The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (40 page)

“Checkmate the king!” said the minister, who disappeared into the mirror and stepped out from it again. He was a bit out of breath.

“It all went off as planned, we see.”

“At Your Majesty’s command. Together we put on pretty fireworks at Operations Base 7, as Your Majesty remembers. Not a stick remained.”

“Yes, we remember. And now, how did you like the whole story, Collins?”

“One can imagine it all very well, Your Majesty.”

“Quite right, especially as we never did have a brother.” The king winked at his minister.

“Especially as Your Majesty never had a brother, as Your Majesty expressly decreed,” returned Collins with a smile.

The king stood up and gave his minister a friendly slap on the shoulder.

“We have made a good job of it, the two of us. We have taken many points into consideration, discarded this one, improved that one, added yet another one. Now the picture is complete. The
last piece of the puzzle has been fitted in. We think it is rather good. What do you say, Collins?”

“Oh yes, good, Your Majesty, very good. When I think of Weisslinger – he was killed plundering a farmhouse, turns into a dollmaker, and becomes a respected citizen of the town . .
.”

“We can afford that fracture. It is insignificant. He had no children, as far as he knew.”

“. . . One day, that is, one night he awakes with a splitting headache and from that time on is like a different person. He can’t put together the simplest clock, is prey to fits of
delirium, becomes addicted to the bottle, gets a thrashing at the Red Ox by the young men of the town because of his sudden overbearing behavior, becomes more and more depraved, and all of this,
mind you, he can foresee, including the bitter end: one day he will have his fill of it, will put a noose around his neck and will make an end to it all.”

“Rather cruel, don’t you think?” put in the king doubtfully.

“Hmm,” said Collins and nodded. “Hideous.”

“But we insist on the sound thrashing at the Red Ox!”

“That he richly deserved, Your Majesty!” smirked the minister.

“We can still grant the poor devil a better fate. But let’s let him struggle for a while before we intervene. Do you see, Collins, that is the best part of our story; we can still
change any piece of it, if something better occurs to us. But now it is black’s move. We shouldn’t underestimate him. After all, he went through the same apprenticeship we did. Let us
wait and see. It would be a pity if the game were already over. At our leisure we will think through all of the possibilities he has in his position. Agreed, Collins?”

“Agreed, Your Majesty.”

They both fell silent and watched the doll as it started an elaborate new dance and tried out the first steps.

“Does Your Majesty permit one last question?”

“But of course, Collins. And we know what is going to come. You are going to say, there is one piece left over.”

“Yes, Your Majesty. The picture is complete, but where does the doll fit in? It is useless; I mean, it has absolutely no purpose in our story as it now stands. It was entirely
unnecessary.”

The king gave a resigned sigh.

“Yes, Collins. You have a good head on your shoulders, but why can’t you see that not everything must have a purpose?”

“But, Your Majesty, the question is justified. Why did Weisslinger go to the trouble of making a doll, if he knew from the start that it would have no – ”

“Good God, Collins! You and your frightful utilitarian reasoning! You still haven’t understood. Do you think we are setting our minds together to solve the problems of the universe
when we make up these stories of ours? All day long we have to grapple with this problem. At least a few hours should remain for us to paint our fantasies in the air and do cerebral gymnastics. And
we often get a good idea out of it, for free, so to speak, if you are so intent on utility!”

The king glared at him and the minister hastened to appease him: “Certainly, Your Majesty.”

“For instance, why do you suppose we made up this story?”

“Out of boredom, perhaps, if I may allow myself to say so, and because Your Majesty delights in the play of thoughts,” suggested the minister doubtfully.

“One could put it that way. Isn’t it wonderful that in our world, which is so entirely oriented to purpose and utility, profit and efficiency, there are still things which seem to
have no purpose or usefulness, because their meaning lies only in the fact that they exist, like the doll in our story? And yet this little doll is delightful – or perhaps it is so for that
very reason.”

Collins nodded.

“I find it quite nice,” he ventured, and pointed to the doll.

“One ought to be able to invent better ones,” answered the king disparagingly. “Let us think of something new, Collins.”

The king brooded and stared at the empty walls as if he were lost in the contemplation of a picture.

The minister looked pensively at the delicate mechanical figure as it accomplished its last spin and then with a courteous bow announced the end of the performance.

Cordwainer Smith was the pseudonym of Paul M. A. Linebarger (1913–66), who wrote the first text on psychological warfare and was involved in sensitive
government work while a professor of Asiatic politics from 1946 to 1966 in Washington, D.C. His pseudonym was kept a close secret during his lifetime. He went to college with L. Ron Hubbard, the
famous pulp SF writer who invented Dianetics (later Scientology), and they published in the same literary magazine. There was apparently some real competitiveness in Linebarger, for he wrote an
entire book manuscript (never published) in the late 1940s, at the same time his first SF story was published, on the science of mental health.

His science fiction was nearly all published between 1959 and 1963 and first collected in paperback between 1963 and 1968, then reassembled in 1975 and reissued, at which time
serious interest in Smith began to grow. He is now considered a major figure in science fiction. Nearly all of Smith’s science fiction takes place in a consistent future history, The
Instrumentality of Mankind, comprising many stories
(The Rediscovery of Man
[1993] collects his complete short fiction) and one novel,
Norstrilia (1975)
. The series chronicles events
in the millennia-long struggle between the human Instrumentality and the Underpeople, intelligent animals biologically transformed into humanlike forms. A devout Christian, Smith built complex
levels of religious allegory into his series.

The title of “Drunkboat” is an allusion to Arthur Rimbaud. It is a work that shows Cordwainer Smith’s distinctive and unusual voice in science
fiction.

Perhaps it is the saddest, maddest, wildest story in the whole long history of space. It is true that no one else had ever done anything like it before, to travel at such a
distance, and at such speeds, and by such means. The hero looked like such an ordinary man – when people looked at him for the first time. The second time, ah! that was different.

And the heroine. Small she was, and ash-blonde, intelligent, perky, and hurt. Hurt – yes, that’s the right word. She looked as though she needed comforting or helping, even when she
was perfectly all right. Men felt more like men when she was near. Her name was Elizabeth.

Who would have thought that her name would ring loud and clear in the wild vomiting nothing which made up space
₃
?

He took an old, old rocket, of an ancient design. With it he outflew, outfled, outjumped all the machines which had ever existed before. You might almost think that he went so fast that he
shocked the great vaults of the sky, so that the ancient poem might have been written for him alone. “All the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears.”

Go he did, so fast, so far that people simply did not believe it at first. They thought it was a joke told by men, a farce spun forth by rumor, a wild story to while away the summer
afternoon.

We know his name now.

And our children and their children will know it for always.

Rambo. Artyr Rambo of Earth Four.

But he followed his Elizabeth where no space was. He went where men could not go, had not been, did not dare, would not think.

He did all this of his own free will.

Of course people thought it was a joke at first, and got to making up silly songs about the reported trip.

“Dig me a hole for that reeling feeling . . . !” sang one.

“Push me the call for the umber number . . . !” sang another.

“Where is the ship of the ochre joker . . . ?” sang a third.

Then people everywhere found it was true. Some stood stock still and got gooseflesh. Others turned quickly to everyday things. Space
₃
had been found, and it had been pierced. Their
world would never be the same again. The solid rock had become an open door.

Space itself, so clean, so empty, so tidy, now looked like a million million light-years of tapioca pudding – gummy, mushy, sticky, not fit to breathe, not fit to swim in.

How did it happen?

Everybody took the credit, each in his own different way.

“He came for me,” said Elizabeth. “I died and he came for me because the machines were making a mess of my life when they tried to heal my terrible, useless
death.”

“I went myself,” said Rambo. “They tricked me and lied to me and fooled me, but I took the boat and I became the boat and I got there. Nobody made me do it. I
was angry, but I went. And I came back, didn’t I?”

He too was right, even when he twisted and whined on the green grass of earth, his ship lost in a space so terribly far and strange that it might have been beneath his living hand, or might have
been half a galaxy away.

How can anybody tell, with space
₃
?

It was Rambo who got back, looking for his Elizabeth. He loved her. So the trip was his, and the credit his.

But the Lord Crudelta said, many years later, when he spoke in a soft voice and talked confidentially among friends, “The experiment was mine. I designed it, I picked
Rambo. I drove the selectors mad, trying to find a man who would meet those specifications. And I had that rocket built to the old, old plans. It was the sort of thing which human beings first used
when they jumped out of the air a little bit, leaping like flying fish from one wave to the next and already thinking that they were eagles. If I had used one of the regular planoform ships, it
would have disappeared with a sort of reverse gurgle, leaving space milky for a little bit while it faded into nastiness and obliteration. But I did not risk that. I put the rocket on a launching
pad.
And the launching pad itself was an interstellar ship!
Since we were using an ancient rocket, we did it up right, with the old, old writing, mysterious letters printed all over the
machine. We even had the name of our Organization – I and O and M – for ‘the Instrumentality of Mankind’ written on it good and sharp.

“How would I know,” went on the Lord Crudelta, “that we would succeed more than we wanted to succeed, that Rambo would tear space itself loose from its hinges and leave that
ship behind, just because he loved Elizabeth so sharply much, so fiercely much?”

Crudelta sighed.

“I know it and I don’t know it. I’m like that ancient man who tried to take a water boat the wrong way around the planet Earth and found a new world instead. Columbus, he was
called. And the land, that was Australia or America or something like that. That’s what I did. I sent Rambo out in that ancient rocket and he found a way through space
₃
. Now none
of us will ever know who might come bulking through the floor or take shape out of the air in front of us.”

Crudelta added, almost wistfully: “What’s the use of telling the story? Everybody knows it, anyhow. My part in it isn’t very glorious. Now the end of it, that’s pretty.
The bungalow by the waterfall and all the wonderful children that other people gave to them, you could write a poem about that. But the next to the end, how he showed up at the hospital helpless
and insane, looking for his own Elizabeth. That was sad and eerie, that was frightening. I’m glad it all came to the happy ending with the bungalow by the waterfall, but it took a crashing
long time to get there. And there are parts of it that we will never quite understand, the naked skin against naked space, the eyeballs riding something much faster than light ever was. Do you know
what an
aoudad
is? It’s an ancient sheep that used to live on Old Earth, and here we are, thousands of years later, with a children’s nonsense rhyme about it. The animals are
gone but the rhyme remains. It’ll be like that with Rambo someday. Everybody will know his name and all about his drunkboat, but they will forget the scientific milestone that he crossed,
hunting for Elizabeth in an ancient rocket that couldn’t fly from peetle to pootle . . . Oh, the rhyme? Don’t you know that? It’s a silly thing. It goes,

“Don’t ask me what ‘ham’ and ‘turkey’ are. Probably parts of ancient animals, like beefsteak or sirloin. But the children still say
the words. They’ll do that with Rambo and his drunken boat some day. They may even tell the story of Elizabeth. But they will never tell the part about how he got to the hospital. That part
is too terrible, too real, too sad and wonderful at the end. They found him on the grass. Mind you, naked on the grass, and nobody knew where he had come from!”

They found him naked on the grass and nobody knew where he had come from. They did not even know about the ancient rocket which the Lord Crudelta had sent beyond the end of
nowhere with the letters I, O and M written on it. They did not know that this was Rambo, who had gone through space
₃
. The robots noticed him first and brought him in, photographing
everything that they did. They had been programmed that way, to make sure that anything unusual was kept in the records.