from his mind to his
body, from his body back to his mind, confounding him so that he couldn't scan? But he hadn't been a
scanner then.
He knew what had hit him. Amid the roar of his own pulse, he knew. In the nightmare of the
up-and-out, that smell had forced its way through to him, while their ship burned off Venus and the
habermans fought the collapsing metal with their bare hands. He had scanned then: all were in Danger.
Chestboxes went up to Overload and dropped to Dead all around him as he had moved from man to
man, shoving the drifting corpses out of his way as he fought to scan each man in turn, to clamp vises on
unnoticed broken legs, to snap the sleeping valve on men whose instruments showed they were
hopelessly near Overload. With men trying to work and cursing him for a scanner while he, professional
zeal aroused, fought to do his job and keep them alive in the great pain of space, he had smelled that
smell. It had fought its way along his rebuilt nerves, past the haberman cuts, past all the safeguards of
physical and mental discipline. In the wildest hour of tragedy, he had smelled aloud. He remembered it
was like a bad cranching, connected with the fury and nightmare all around him. He had even stopped his
work to scan himself, fearful that the first effect might come, breaking past all haberman cuts and ruining
him with the pain of space. But he had come through. His own instruments stayed and stayed at Danger,
without nearing Overload. He had done his job, and won a commendation for it. He had even forgotten
the burning ship.
All except the smell.
And here the smell was all over again—the smell of meat-with-fire.
Luci looked at him with wifely concern. She obviously thought he had cranched too much, and was
about to haberman back. She tried to be cheerful: "You'd better rest, honey."
He whispered to her: "Cut-off-that-smell."
She did not question his word. She cut the transmitter. She even crossed the room and stepped up
the room controls until a small breeze flitted across the floor and drove the smells up to the ceiling.
He rose, tired and stiff. (His instruments were normal, except that heart was fast and nerves still
hanging on the edge of Danger.) He spoke sadly:
"Forgive me, Luci. I suppose I shouldn't have cranched. Not so soon again. But darling, I have to
get out from being a haberman. How can I ever be near you? How can I be a man—not hearing my own
voice, not even feeling my own life as it goes through my veins? I love you, darling. Can't I ever be near
you?"
Her pride was disciplined and automatic: "But you're a scanner!"
"I know I'm a scanner. But so what?"
She went over the words, like a tale told a thousand times to reassure herself: "You are the bravest
of the brave, the most skillful of the skilled. All mankind owes most honor to the scanner, who unites the
Earths of mankind. Scanners are the protectors of the habermans. They are the judges in the up-and-out.
They make men live in the place where men need desperately to die. They are the most honored of
mankind, and even the chiefs of the Instrumentality are delighted to pay them homage!"
With obstinate sorrow he demurred: "Luci, we've heard that all before. But does it pay us back—"
" 'Scanners work for more than pay. They are the strong guards of mankind.' Don't you remember
that?"
"But our lives, Luci. What can you get out of being the wife of a scanner? Why did you marry me?
I'm human only when I cranch. The rest of the time—you know what I am. A machine. A man turned
into a machine. A man who has been killed and kept alive for duty. Don't you realize what I miss?"
"Of course, darling, of course—"
He went on: "Don't you think I remember my childhood? Don't you think I remember what it is to be
a man and not a haberman? To walk and feel my feet on the ground? To feel a decent clean pain instead
of watching my body every minute to see if I'm alive? How will I know if I'm dead? Did you ever think of
that, Luci? How will I know if I'm dead?"
She ignored the unreasonableness of his outburst. Pacifyingly, she said: "Sit down, darling. Let me
make you some kind of a drink. You're overwrought."
Automatically, he scanned. "No I'm not! Listen to me. How do you think it feels to be in the
up-and-out with the crew tied-for-space all around you? How do you think it feels to watch them sleep?
How do you think I like scanning, scanning, scanning month after month, when I can feel the pain of
space beating against every part of my body, trying to get past my haberman blocks? How do you think I
like to wake the men when I have to, and have them hate me for it? Have you ever seen habermans
fight—strong men fighting, and neither knowing pain, fighting until one touches Overload? Do you think
about that, Luci?" Triumphantly he added: "Can you blame me if I cranch, and come back to being a
man, just two days a month?"
"I'm not blaming you, darling. Let's enjoy your cranch. Sit down now, and have a drink."
He was sitting down, resting his face in his hands, while she fixed the drink, using natural fruits out of
bottles in addition to the secure alkaloids. He watched her restlessly and pitied her for marrying a
scanner; and then, though it was unjust, resented having to pity her.
Just as she turned to hand him the drink, they both jumped a little as the phone rang. It should not
have rung. They had turned it off. It rang again, obviously on the emergency circuit. Stepping ahead of
Luci, Martel strode over to the phone and looked into it. Vomact was looking at him.
The custom of scanners entitled him to be brusque, even with a senior scanner, on certain given
occasions. This was one.
Before Vomact could speak, Martel spoke two words into the plate, not caring whether the old man
could read lips or not:
"Cranching. Busy."
He cut the switch and went back to Luci.
The phone rang again.
Luci said, gently, "I can find out what it is, darling. Here, take your drink and sit down."
"Leave it alone," said her husband. "No one has a right to call when I'm cranching. He knows that.
He ought to know that."
The phone rang again. In a fury, Martel rose and went to the plate. He cut it back on. Vomact was
on the screen. Before Martel could speak, Vomact held up his talking nail in line with his heartbox.
Martel reverted to discipline:
"Scanner Martel present and waiting, sir."
The lips moved solemnly: "Top emergency."
"Sir, I am under the wire."
"Top emergency."
"Sir, don't you understand?" Martel mouthed his words, so he could be sure that Vomact followed.
"I ... am ... under ... the ... wire. Unfit ... for ... Space!"
Vomact repeated: "Top emergency. Report to Central Tie-in."
"But, sir, no emergency like this—"
"Right, Martel. No emergency like this, ever before. Report to Tiein." With a faint glint of kindliness,
Vomact added: "No need to decranch. Report as you are."
This time it was Martel whose phone was cut out. The screen went gray.
He turned to Luci. The temper had gone out of his voice. She came to him. She kissed him, and
rumpled his hair. All she could say was,
"I'm sorry."
She kissed him again, knowing his disappointment. "Take good care of yourself, darling. I'll wait."
He scanned, and slipped into his transparent aircoat. At the window he paused, and waved. She
called, "Good luck!"
As the air flowed past him he said to himself, "This is the first time I've felt flight in—eleven years.
Lord, but it's easy to fly if you can feel yourself live!"
Central Tie-in glowed white and austere far ahead. Martel peered. He saw no glare of incoming
ships from the up-and-out, no shuddering flare of space-fire out of control. Everything was quiet, as it
should be on an off-duty night.
And yet Vomact had called. He had called an emergency higher than space. There was no such
thing. But Vomact had called it.
When Martel got there, he found about half the scanners present, two dozen or so of them. He lifted
the talking finger. Most of the scanners were standing face to face, talking in pairs as they read lips. A
few of the old, impatient ones were scribbling on their tablets and then thrusting the tablets into other
people's faces. All the faces wore the dull dead relaxed look of a haberman. When Martel entered the
room, he knew that most of the others laughed in the deep isolated privacy of their own minds, each
thinking things it would be useless to express in formal words. It had been a long time since a scanner
showed up at a meeting cranched.
Vomact was not there: probably, thought Martel, he was still on the phone calling others. The light of
the phone flashed on and off; the bell rang. Martel felt odd when he realized that of all those present, he
was the only one to hear that loud bell. It made him realize why ordinary people did not like to be around
groups of habermans or scanners. Martel looked around for company.
His friend Chang was there, busy explaining to some old and testy scanner that he did not know why
Vomact had called. Martel looked farther and saw Parizianski. He walked over, threading his way past
the others with a dexterity that showed he could feel his feet from the inside, and did not have to watch
them. Several of the others stared at him with their dead faces, and tried to smile. But they lacked full
muscular control and their faces twisted into horrid masks. (Scanners usually knew better than to show
expression on faces which they could no longer govern. Martel added to himself, I swear I'll never smile
again unless I'm cranched.)
Parizianski gave him the sign of the talking finger. Looking face to face, he spoke:
"You come here cranched?"
Parizianski could not hear his own voice, so the words roared like the words on a broken and
screeching phone; Martel was startled, but knew that the inquiry was well meant. No one could be
better-natured than the burly Pole.
"Vomact called. Top emergency."
"You told him you were cranched?"
"Yes."
"He still made you come?"
"Then all this—it is not for Space? You could not go up-and-out? You are like ordinary men?"
"That's right."
"Then why did he call us?" Some pre-haberman habit made Parizianski wave his arms in inquiry. The
hand struck the back of the old man behind them. The slap could be heard throughout the room, but only
Martel heard it. Instinctively, he scanned Parizianski and the old scanner, and they scanned him back.
Only then did the old man ask why Martel had scanned him. When Martel explained that he was under
摘要：

THEBESTOFCORDWAINERSMITHCordwainerSmithEdited,withIntroductionandNotes,ByJ.J.Pierce[22jul2002—proofedfor#bookz]CORDWAINERSMITH:THESHAPEROFMYTHSInanobscureandshort-livedmagazinecalledFantasyBook,thereappearedin1950astorycalled"ScannersLiveinVain."Noonehadeverheardoftheauthor,CordwainerSmith.Anditappe...

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