We the Underpeople (2 page)

"The man is not just a science-fiction writer. He is a wanderer out of the future, I have no doubt. It scares me to contemplate his work or his presence among us."

I was not, of course, serious about my notion in that book review of four decades ago that Smith was a time-traveler masquerading as a science-fiction writer. The bit of legitimate biographical information I provided about him was accurate enough, but very much on the sketchy side, as we discovered in 1966 when news came of the author's death.

He was only 53, and had packed several lifetimes worth of experience into that short span. At last it was revealed that Paul M.A. Linebarger, born in Milwaukee in 1913, was the son of an American judge who had helped to finance the Chinese revolution of 1911 and was the legal advisor to its leader, Sun Yat-sen. The younger Linebarger had grown up in China, Japan, Germany, and France, and by the age of 21 had earned a doctorate in political science at Johns Hopkins University. (Some of the strangeness of his fictional technique, apparently, was derived from his knowledge of the Chinese language and classical Chinese methods of storytelling.) Between 1930 and 1936 he had been a legal consultant to the Chinese government under Chiang Kai-shek, and during World War II, still based in China, he served as a lieutenant colonel in U.S. Army Intelligence. (This was the Pentagon connection about which we had heard.) After the war he became a professor of Asian politics at Johns Hopkins, but also found time to serve as an advisor to the British forces in Malaya and to the U.S. Eighth Army in Korea, and to write a definitive textbook on psychological warfare, severaal espionage thrillers, and the science-fiction works for which he will always be remembered by connoisseurs of the field.

Researchers have discovered that Linebarger had been writing science fiction from boyhood on, his first known story, "War No.81-Q," appeared in his high-school magazine in 1928, when he was fifteen. Evidently he went on writing fantasy and science fiction stories in great abundance throughout the 1930s and 1940s, though none of them has ever been published and they can be presumed to be lost—and then, in 1945, came "Scanners Live in Vain," which would so spectacularly launch his career as a writer five years later.

A brilliant man, an extraordinary writer, Death took him much too soon, just as he was reaching his creative peak, and we will never know what glories of the imagination he would have given us if he had been granted another fifteen or twenty years. But at least we have the thirty or so science-fiction stories and the one novel that he did manage to produce in his short, busy life.

I was instrumental in arranging for the publication of the very first Cordwainer Smith short-story collection in 1963, a book to which the publisher gave the title
You Will Never Be the Same
. It is as apt a description of the effect Cordwainer Smith's fiction has on its readers as has ever been coined.

—Robert Silverberg
July 2002

1

You already know the end—the immense drama of the Lord Jestocost, seventh of his line, and how the cat-girl C'mell initiated the vast conspiracy. But you do not know the beginning, how the first Lord Jestocost got his name, because of the terror and inspiration which his mother, Lady Goroke, obtained from the famous real-life drama of the dog-girl D'joan. It is even less likely that you know the other story—the one behind D'joan. This story is sometimes mentioned as the matter of the "nameless witch," which is absurd, because she really had a name. The name was "Elaine," an ancient and forbidden one.

Elaine was a mistake. Her birth, her life, her career were all mistakes. The ruby was wrong. How could that have happened?

Go back to An-fang, the Peace Square at An-fang, the Beginning Place at An-fang, where all things start. Bright it was. Red Square, dead square, clear square, under a yellow sun.

This was Earth Original, Manhome itself, where Earthport thrusts its way up through hurricane clouds that are higher than the mountains.

An-fang was near a city, the only living city with a pre-atomic name. The lovely meaningless name was Meeya Meefla, where the lines of ancient roadways, untouched by a wheel for thousands of years, forever paralleled the warm, bright, clear beaches of the Old South East.

The headquarters of the People Programmer was at An-fang, and there the mistake happened:

A ruby trembled. Two tourmaline nets failed to rectify the laser beam. A diamond noted the error. Both the error and the correction went into the general computer.

The error assigned, on the general account of births for Fomalhaut III, the profession of "lay therapist, female, intuitive capacity for correction of human physiology with local resources." On some of the early ships they used to call these people
witch-women,
because they worked unaccountable cures. For pioneer parties, these lay therapists were invaluable; in settled post-Riesmannian societies, they became an awful nuisance. Sickness disappeared with good conditions, accidents dwindled down to nothing, medical work became institutional.

Who wants a witch, even a good witch, when a thousand-bed hospital is waiting with its staff eager for clinical experience . . . and only seven out of its thousand beds filled with real people? (The remaining beds were filled with lifelike robots on which the staff could practice, lest they lose their morale. They could, of course, have worked on underpeople—animals in the shape of human beings, who did the heavy and the weary work which remained as the
caput mortuum
of a really perfected economy—but it was against the law for animals, even when they were underpeople, to go to a human hospital. When underpeople got sick, the Instrumentality took care of them—in slaughterhouses. It was easier to breed new underpeople for the jobs than it was to repair sick ones. Furthermore, the tender, loving care of a hospital might give them ideas. Such as the idea that they were people. This would have been bad, from the prevailing point of view. Therefore the human hospitals remained almost empty while an underperson who sneezed four times or who vomited once was taken away, never to be ill again. The empty beds kept on with the robot patients, who went through endless repetitions of the human patterns of injury or disease.) This left no work for witches, bred and trained.

Yet the ruby had trembled; the program had indeed made a mistake; the birth-number for a "lay therapist, general, female, immediate use" had been ordered for Fomalhaut III.

Much later, when the story was all done down to its last historic detail, there was an investigation into the origins of Elaine. When the laser had trembled, both the original order and the correction were fed simultaneously into the machine. The machine recognized the contradiction and promptly referred both papers to the human supervisor, an actual man who had been working on the job for seven years.

He was studying music, and he was bored. He was so close to the end of his term that he was already counting the days to his own release. Meanwhile he was rearranging two popular songs. One was
The Big Bamboo,
a primitive piece which tried to evoke the original magic of man. The other was about a girl,
Elaine, Elaine,
whom the song asked to refrain from giving pain to her loving swain. Neither of the songs was important; but between them they influenced history, first a little bit and then very much.

The musician had plenty of time to practice. He had not had to meet a real emergency in all his seven years. From time to time the machine made reports to him, but the musician just told the machine to correct its own errors, and it infallibly did so.

On the day that the accident of Elaine happened, he was trying to perfect his finger work on the guitar, a very old instrument believed to date from the pre-space period. He was playing
The Big Bamboo
for the hundredth time.

The machine announced its mistake with an initial musical chime. The supervisor had long since forgotten all the instructions which he had so worrisomely memorized seven long years ago. The alert did not really and truly matter, because the machine invariably corrected its own mistakes whether the supervisor was on duty or not.

The machine, not having its chime answered, moved into a second-stage alarm. From a loudspeaker set in the wall of the room, it shrieked in a high, clear human voice, the voice of some employee who had died thousands of years earlier:

"Alert, alert! Emergency. Correction needed. Correction needed!"

The answer was one which the machine had never heard before, old though it was. The musician's fingers ran madly, gladly over the guitar strings and he sang clearly, wildly back to the machine a message strange beyond any machine's belief:

 
Beat, beat the Big Bamboo!
Beat, beat, beat the Big Bamboo for me . . . !
 

Hastily the machine set its memory banks and computers to work, looking for the code reference to "bamboo," trying to make that word fit the present context. There was no reference at all. The machine pestered the man some more.

"Instructions unclear. Instructions unclear. Please correct."

"Shut up," said the man.

"Cannot comply," stated the machine. "Please state and repeat, please state and repeat, please state and repeat."

"Do shut up," said the man, but he knew the machine would not obey this. Without thinking, he turned to his other tune and sang the first two lines twice over:

 
Elaine, Elaine,
go cure the pain!
Elaine, Elaine,
go cure the pain!
 

Repetition had been inserted as a safeguard into the machine, on the assumption that no real man would repeat an error. The name "Elaine" was not correct number code, but the fourfold emphasis seemed to confirm the need for a "lay therapist, female." The machine itself noted that a genuine man had corrected the situation card presented as a matter of emergency.

"Accepted," said the machine.

This word, too late, jolted the supervisor away from his music.

"Accepted what?" he asked.

There was no answering voice. There was no sound at all except for the whisper of slightly-moistened warm air through the ventilators.

The supervisor looked out the window. He could see a little of the blood-black red color of the Peace Square of An-fang; beyond lay the ocean, endlessly beautiful and endlessly tedious.

The supervisor sighed hopefully. He was young. "Guess it doesn't matter," he thought, picking up his guitar.

(Thirty-seven years later, he found out that it did matter. The Lady Goroke herself, one of the Chiefs of the Instrumentality, sent a Subchief of the Instrumentality to find out who had caused D'joan. When the man found that the witch Elaine was the source of the trouble, she sent him on to find out how Elaine had gotten into a well-ordered universe. The supervisor was found. He was still a musician. He remembered nothing of the story. He was hypnotized. He still remembered nothing. The subchief invoked an emergency and Police Drug Four ("clear memory") was administered to the musician. He immediately remembered the whole silly scene, but insisted that it did not matter. The case was referred to Lady Goroke, who instructed the authorities that the musician be told the whole horrible, beautiful story of D'joan at Fomalhaut—the very story which you are now being told—and he wept. He was not punished otherwise, but the Lady Goroke commanded that those memories be left in his mind for so long as he might live.)

The man picked up his guitar, but the machine went on about its work.

It selected a fertilized human embryo, tagged it with the freakish name "Elaine," irradiated the genetic code with strong aptitudes for witchcraft, and then marked the person's card for training in medicine, transportation by sail-ship to Fomalhaut III, and release for service on the planet.

Elaine was born without being needed, without being wanted, without having a skill which could help or hurt any existing human being. She went into life doomed and useless.

It is not remarkable that she was misbegotten. Errors do happen. Remarkable was the fact that she managed to survive without being altered, corrected, or killed by the safety devices which mankind has installed in society for its own protection.

Unwanted, unused, she wandered through the tedious months and useless years of her own existence. She was well fed, richly clothed, variously housed. She had machines and robots to serve her, underpeople to obey her, people to protect her against others or against herself, should the need arise. But she could never find work; without work, she had no time for love; without work or love, she had no hope at all.

If she had only stumbled into the right experts or the right authorities, they would have altered or re-trained her. This would have made her into an acceptable woman; but she did not find the police, nor did they find her. She was helpless to correct her own programming, utterly helpless. It had been imposed on her at An-fang, way back at An-fang, where all things begin.

The ruby had trembled, the tourmaline failed, the diamond passed unsupported. Thus, a woman was born doomed.

2

Much later, when people made songs about the strange case of the dog-girl D'joan, the minstrels and singers had tried to imagine what Elaine felt like, and they had made up
The Song of Elaine
for her. It is not authentic, but it shows how Elaine looked at her own life before the strange case of D'joan began to flow from Elaine's own actions:

 
Other women hate me.
Men never touch me.
I am too much me.
I'll be a witch!
 
Mama never towelled me.
Daddy never growled me.
Little kiddies grate me.
I'll be a bitch!
 
People never named me.
Dogs never shamed me.
Oh, I am a such me!
I'll be a witch.
 
I'll make them shun me.
They'll never run me.
Could they even stun me?
I'll be a witch.
 
Let them all attack me.
They can only rack me.
Me—I can hack me.
I'll be a witch.
 
Other women hate me.
Men never touch me.
I am too much me.
I'll be a witch.