THE LEVER OF LIFE: CORDWAINER SMITH AS ETHICAL PRAGMATIST, by Terry Dowling

[1982]

This is the task of man always...not to illuminate the ancient truths, the ancient truths of the unconscious, the ancient intimations of the soul, but...to make them immediate and contemporary, to give them a meaning in the here and now.

—Laurens van der Post, citing Jung. BBC

television program: The Story of Carl Gustav Jung

Ever. Never. Forever. Three worlds. The lever of life upon times. Never, forever, ever....

—Old Norstrilian Poem

“Fathers and teachers, I ask: ‘What is hell?’ I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

—Father Zussima in The Brothers Karamazov

There is a broad refrain that runs through the late Paul Linebarger’s Instrumentality series; a refrain that is a central motif in almost all the stories he wrote as Cordwainer Smith. This is the recurring, connecting theme of winning and losing, of triumph and celebration and loss as part of an unending cycle fundamental to the phenomenon and spirit of our humanity. The Instrumentality stories are built solidly upon this cycle. Out of the chaos of the Ancient Wars, mankind wins through to a new utopian future under the supervision of the Instrumentality, a victory of dubious value for a humanity that is “dying of perfection” (N/163) prior to the Rediscovery of Man.39 Rod McBan wins the Earth and loses it again. He is prepared to “win or fail” (N/197) in the Hate Hall of the Department Store of Hearts’ Desires, and so wins something of far greater value than a world or a fortune. On Pontoppidan, a still-unfulfilled Casher O’Neill is told: “You can’t win now” (Q/32), even at the outset of his struggle to liberate Mizzer. Jestocost loses C’mell but wins a future for the underpeople. The martyred dog-girl, D’joan, loses her life to the same end; and so it goes (see appendix).

There are references aplenty to take up this refrain, whether it be the “I Loved You and Lost You” song from “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”:

I knew you, and loved you

and won you, in Kalma.

I loved you, and won you,

and lost you, my darling! (B/160)

or the poem about the “testing” of the Norstrilian young recalled by Rod:

Out in the Garden of Death, our young

Have tasted the valiant taste of fear.

With muscular arm and reckless tongue,

They have won, and lost, and escaped us here. (N/7),

or a determined remark made by T’ruth, the turtle-girl guardian of Murray Madigan’s estate on the storm planet, Henriada:

“I’m not going to lose, Casher. I’m going to win.” (Q/108)

Quotes from the text simply highlight the richness of this thematic refrain. What becomes important is the exact sense in which we are to regard this pattern of conflict, defeat, and victory. What is it to win, from Smith’s point of view? What is it to lose?

To discover this, we must remember that Smith was a true humanitarian; a person who was deeply sympathetic to Christianity—largely because, unlike many other world religions with their “fatalism and indifference to human life” (B/xv), it put life and love before all else. His own faith appears repeatedly as the Old Strong Religion, though it must be remembered that Smith goes beyond merely advocating to others his own beliefs or one body of doctrine. The universe of the Instrumentality (where organized religions become strictly limited to their worlds of origin) may be essentially a neo-Christian universe, but at the same time it is more than that. Whatever was gained by Linebarger from his High Church Episcopalian upbringing must be seen in the light of a subsequent, equally dynamic involvement with other similar bodies of religious teaching and philosophical thought. In his capacity as a social scientist and a US adviser in Asia, he was continually exposed to Eastern philosophies. By his work on psychological warfare, he knew well the power of belief and the fundamental motivating forces in man that directed him along one path and not another. From such an interaction, from such a specialization in the mainsprings of ideology and human need, Linebarger distilled a unique insight. Consequently, writing as Cordwainer Smith, we see him as a synthesist—a syncretist who saw the best of man’s beliefs through all of history, whether it involved the worship of Christ or of Aten.

The plight of the underpeople, the teachings of D’joan, E’telekeli, and T’ruth, the subject matter of so many of the Instrumentality stories, may all reflect a concern with a traditional Christian faith, surfacing here and there throughout man’s future with its ideals and values, its humanizing, civilizing force intact, but it is rather as J.J. Pierce has observed, that Smith “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” (B/xv-xvi). While Linebarger himself was brought up as a High Anglican and was “devoutly religious” (B/xiv), as Cordwainer Smith he has no “vested interests” in Christianity. The constants acted and re-enacted in his Instrumentality stories show him as a synthesist and a natural “Jungian” writer and thinker.

1: The Nature of the Struggle

“Sweet are the uses of adversity,

Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,

Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.”

—William Shakespeare, As You Like It

The stories set within the Instrumentality framework are always concerned with struggles that are inevitably:

(a) Man against himself;

(b) Man against his universe;

(c) Man against ideas;

(d) Man against death;

(e) Man against loneliness and fear;

(f) Man against the unknown.

Any given Smith story will involve most if not all of these areas.

Man Against Himself

“I think therefore I am...I think!”

—Anonymous

This first area of conflict does not refer to the basic physical, political, or ideological conflicts of one sphere of interest against another (as presented in “War No.81-Q” or “Golden the Ship Was—Oh! Oh! Oh!”), but rather it refers to a confrontation between the individual, his notions of his own humanity, and the reality containing him.

In the Instrumentality series we are given constant crises of self; recurring semantic, philosophical, epistemological, and ontological crises, such as: What is life? What is being? What is human? What is real? What is self? These are the basic identity conflicts of any sensitive, sentient creature. Smith, of course, approaches these questions as a poet and not as a scientist, but he is a most intelligent and self-aware poet, capable of strict scientific and philosophical disciplines. These debates with self and others are very important to the philosophy of love and tolerance practiced by Linebarger the private man. Typically, they go like this. Elaine asks the Traveler’s Aid:

“…are you a person or are you a machine?”

“Depends,” said the voice. “I’m a machine, but I used to be a person…. So what do you say? Am I me or aren’t I?” (B/136)

In “Think Blue, Count Two” Talatashar asks the “illusory” captain about Sh’san:

“But what is he? Who are you?…Are you imaginary? Are you real?”

“That’s philosophy. I’m made by science. I wouldn’t know….” (I/115-116 )

So too does Lord Sto Odin question his two robot companions:

“I am alive?” the Lord asked.

“Yes,” said both the robots.

“You are dead?”

“We are not dead. We are machines, printed with the minds of men who once lived.” (B/221)

And if they “are not dead,” there is the suggestion that they are living.

As this debate continues, there comes a pointed warning, as relevant today as in this far future time:

“You are machines, nothing more, are you not? Are you not?” His voice shrilled at the end.

Said Flavius, “Nothing more.”

Said Livius, “Nothing more. And yet–”

“And yet what?” demanded the Lord Sto Odin.

“And yet,” said Livius, “I know I am a machine, and I know that I have the known feelings only when I was once a living man. I sometimes wonder if you people might go too far. Too far, with us robots. Too far, perhaps, with the underpeople too. Things were once simple, when everything that talked was a human being and everything which did not talk was not. You may be coming to an ending of the ways.” (B/229)

Man is complicating his own environment, his own philosophical traditions; the “ending of the ways” is near indeed. The old hard-and-fast yardsticks have already become useless. People can be printed onto machines (the Lady Panc Ashash, Flavius and Livius); machines can be fashioned about the brains of animals (owl-brained little Harry Hadrian, the gun-watching robot, for example); animals can be made to resemble humans (D’alma, D’joan, C’mell); men become both wild “animals” (Talatashar, Benjacomin Bozart) and nonhumans (the klopts of Arachosia). The reflective and apprehensive dialogue between Sto Odin and his robots is as rigorous as Smith’s debates get. The dilemma is there: what constitutes a man? humanity? Such questions are not to be answered easily. Certainly they are never fully answered within the Instrumentality stories as we have them, although an answer seems to be forthcoming at some inevitable stage of future growth.

It is enough that any thinking creature be brought to this philosophical impasse. He will then be directed to a new examination of those age-old “big” questions; his awareness will be fine-honed, and he will acquire a new respect for life in general. We cannot go any further. Our own confusion over these questions is highlighted by the equally paradoxical remarks of a psychically motivated warden like Sh’san, summoned by Veesey to save the crew and passengers of her sailship:

“I do not exist,” said the stranger, “but I can kill you, any of you, if I wish.” (1/109)

It is reinforced when the “lost art of fighter replication” (Q/87) is used against the insane Go-Captain, John Joy Tree:

Tree whirled around. “You’re not real,” he said.

Image-Casher stepped around the console and hit Tree with an iron glove. The pilot jumped away, a hand reaching up to his bleeding face. (Q/86)

This dilemma of identity and reality is compounded further in “Think Blue, Count Two” when that other “temporary, artificial personality” (I/115), the captain, is questioned about his immediate creator, Sh’san. Awe-struck, the “ghost” captain replies:

“He is the thinker of all thinkers, the ‘to be’ of being, the doer of doings. He is powerful beyond your strongest imagination. He makes me come living out of your living minds. In fact,” said the captain with a fine snarl, “he is a dead mouse-brain laminated with plastic and I have no idea at all of who I am. Good night to you all!” (I/116)

In other words, Sh’san is a “relative god,” all-powerful within a certain set parameters. It is a most wonderful evasion, for Sh’san can be reduced mechanistically, functionally, scientifically—contained and explained by theories and techniques—while at the same time he continually eludes complete understanding. As with the robots and the underpeople, the ends often transcend the means producing them.

Thus we are to remind ourselves not only that our own gods may be quite relative to our finite world-view and life-experience, but also that while we can reduce ourselves mechanistically to an intricate set of interlocking systems and electrical impulses, we too are beyond easy quantification: the knowns quickly falter in the face of the unknowns. This is a proper and healthy attitude.

In a “fringe” Instrumentality story like “Nancy” (there is only one connection, a single reference to the Up-and-Out) the same crisis of self, existence, and reality-perception exists. A space-pilot is infected with a sokta virus which gives him an illusory female companion—a Nancy—who is “more real than life itself” (I/196). Elsewhere the same crisis of reality versus illusion occurs in an unrelated story, “Western Science Is So Wonderful,” when an American challenges a Martian visitor with: “You’re not are you? You can’t be. Or can you?” and is answered: “What is real, darling?” (I/172). The point, once again, is that it is correct for man to be in awe of the miracle of existence, and that we must be careful to avoid dogmatic assertions and rationalizations about things we cannot ultimately understand in our present condition.

Man Against His Universe

“The only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it.”

—Carl G. Jung

“It’s a lot of work to be human and it’s work which must be kept up or it begins to fade.” (Q/30)

—Philip Vincent, Hereditary Dictator of Pontoppidan

Another major area of conflict in the series is between man and his universe. Space is not kind to man. It is an ordeal, cruel and deadly, and all the transits between the worlds of men are hard-won. In “Scanners Live in Vain,” in the early days of space colonization (c.6000AD) when huge sub-light sailships were used to cross normal space (presumably Space One), we learn of “the great pain of space” (B/6), an actual physical pain:

which started quietly in the marrow, like an ache, and proceeded by the fatigue and nausea of each separate nerve cell, brain cell, touchpoint in the body, until life itself became a terrible aching hunger for silence and for death.... (B/20)

We learn too that “People who went to the Up-and-Out had to pay the price for space” (B/4). Initially this price is met by the scanners, the scanner-pilots, and the habermans who man the ships which carry cryogenically-suspended colonists between the stars. With the discovery of Space Two and “planoforming” (c.8000-9000AD) there are the Go-Captains and the pinlighters (playing their “game” of “Rat and Dragon” with that enemy “out there underneath space itself which was alive, capricious and malevolent” (B/70)); and later we hear of the more lethal Space Three, “where so many travelers had gone in and so few had come out” (Q/112-113).

But whether it is Space One, Space Two, or Space Three, or such space-borne enemies of Instrumentality-governed humanity as the Arachosians, the chicken-people of Linschoten XV, Raumsog and the Bright Empire; hostile planets like Arachosia, Paradise VII, Amazonas Triste, Henriada, the Solid Planet and Shayol; the sheer physical realities of coming to grips with an inimical cosmos serve to bring out the best and the worst in man; wearing him down, driving him insane, exposing his darker qualities one minute, ennobling him through trial and suffering the next.

Smith uses space, with its “real or imagined horrors” (Q/163), to examine the various aspects of our humanity; and understanding and celebrating our humanity is Smith’s greatest priority. One ancient lord is quoted as saying: “We must be people first and happy later, lest we live and die in vain” (B/211). Space stops man from being “people first,” and so this is the level at which man must confront it.

By the nature of this confrontation, space too becomes the place of self-discovery, of expiation and sacrifice, of nobility, reaffirmation, and endless promise—one of the settings in which we may discover what being “people” means. Space is where man meets himself. Apart from the very real dangers of “Rats/Dragons” and the “wild unformed life” (Q/158) living in space itself, it is where we confront all our hidden evils—the worst aspects of ourselves. In a story like “Think Blue, Count Two”—a veritable moral and philosophical progress if ever there was one—an important distinction is made:

Space never committed crimes. It just killed. Nature could transmit death, but only man could carry crime from world to world. Without the boxes, they looked into the bottomless depths of their unknown selves. (1/101)

So, when we hear of how the Storm Planet, Henriada, is “located within a series of bad pockets of space” (Q/68), we know that this is firstly a physical reality, for the Big Nothing is far from empty (thanks to the discoveries made by Colonel Harkening, Rambo, John Joy Tree, Samm and Finsternis); but we also come to understand that it comes to be a “Nothing” for the human spirit. We realize that such regions are “bad” because man is tormented there by the very facets of his own humanity, a humanity that is stretched thin, twisted and tested to the limit. Aware of this awful dehumanizing role played by space, Trece thus says to Veesey:

“The little boxes protected us from ourselves. And now there aren’t any. We are helpless. There isn’t anything here to protect us from us. What hurts man like man? What kills people like people? What danger to us could be more terrible than ourselves? (I/101)

Death in Smith’s stories is never the terrible end we often make it, as we shall see presently. It is the “how” and “why” (rather than the “what”) of it that matters. To survive space, the terrible Up-and-Out, man must ultimately survive himself. And again, to do that, he must fathom the depths of his humanity and draw on courage and sacrifice and love: he must re-establish his priorities and find a new purpose for being man.

§

In all of the actual “space travel” stories in the series—“The Lady Who Sailed the Soul,” “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” “The Burning of the Brain,” “Drunkboat,” “Think Blue, Count Two,” “Scanners Live in Vain,” etc.—the transits are generally shown to involve self-sacrifice and a richer understanding of loving and giving. For these journeys through danger, death, and the naked evils of self to be successful, man must resort to his better self, his higher qualities. Perhaps this is why Smith’s stories suggest legends and myths: they resonate with the struggle, both inner and outer. When man loses this struggle, it is because he has lost his humanity, his vital sensitivity to life. This is the terrible loss Sto Odin recognizes in “Under Old Earth” when he speaks of mankind being killed “with a bland hopeless happiness” (B/214), or that Philip Vincent refers to on Pontoppidan when he recalls the long ago Dark Ages when “people lost people” (Q/30). By going through space to fulfill the destiny of man, people stand to lose what it is that makes them people. To lose, in Smith’s worldview, is to be shut off from hope and love, to be without an insight into the true essence of what it is to be fully human.

Unlike the Christian polarization of good and evil into extremes, Smith recognizes—again in the Jungian way: acknowledging the value of archetypes such as the shadow—that this vying of good with evil is a necessary and vital melding, beyond morality. Benjacomin Bozart is not censured by the narrator of “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons” as a bad man, but rather is explained:

He was no more “wrong” than a shark approaching a school of cod. Life’s nature is to live, and he had been nurtured to live as he had to live—by seeking prey. (B/258)

Often it is ignorance and fear, propaganda or social conditioning (as on Viola Siderea) that leads to cruel unjust acts. Smith has the post-Rediscovery narrator of “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” speak of the need for a seasoning of anger and hate with our better qualities to preserve vitality in the race:

We today know that variety, flexibility, danger and the seasoning of a little hate can make love and life bloom as they never bloomed before.... (B/193)

It is Smith as ethical pragmatist, as again the Jungian “healer,” who has Jean-Jacques Vomact express the Instrumentality’s Rediscovery of Man program as being: “To make life dangerous enough and interesting enough to be real again” (N/123). There is no tonic like loss and adversity. When man rediscovers himself, he is brought face to face with pain and suffering and death; with the harsh realities we find still rampant in the earlier stories set in the pre-Rediscovery period. Surviving space is therefore a raw test of man and his ability to stay civilized. As Philip Vincent tells his council:

“We are judging space. What happens to a man when he moves out into the Big Nothing? Do we leave Earth behind? Why did civilization fall?” (Q/29)

It is not easy for man to remain kind and noble and civilized among the stars, nor does he always succeed. We witness the klopts; we see Talatashar before the wardens come to his aid; and we hear of the fate of the Old Twenty-two, whose crew “began making up evil from the people-insides” (I/103).

If man fails, it is because his humanity has failed. Space is deadly, but mainly because it does test all that man needs most to stay man. It tests us just by being itself. By fulfilling its own nature, it threatens to undermine our own. If man cannot survive such an acid test, then he does not deserve to.

Man Against Ideas

It hardly needs mentioning that “man” in Smith’s universe comes to signify any sentient, self-aware being capable of love and self-sacrifice (though this is a truth not generally accepted by organized humanity in the Instrumentality stories). In the Hate Hall, a voice spieks to Rod and asks:

Rob McBan is a man, man, man

But what is man? (N/198)

Whether related to a true human, a machine, a synthetic phantom warden like Sh’san, a “hominid” (adapted humans from other worlds) or a “homunculus” (animal-derived underperson), the debate over what constitutes humanity comes up against barriers of ideology and social convention.

Smith repeatedly makes his most “human” and attractive characters non-human (C’mell, D’joan, B’dikkat, even the unmodified cat Griselda on Xanadu) and so continually tests these prejudices and conventions. Stories like “The Ballad of Lost C’mell” and “The Dead Lady of Clown Town,” and parts of Norstrilia concern revolution by coercion, no matter how generally non-violent. C’mell works with Jestocost and the powerful E’telekeli to win time for the underpeople in their centuries-long struggle against the amazingly hidebound attitudes of the Instrumentality. D’joan, Elaine, and Hunter, working with the mechanical imprint of the Lady Panc Ashash, have already begun this long progress towards a new status by their passive love-revolution on Fomalhaut III. Jestocost, as a member of the Instrumentality, becomes a champion of justice. Like Smith, he too is a pragmatist:

He did not think that mankind would ever get around to correcting ancient wrongs unless the underpeople themselves had some of the tools of power—weapons, conspiracy, wealth and (above all) organization with which to challenge man. He was not afraid of revolt, but he thirsted for justice with an obsessive yearning which overrode all other considerations. (B/319)

Though it remains a tale of revolution, “The Ballad of Lost C’mell” is pre-eminently a story of unrequited love, and in this there is an even more provocative revolutionary issue, namely the social and moral dilemma of a relationship between a human and a cat-derived girlygirl. In the far future it is not uncommon for humans and underpeople to enter into close physical relations, an idea advanced long before Harlan Ellison was outraging the public with his Dangerous Visions. A desperate Earth government hopes to appease Rod McBan by providing him with girls “of all shapes, sizes, smells and ages—all the way from young ladies of good family down to dog-derived undergirls who smelled of romance all the time....” (N/2).

Smith plays it safe here. Seduction is permitted, provided there is no actual consummation—or at least that is the legal and official position regarding the use of girlygirls and female servants of animal extraction. But when we witness the advances made on C’mell by Tostig Amaral, we realize that such conduct may not be uncommon.

And while there is no interbreeding between the different species of under-people for physiological and genetic reasons (N/155), C’mell embarrasses some soldiers high on Earthport by suggesting that “she might be a mixed type, part human and part animal” (N/149). This could mean merely a scientific rather than an illicit sexual origin, but however we interpret clues like “mixed,” the connection is deliberately made and flaunted. Such a provocation, made about such a hedonistic age, is no accident. Smith is purposefully toying with one of our own society`s most fundamental taboos. The parallels with contemporary and historical racialist attitudes are obvious; and just as the differences of color and physiological type are as artificial as the barriers of ideology, so too do the differences become immaterial here. The love of T’ruth for her cataleptic master, Murray Madigan, is beyond reproach regardless of her sexual ministrations to him; while Rod’s caring for C’mell “because he sensed in their whole relationship a friendliness much more fervent than sex itself” (N/176) shows Smith’s position most clearly. These are conscious, consenting creatures who share a full awareness of life and its common bonds between them.

It is immaterial that the C’mell/Jestocost relationship remains unconsummated, for there are better victories in Smith’s credo of love. Jestocost likes C’mell “as a being, not as a girlygirl” (B/332). It is this “equality”—the equality that has such a creature chosen for reasons above and beyond her functional, designed role—that is important. The major point is that we feel as a certain “off-Earth prince” felt:

“Funny, C’mell, you’re not even a person and you’re the most intelligent human being I’ve met in this place. Do you know it made my planet poor to send me here? And what did I get out of them? Nothing, nothing, and a thousand times nothing. But you, now. lf you’d been running the government of Earth, I’d have gotten what my people need, and this world would be richer too. Manhome, they call it. Manhome, my eye! The only smart person on it is a female cat.” (B/327—my italics)

Here in this one paradox-ridden remark is the essence of man’s struggle with ideas, as well as an inkling of the shift in attitude that shall lead on to that “ending of the ways” foreseen by the robot Livius. Were man able to let himself be guided more by his heart and feelings and less by his over-rationalizations (his protocol and conventions) these dilemmas would cease to exist, and the whole issue raised by Livius about the tests for humanity would be relegated to its proper place: an unanswerable mystery requiring tolerance and understanding. Perhaps it is important that Jestocost, with his sense of justice and his commitment to humanity, relies on instincts and ideals rather than intellect:

His mind was quick, too quick to be deeply intelligent. He thought by gestalt, not by logic. (B/320)

We too must act with all our faculties; with ourselves in balance.

Smith emphasizes this “Jungian” need for a balanced self —the fully “human way”—when he has Martel survey his own fellow scanners at the emergency meeting called to decide on the fate of Adam Stone. Martel is “cranched”—temporarily restored to a feeling, sensation- and emotion-rich mode of existence and reality-perception. Once again, he sees things with the balanced view available to ordinary men, with the added incentive of cherishing such precious, fully human moments because they are so rare.

Had he been haberman, he would have thought only with his mind, not with his heart and guts and blood. (B/27)

That is, not with his full humanity. He realizes too just how dangerous it is to be unbalanced and “dehumanized” this way, and later says:

“If the others were all cranched, as I am, they would see it in a human way, not with the narrow crazy logic which they used in the meeting.” (B/28)

Important here is the connection Smith makes between being fully human and true freedom. They go together, one the automatic result of the other. Away from “the narrow crazy logic,” being human and free to choose, Martel discovers the truth of this: “With real freedom, he began to think of what he still might do” (B/28).

What bitter irony it is that the scanners cannot see beyond the preservation of their code and their way of life, cannot see positive alternatives, because they are constantly being cut off from their full humanity for the good of humanity in general.

The other deadly idea which prevails in this future society is the sinister belief nursed by the Lords and Ladies of the Instrumentality that they are automatically working in humanity`s best interests. In spite of its victories over Raumsog, the Arachosians, even the duck-like Apicians,40 the Instrumentality is a very real threat to man, bringing him through “a nightmare of perfection …to the edge of suicide” (B/283). It has always been guided by “the old philosophy—if you see wrong, right it” (N/163), never thinking, never realizing as Jestocost does (and as the wise and aging Lord Crudelta does) that suffering and having things go wrong are as much blessings for our humanity as are an appreciation of the beauty of life or an awareness of the value of true friendship. Shared adversity is a stabilizing and ennobling thing for any community just as it is for any individual. Hence the significance of Rod McBan’s comparison of the rich vitality of an ever-threatened, harsh Norstrilia with that of an over-populated, newly-awakened Earth, recovering from its centuries-long malaise—from the misguided caring that was in fact the worst possible neglect. Hence the importance of the dissolute Lord Tedesco’s finding pleasure in service, a pleasure “greater than any he had ever experienced before” (B/122). For these things show ideas and assumptions on the turn: duty and service become their own rewards; an awareness is growing that humanity must be earned and won and deserved—it is not an automatic right of birth.

The Instrumentality has been responsible for this “fool’s paradise.” It has known that man is his own worst enemy; what irony that it should also be the “enemy within.” When we are told that:

Earth won and the others lost, because the leaders of Earth never put other considerations ahead of survival (B/114)

we realize just how unimportant survival could become without these “other considerations”—things like self-respect, freedom, personal honor and an individual sense of purpose. In “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” Maximilien Macht tells Paul and Virginia:

This is what the Lords of the Instrumentality never let us have. Fear. Reality. We were born in a stupor and we died in a dream. Even the underpeople, the animals, had more life than we did. The machines did not have fear. That’s what we were. Machines who thought they were men. And now we are free. (B/301)

What irony, too, that the underpeople, hunted and killed for the slightest misdemeanor, are seen as having more life.

This threat posed by the Instrumentality does not disappear with the Rediscovery of Man, for the Instrumentality is a repressive elite. Even by the time of Rod McBan’s arrival on Mars, there is little effective freedom of expression. Jean-Jacques Vomact has been banished from Earth—charged with revolt against the Instrumentality—simply because he produced more than the stipulated number of issues of a newspaper.

“People can say anything they want on Earth, and they can print up to twenty copies of anything they need to print, but beyond that it’s mass communication. Against the law.” (N/124)

Given the ferocity with which the Instrumentality protects itself, such rulings are expedient to this end, as is the prohibition of the dissemination of religions and ideologies between the different worlds of man. But such caution, even when amply justified, stands to make such a body overzealous and over-prescriptive in the public interests they allegedly serve, allowing the Pleasure Revolution and an almost unnatural cultural homogeneity to draw mankind into decadence. It is only by the actions of the Jestocosts and the Sto Odins of the day, by the foment of ideas provoked by the aspirations of the underpeople, that the race is saved.

Man Against Death

“O death, where is thy sting?”

—I Corinthians XV:55

Related to the struggle with an inimical if oblivious cosmos is man’s confrontation with what we conventionally call the “final adversary”—death. Death is “the long bleak dark” (N/187), the “private, everlasting night” (N/145)—the “final shock” and the “dark forever” (N/191) of the Judson poem seen by Rod McBan when he goes to visit the Catmaster.

Smith would have us see death in a special way. It is indeed “a very private affair” (N/211) but, again in a Jungian sense, there are important qualifications to its tyranny. It is not the ultimate isolation, as we shall see presently, and it is just one more facet of nature. “Death is not bad, soldier. It just comes badly,” says the rat-woman to the human soldier who is about to kill her (B/196).

The worst threat that such a state poses for man is that it might separate him from life before he has achieved self-fulfillment, before he has discovered that death does not matter. Death alters things, but need not finish them; and there are always fates far worse—like a second-rate, unfulfilled life such as that lived by those under the pre-Rediscovery Instrumentality. In Smith’s stories, death is constantly being qualified in its role as the great leveler; it is contained and reduced by factors that transcend death.

It is important to note that death is not defeated by a divine being with a promise of eternal life, or even some celestial union of souls. Death is defeated simply by an attitude—one directly related to self-fulfillment. The old mouse-woman, Baby-baby, explains to Elaine how:

“Death is a when, not a what. It’s the same for all of us. Don’t be scared... you may find mercy and love. They’re much richer than death, if you can only find them. Once you do find them, death won’t be very important.” (B/152)

Nor is it important whether the horse on Pontoppidan lives or dies after its spectacular climb out of the Hipsy Dipsy and its own personal “rediscovery” of man: “After all, he has already had his great triumph” (Q/29). This same “enlightened” attitude is echoed by the bear-man Orson: “There is no death. Not for love.” (B/1 98).

In that beautiful moment at the end of “The Lady Who Sailed The Soul,” Helen is seen dying happily, believing “that if they could conquer space, they might conquer death as well” (B/66). If space is a place where man is exposed and death exerts its terrifying dominion, then the conquest of space—as a process of fulfilling man by teaching him about his humanity—is also a fitting conquest of death, in spite of the pain, in spite of the personal suffering. Rather than being the great and final unknown of most human cultural traditions, death marks the change-over point, a point of transition and quite possibly of some as-yet-unknowable metamorphosis.

Man Against Loneliness and Fear

“But none shall triumph a whole life through:

For death is one, and the fates are three.

At the door of life, by the gate of breath;

There are worse things waiting for man than death.”

—Swinburne, “The Triumph of Time”

The conflict with death is also related to the struggle against loneliness and fear. This is yet another crisis of self that haunts all conscious life. Aggravated by the vast solitudes of space, and exacerbated by the inevitability of death and the prospect of being forever alone, it is relieved only by love, empathy, and companionship, by self-realization and—ideally—self-fulfillment.

We hear of synthetic companions being given to man in space, or made by him out of desperation simply to stave off this loneliness: Suzdal’s “hypnotics and cubes to provide him the semblance of company, a large crowd of friendly people who could be convoked out of his own hallucinations” (B/96), as well as his turtle-men; Gordon Greene’s sokta-induced Nancy in “Nancy”; and the party-companions summoned by a lonely spaceman in “The Good Friends.”

Even in an age when there can be the telepathic sharing of one’s subjective experience of life with others, it is being alone, without friendship, without love that is the ultimate agony and loss. When the council on Pontoppidan considers the fate of Perino’s near-immortal horse, the Hereditary Dictator points out just how insignificant a loss death can be:

“If we kill that horse, gentlemen, we will not be doing the horse a great wrong. He is an old animal, and I do not think that he will mind dying very much, now that he is away from the ordeal of loneliness which he feared more than death.” (Q/29)

Just as Helen America, D’joan, Laird, and even Jestocost all attain a triumph in death by not dying alone, so does this aged and unmodified creature.

Man Against the Unknown

“All the thousands and tens of thousands of gods are all one god.”

—Chinese proverb

“Some people might call it a god. I call it nothing.”

—Paul, regarding the Abba-dingo

“The pattern of God exists in every man.”

—Carl Gustav Jung

“God is where he has always been—around us, near us, in us.”

—Maximilien Macht in “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”

This brings us to the ultimate sphere of conflict: man against the unknown. As a finite creature in an infinite universe, man is continually being brought into confrontation with things beyond his ken. We have the inability of either the humans or the “illusory” guardians of “Think Blue, Count Two” to explain the true nature of the “ghosts” (Sh’san, Tal’s mother, Marcia and the captain) when they appear (I/115). In “The Colonel Came Back from Nothing-at-All” we have Colonel Harkening’s space-being—“some gigantic form of life immensely beyond the limits of human imagination” (I/128). There are the visions and nightmares of Space Three, the “wild unformed life” (Q/158) detected and destroyed by Folly, Samm, and Finsternis; the weeping two-headed elephants and their “unimaginable ships” (Q/168) discovered by John Joy Tree (again with the assertion that such things are beyond our imagination); and in “Under Old Earth” we learn of the Douglas-Ouyang entity—“A power which had tried to find friendship with man, but had found the wrong man and the wrong friendship” (B/256).

§

Smith clearly opts for a marvelous universe, purposely beyond the limits of the human imagination. As we have already seen, there is a double process at work in most of the Instrumentality stories—an expanding out to touch on issues of ultimate meaning and the nature of being, and then a contracting away from rigorous scientific enquiry to a respect for all aspects of life and the simpler ethical abstractions of love and charity.

This process is well illustrated in “The Colonel Came Back from Nothing-at-All” (re-worked and later published in a different form as “Drunkboat”). Colonel Harkening, the first human to undergo a planoform jump, is lost in the Big Nothing of space. Later he re-appears, naked and virtually comatose, without his tiny chronoplast chamber, and is discovered to be in mental contact with a vast non-human intelligence from which he must be rescued by a team of doctors and a little girl telepath.

From the first, the nature of this encounter is presented as being with a distinctly God-like being. Smith prepares us for this by making his telepath a member of the Post-Soviet Orthodox Eastern Quakers; someone with a pronounced religious bias. She says to the doctors:

“I want you three to wear the helmet of the pinlighters and ride with me into hell itself. That soul is lost... lost to the mercy of God and to the friendship of mankind.” (I/126)

The irony is that when they set off on their “crusade” to win Harkening back from “all the terrors of the Up-and-Out” (I/121), they discover him to be communing with an awesome entity which could be a deity—but which turns out to be just another physical phenomenon. Thus there is a revelation, but hardly an epiphany. When at last they return to Earth with all that they have learned and accomplished, they realize that “The world was better, but not much the wiser” (I/129).

This is a fundamental dictum for Smith’s Instrumentality stories. There is a constant counterpoint in this double process of discovery and wonder. We become wiser, but only wise enough to realize that we are not so very wise at all in the face of an infinite universe and ultimate meanings. The struggle to know continues. As is the case with the return of the Vom Acht sisters or the Rediscovery of Man, life may become better, but man remains man, fallible, striving, nursing his own best and worst features within himself.

And there are still miracles, even if they are subjective and phenomenalistic ones—miracles that cannot be adequately communicated to the world in general. Gordon Greene does find his Nancy, who is “more real than life itself” (I/196), even though she is a drug-induced reality, and Helen America remains convinced that Mr. Gray-no-more came to her even as she journeyed across space to join him on New Earth.

“You did so come to The Soul,” she said. “You did so stand beside me when I was lost and did not know how to handle the weapon.”

“If I came then, darling, I’ll come again, wherever you are....” (B/66)

As we have already seen in man’s conflict with the nature of being and death, there are no easy answers. We might say that Colonel Harkening’s space-being, though awesome and unknowable and seemingly absolute, is one more phenomenal fact in a vast phenomenon-filled cosmos. It is just another “relative” god when seen from anything like a clinical overview, just as Commander Suzdal is an absolute God to the Cats of Catland, or Murray Madigan is T’ruth’s “god” (Q/91) or humans are “gods” to the underpeople (N/247). The revealed gods of Smith’s universe—Christian and non-Christian alike—are relative gods, forever contained and “accounted for.” But whatever their form or limitations, such gods do point to a direction which the human spirit would take; they do reflect a longing that is vital to our nature.

Thus, offsetting Smith’s orthodox Episcopalian background we have this expansive viewpoint which sees all man’s gods as merely reflections of a yearning for meaning—a yearning which, properly manifested, becomes a celebration of the vital and noblest sides of humanity. Any absolutist idea of god is always qualified by what man is and what man needs his god to be. When Sto Odin asks his robot servant, Livius, “What do you call a god?,” the robot answers: “A person or an idea capable of starting wholly new cultural patterns in motion” (B/218). Consequently, in a man-created-god inversion, the pharaoh Akhnaton is described as a ruler who “invented the best of the early gods” (B/219), a very revealing behavioral and cultural observation by Smith. (Of course, this is a robot talking, supposedly divorced from spiritual imperatives, but Smith has always given great wisdom to his artificial constructs, whether it be T’ruth, D’alma, the Lady Panc Ashash, Sh’san, or Livius, printed with the brain pattern of “a psychiatrist who turned into a general” (B/216).)

By Libius’s same definition, Christianity too becomes a projection of human needs—an institutionalization of mankind’s desires for an answer to life and for a higher meaning.

This same “miraculous” dimension also intrudes in such things as the visions, the nightmares, the awesome powers experienced by Artyr Rambo in Space Three en route to his Elizabeth, or in Lavinia’s inexplicably precise vision of a transformed Rod with C’mell on Earth. Though this last wonder has the pseudo-scientific agency of stroon-laced honey from Paradise VII for an empirical basis, it nonetheless smacks of the paranormal, even in Smith’s already amazing universe of telepaths and visionaries. Occurring alongside the appearance of wardens like Sh’san and the marvelous architectural and telekinetic feats of the Daimoni, this “paranormal” aspect adds a rich edge to the possibility of anything and everything taking place. Regardless of the source or the cause, the appropriate attitude in such an infinite universe has to be one of infinite wonder, faith, and reverence.

2: The Nature of the Victory

There is a simple equation that may be applied to the Instrumentality canon:

Love—is the measure of our humanity

is the key to our humanity

is the way to truth

is knowing yourself and all life

is sacrifice

is the way to defeat death

is the way to transform life

requires/leads to understanding and self-fulfilment

transcends all.

The winning that takes place in the areas of conflict we have mentioned, comes down to a simple awareness that this equation holds true. Victory without love, without mercy and kindness and denial of self, is no victory at all, regardless of personal, economic, or material gain.

The Different Kinds of Love

In Smith’s writing, love covers all the traditional classifications—eros to agape—involving sympathy and empathy, selfishness and self-denial, the sacred and the profane. Smith’s heroes and heroines—Jestocost, Hunter, Sto Odin, D’joan C’mell, Santuna—are all champions of ideals, all fallible, all capable of immense giving and sacrifice.

To classify and illustrate these aspects of love, we might say that the Instrumentality stories deal with the love of:

(a) Man for woman; woman for man;

(b) Man for an ideal;

(c) Man for humanity and all life;

(d) Man for a universal spirit.

We are never given the lower “survival” love of man for self except as a passing contrast to highlight one of the other forms of positive love.

The first kind of love is at the center of nearly all of Smith’s best stories. Most often we have tales of great loves involving a quest, or trial, or ordeal: a conventional love relationship under stress which serves to elevate it so that it touches on other kinds of love, overlapping inextricably with them. Many such stories, by the nature of the love-adventure being recounted, take on the status of myths and legends, with that delightfully Jungian archetypal quality we have mentioned, making them rich with wholeness and healing and fulfillment. Such love stories include those of: Martel and Luci; Rambo and Elizabeth; Helen America and Mr. Gray-no-more; Carlotta and Laird; Juli and Laird; Dobyns Bennett and Terza Vomact; Magnus Taliano and Dolores Oh; Paul and Virginia; Rod and C’mell and Lavinia; Elaine and Hunter; T’ruth and Murray Madigan; T’ruth and Casher (her “might-have-been”); Casher and Calelta; Samm, Folly and Finsternis; Veesey and Talatashar; Lady Da and Mercer.

These relationships are set in frameworks of crisis and self-discovery, and they lead on to other forms of loving and kindness. It can be argued that some of these loves are less integral than others (for example, Rogov and Cherpas, Santuna and Sun-boy), but as they provide a structure of emotional and spiritual involvement—illustrating sacrifice, patience, loyalty, charity—they tend nonetheless to lie at the basis of the different kinds of love interrelated with them.

Furthermore, these love-adventures display in miniature the qualities man should apply in all his dealings with his fellow beings. For example, Martel loves Luci—but he also loves humanity enough to defy his fellow scanners to save Adam Stone. He abandons his duty to the code of the scanners in order to fulfill a higher duty to all of humanity. Jestocost, though we are told he has “little love, no fear, freedom from ambition and dedication to his job” (B/318), nevertheless (by whatever passion of government and sense of propriety moves him) truly believes in justice and the rights of the underpeople. He genuinely serves life. And love is such an infinite, transcending quality, that even the little of it he possesses is enough to work the necessary miracles. On his death-bed, after a life in which only “justice mattered,” only “the perpetual return of mankind to progress” mattered (B/330), Jestocost’s final questions in the face of death turn not to a cosmic creator, nor to any of the religions thrown up by the Rediscovery of Man, but rather his “death-bed conversion” would seem to be to love:

I have helped your people.

“Yes,” came back the faintest of faraway whispers, inside his head.

I am dying. I must know. Did she love me?

“She went on without you, so much did she love you. She let you go, for your sake, not for hers. She really loved you. More than death. More than life. More than time. You will never be apart.”

Never apart?

“Not, not in the memory of man,” said the voice, and was then still.

Jestocost lay back on his pillow and waited for the day to end. (B/337)

Thus selfless love ennobles, and allows one’s better self to grow. It cuts across the worst parts of man and touches on the best—nobility and dignity, those higher abstracts in our nature. When the “witch” Elaine first comes upon the forbidden door leading down to the Lower City of Kalma, we are told: “She was not yet frantic, not yet desperate, she was not yet even noble” (B/133). She has yet to experience Hunter, D’joan, and the underpeople in the Brown and Yellow Corridor. She has yet to have the experience that will provide the basis for her achieving a Blakean “innocence through experience.”

And, of course, while the “ultimate” loss always seems to be death itself, we are to remember that there is no final grave in a Smith story. Death remains the great cheater, but it too is constantly cheated of its prey. In Norstrilia Smith quotes from “A Forsaken Garden,” a poem by the pre-Raphaelite poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. Swinburne is an interesting choice for Smith to make, for, like the E.C.Z. Judson verse quoted earlier in the same novel (dealing with the closeness of “the tideless river” and “the dark forever” (N/191)), Swinburne’s work also shows a preoccupation with the transience of life and with that final terrible confrontation with death, but in contrast to the Judson extracts the Swinburne verse promises a victory. In poems like “The Triumph of Time” and particularly “A Forsaken Garden” there are both fearful questions (“What love was ever as deep as a grave?”) and others that suggest hope (“Or they loved their life through, and then went whither?/And were one to the end—but what end who knows?”).41 But there is also the paradoxical solace, the reassurance that after death there is no longer the fear of death (“Here death may deal not again for ever”). By making that terrible crossing, we are free of it; death is defeated at its moment of triumph. Moreover, it is a crossing to be made with love if the victory is to be won, for as T’ruth tells Casher O’Neill: “Love is the only end of things” (Q/97).

Consequently, as an act of faith in the transcending power of love over death, Laird willingly dies to be with Juli Vom Acht and his first love, Carlotta, in “The Queen of the Afternoon,” sacrificing youth and vitality:

“My darling and last love,” he said, “I will be losing you twice. I cannot bear it. I have asked the physician for medicine to counteract the rejuvenation. In an hour I shall be as old as you. We are going together. And somewhere out there we will meet Carlotta and we will hold hands, the three of us, among the stars.” (I/70)

So too does Helen America meet death happily:

She believed that if they could conquer space, they might conquer death as well. (B/66)

Such attitudes contain the same transcending note of triumph as C’mell’s love for her “renegade” Lord. Once again, the Jungian note is clear. If the psyche “isn’t entirely confined to space and time” as Jung says,42 then death is truly an interruption and not an ending. How true are those words from “A Forsaken Garden,” quoted to Rod by the great bird-man, E’telekeli; for in the face of such prospects “Death lies dead” indeed (N/249).

Death, then, remains the penultimate rather than the ultimate loss. The ultimate uttermost losing, as we have already seen, is the inability to feel and know love—the loss of love which is the loss of one’s very humanity. This one fact lends new substance to the I Loved You and Lost You song sung by Hunter to Elaine, completing the circle, the equation of true loss—to “know” before winning and losing.

I knew you, and loved you,

and won you, in Kalma.

I won you, and loved you,

and lost you, my darling! (B/160)

It is a refrain taken up by Sto Odin, a seemingly less likely candidate, when he reflects on friends long dead:

“…they were here, and they loved me, and they knew me, and now they are dead.” (B/221)

It is an isolation from love that is feared here; that is what gives death its sting. And if loss of love means the loss of humanity, then, conversely, the gaining of love means the gaining of humanity. It is the greatest of all weapons, making all the conflicts—with space, with death, with ideas, with fear—end in victory. When a jealous and hurt Casher O’Neill is confronted with T’ruth’s total life-commitment to the cataleptic Murray Madigan, he questions it as a waste:

“But what for?” asked Casher, a little crossly....

“For life!” she cried, “In any form, in any way....”

“What’s the use of it?” insisted Casher.

“I can tell you, man, what the use is. Love.”

“What did you say?” said Casher.

“I said the use was love. Love is the only end of things. Love on the one side, and death on the other. If you are strong enough to use a real weapon, I can give you a weapon which will put Mizzer at your mercy. Your cruiser and your laser would just be toys against the weapon of love. You can’t fight love.” (Q/96-97)

Similarly, the revolt of the underpeople on Fomalhaut III (which so severely tests the established definitions of humanity held by the Instrumentality) is a revolution through an understanding of what love is and what it can do. D’joan (now called Joan) says:

“Love is knowing yourself and knowing all other people and things.” (B/205)

And again:

“Love is for life itself, and we have life.” (B/180)

Baby-baby corrects a misunderstanding Elaine, and describes the sort of love they have discovered for themselves as “Love for life. Love for all things living” (B/152). When the robot soldier asks his crucial question, the mechanical Lady Panc Ashash provides the inevitable answer:

“You mean I’m alive? I exist?”

“With love, you do,” said the Lady Panc Ashash. (B/186)

She continues with: “You are not really escaping two human commands. You are making a choice. You. That makes you men.” (B/186)

This final qualification is an important one. It is no programmed, preconceived concern for life which is being talked about here; no inbuilt rearing. It is contingent on choice, and on a choice that means self-denial (and in the case of the robot sergeant and his troops, self-destruction). This moment of confrontation in “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” is an ideological, ontological, and poetic climax. It works beautifully in context, and ends up making the robots and underpeople, newly awakened to love, seem so much more human than the human citizens whose daily routine has been disturbed by this incident. It is with savage irony that we are told: “The street had filled full of real people” (B/190), for these are the ones who have lost; they represent humanity locked in its “nightmare of perfection” (B/283), being seriously imperiled by the “bland hopeless happiness” (B/214) maintained by a decadent pre-Rediscovery Instrumentality.

There can be no real happiness without loss, trial, and sacrifice. And just as mankind will later attain a “real” life under the Rediscovery, so too do the underpeople yearn to be given “real life” (B/150)—that is, a life in which they are loved as sentient creatures and as having dignity.

The Glory and Affirmation of Man

Smith makes a religion of love and of life itself. All vitality, all Nature, is good (and is contained by its own natural justice), whether it be the life of a natural predator like Benjacomin Bozart, that of the lowliest underperson, or even that of some unchanged birds high on Alpha Ralpha Boulevard. When the cynical, jaded Jean-Jacques Vomact tells Rod that his servant Eleanor—disguised to look like Rod—will probably be killed, adding: “That’s what you bought her for, isn’t it? Aren’t you rich enough?,” Rod answers: “No, no, no... nobody is that rich” (N/127). If life alone is of such immense value, life enriched by love is invaluable. Only creatures who deny and abuse their natures, who are “contaminated” (N/199) by their own conscious actions, are the exception to this rule of life.

The Arachosians, for instance, are “not men” but “enemies” (N/199) (unlike the chicken-people of Linschoten XV, who are misguided and motivated by fear), not because of the cruel fate on Arachosia that has left them mutated into hermaphroditic klopts, but because of their willful acceptance of such a lot. By making a virtue of their grim situation, embracing a code of hatred for beauty and anything not their own twisted brand of normal, they have sunk through deprivation to depravity, sacrificing dignity and forsaking even the very idea of being human. The idea that can transform animals and machines into something more can work the other way, transforming careless men into something less. As with the robots outside Clown Town, just as choice makes us men, choice can also “unman” us. Along with hope and love, choice is the distinctively human way. Through the very act of choosing, even when the choice is not well-made (as in the case of the Arachosians and of Suzdal’s folly—a bad choice followed by an irresponsibly good one—and mark the tone of approbation taken by the narrator for the “human way” behind Suzdal’s freely-chosen solution to it):

It is the pride of the Instrumentality that the Instrumentality allows its officers to commit crimes or mistakes or suicide. The Instrumentality does the things for mankind that a computer cannot do. The Instrumentality leaves the human brain, the human choice, in action. (B/109)

With this love for all life there is also an appropriate respect for the unique individuality of each “sentient” thing. C’mell tells Rod:

“You’re not in the world just to own a piece of property or to handle a surname with a number after it. You’re you. There’s never been another you. There will never be another one, after you.” (N/170)

And, in the same vein, reinforcing this focus, she later pleads with him:

“Please make a trip with me, Rod. One last dangerous trip for you. Not for me. Not even for mankind. For life, Rod.” (N/234)

When he descends into the Downdeep-downdeep, confronts E’telekeli, and has the true loving custodianship of the underpeople revealed to him, Rod willingly uses his wealth to set up the One Hundred and Fifty Fund, not for man, not for the underpeople, but for life itself. He realizes that the underpeople, who are becoming “the masters of men” (N/241) by “fixing up” the new cultures revived and needed for the Rediscovery of Man, are blessed by the same life-awareness and life-reverence. As C’mell says:

“They make the same basic choices between power and beauty, between survival and self-sacrifice, between common sense and high courage.” (N/237)

These crucial choices highlight the best and most noble aspects of man; reaffirming yet again Joan’s teaching that:

…whatever seems human is human. It is the word that quickens, not the shape or the blood or the texture of flesh or hair or feathers. (N/211)

When Rod’s money is wanted “to improve the race of man” (N/248), we are aware that there is a common destiny that these improvements will help make possible, and we are aware of how encompassing the term “man” now is. An “ending of the ways” is brought still closer.

Just as Joan becomes the mouthpiece for Smith’s basic precepts for life, so too does the eagle-man, E’telekeli, become a speaker of truths and a virtual prophet-figure. His words to Rod are a synthesis of the great religious teachings, re-located into a new time and given a new application, but within the same general focus of ministering to life. He says to E’lamelanie:

“True men are not free either.... They too have grief, fear, birth, old age, love, death, suffering and the tools of their own ruin....” (N/210-211)

And in referring to the men of the Ancient World:

“They had all forgotten that humanness is itself imperfection and corruption, that which is perfect is no longer understandable...we must never be so foolish enough to look for perfection in this life.” (N/211)

Similarly, he declares:

“Freedom is what you do....” (N/211)

“Great beliefs always come out of the sewers of cities, not out of the towers of the ziggurats.” (N/211)

“We know that everything which loves has a value in itself.” (N/212)

“It is not necessary to do your duty joyfully—just to do it.” (N/212)

The presentation of E’telekeli is almost overdone, for Smith surrenders the lyrical, restrained richness of a shorter work like “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” for a much more concentrated, traditionally Christian presentation of the Holy Insurgency. But the latter day “Christianity” (characterized once again in its clandestine guise by the Sign of the Fish, and waiting for its Promised One) is of utmost importance simply because at its center lies the true mystery of a god of love. It is an agency of reverence and caring whereby people and underpeople might “mingle in complete comradeship” (N/219). When T’ruth refers to Casher’s “most important weapon in the fight” for freedom on Mizzer (Q/71), and then produces her crucifix, it is of “the ultimate and undefeatable wisdom of the Sign of the Fish” that she is speaking (Q/114): the wisdom that sees love as the basis of any life-experience and certainly of any god-experience.

Balancing this, we are to remember how stringent the Instrumentality is in policing the dissemination of organized religion, for that too is a crucial aspect of Smith’s attitude. In its custodianship and monitoring of human affairs, the “transplanting of religion” is one of the Instrumentality’s “hostile obsessions” (Q/73). Most of the precautions taken by this pragmatic and quasi-mystical authority are intended, first, to preserve and maintain its position, and then to make sure “that fanaticisms did not once more flare up between the stars, once again bringing wild hope and great death to all the mankinds” (Q/73).

But while this is a sound measure for government, the Instrumentality tends to overlook the spiritual mainsprings of such phenomena for the business of “keeping house.” Quite rightly, the spiritual experience is (at least initially) a solitary thing, and Smith is continually celebrating this ennobling and uplifting force in man, exploited and distorted by religion, but pure and transforming in its solitary inception within each individual.

Restoring this vital and healing perspective to a view of our humanity, it is up to figures like E’telekeli to remind Rod that “mankind has moments of enormous passion which will come again and in which we will share” (N/212). And while E’telekeli acknowledges a higher power as something which the underpeople “love and cherish” because they “need it more than do the people on the surface,” he reminds Rod and us that “the higher power and the large problems still wait for all men, whether men like it or not” (N/211-212).

The Christian cast to events in Downdeep-downdeep is later freed from polemics and dogma when the motives of the underpeople are revealed:

“We are afraid that Man himself will die and leave us alone in the universe. We need Man, and there is still an immensity of time before we all pour into a common destiny.... We are the creatures of Man. You are gods to us.” (N/247)

In turn, by implication, it is the faith of man and underpeople alike to worship the power that created all life, whatever it may be. Once again, the truths that are the motives in this ultimate self-sacrifice are pointed out to Rod by E’telekeli:

“Men are evil when they are frightened or bored. They are good when they are happy and busy. I want you to give your money to provide games, sports, competitions, shows, music, and a chance for honest hatred.” (N/249)

And behind it all, behind the joint plan of E’telekeli, Lord Jestocost, and the Lady Alice More (the architects of the Rediscovery, who comprise this steadily-working “lever of life upon times” (N/262)), there is the simplest motive:

“We are just altering the conditions of Man’s situation for the present historical period! We want to steer Mankind away from tragedy and self-defeat. Though the cliffs may crumble, we want Man to remain.” (N/249)

The implication too is that man cannot endure (or even remain man) unless he grows and develops; nor can he hope to grow without the spiritual awareness that is natural to him.

Also, Christianity is a blueprint for civilization. It is “the mystery behind the civilization of all these stars” (Q/129), for it has been the one agency which has kept man truly human. Early in Casher O’Neill’s progress, on the Gem Planet, Pontoppidan, Philip Vincent and his daughter, Genevieve, remind us of how “people lost people” (Q/30) during the Dark Ages, and of how civilization (“a woman’s choice first, and only later a man’s” (Q/30)) is not a first nature condition for man but rather a second nature condition, learned and mastered through conscious choice, self-control, and the achievement of nobility. Philip Vincent says, in commenting on how civilization is an ancient “lady’s word”:

“To be ‘civilized’ meant for people to be tame, to be kind, to be polished. If we kill this horse, we are wild. If we treat the horse gently, we are tame.” (Q/30)

But not weak!—for tameness means the potential for wildness held in check. The storms of our first nature all rage within, as a personal and private conflict. Each of us, alone, must win for ourselves the name “civilized.” “Lady” and “gentleman” are no idle terms in Smith’s universe: to be these things represents a hard-won victory over self.

And what better “civilizer,” what greater incentive for civilized behavior, than the notion that there exists a power which sanctions this ability to discriminate, to choose, and to grow through self-understanding? When Casher O’Neill sought victory over Colonel Wedder—a just vengeance through violence—he was pursuing Francis Bacon’s dictum that revenge is “a kind of wild justice.” The “tame” justice of a civilized man involves the self-restraint that can perceive an alternative way; employing non-violence and forgiveness, though again in a balanced fashion. Casher is “wild” enough to choose love as his weapon, because he sees that it will do the good. Though his “healing” of Wedder is dependent on the vast mental powers passed on from Agatha Madigan, Casher’s self-denying love is the ultimate force and reason behind those gifts enlivened in him.

The Word That Quickens

When the heretic pharaoh Akhnaton is described by the robot, Livius, as “one of the first and greatest of the more-than-ancient kings” (B/228), the love-credo of Smith’s Instrumentality canon is augmented yet again. In conventional terms, Livius’s words about Sun-boy’s namesake are not altogether true. As ruler of Egypt during the ill-fated Amarna period, Akhnaton was quite ineffectual: he lost provinces, his pacifism and monotheistic practices caused only trouble for Egypt, and his reign ended in blood and violence. But these negative aspects are those of that eternal struggle between the best and worst in man seen in “Think Blue, Count Two.” In terms of love, mercy, nobility, and the courage to stand against opposing ideas, Livius’s description of Akhnaton validly describes the first religion of love—the worshipping of one benign universal creator and life-source. This praiseworthy, love-based monotheism is later taken up by Christianity with its God-Nailed-High, though there is never any general endorsement by Smith of any one faith over another beyond such a foundation in love.

Love requires tolerance, and it is no accident that the taking of organized religion from one world to another is regarded by the Instrumentality as one of the few major crimes. Smith sees that it is in the exploitation of one’s individual views by another (whether of moral codes, political beliefs, or god-perception) that most of history’s greatest crimes have been committed. Within an attitude of love and tolerance, Smith has D’joan say:

“…it is the duty of life to find more than life, and to exchange itself for the higher goodness.” (B/191)

Smith’s stories inevitably chronicle such moments of exchange, leading individuals through self-discovery to the point where they discover answers for themselves. So important is this one dictum, that Smith has it later re-stated by the narrator himself:

“It’s the mission of life always to look for something better than itself, and then to try to trade life itself for meaning.” (B/208)

Such a mission is an individual one, the individual alone knowing when meaning has been attained.

But, whilst Smith would have us remember that mankind might get better, but not much wiser, it is clear that this is a case where travelling hopefully is better than arriving. The establishment of the Instrumentality after the Ancient Wars appears to be an act of progress offering a wonderful future for the race, though it did lead an unsuspecting humanity to “the edge of suicide” (B/283) before the Rediscovery of Man. The winning of rights for the underpeople begun in “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” is only a “relative” victory too. By the post-Rediscovery “Ballad of Lost C’mell” the underpeople have many new rights (they can earn money and hold property) but they are still second-rate citizens and they are mere “property” themselves. Jestocost is still seeking “a little more justice” for them (N/133) at the time of Rod McBan’s journey to Earth, and we witness the contempt displayed to Rod on Mars by Dr. Vomact when he considers the ease with which Rod impersonates a cat underperson.

Thus we have yet to see the true emancipation of the underpeople, and this reminds us that there are not always simplistic, spectacular transformations in any society, no matter how enlightened. We must keep in mind the fact that even the Rediscovery-envitalized Earth of Rod McBan’s day has “the vitality of the cesspool, of the compost heap” (N/178). Man still has a long way to go. There is, as well, the natural conservatism, the traditional views that must be changed and conditioned, as well as fear and avarice and the darker qualities of man’s nature. Not even love can eradicate all these obstacles immediately.

Love, after all, must happen within each individual as a personal experience, before the love-equation can be made manifest; and one person’s love-experience is always a notoriously provocative thing, causing a host of adverse reactions in the not-yet-converted. The beautiful things that make us truly human surface unevenly in any society as in any individual. (One need only recall the persecution of Christ or St Joan, Gandhi or Martin Luther King.)

It is important, too, that innocence, even the innocence of an Akhnaton or a Buddha, is not as out of place as it first seems. Rod displays the same naivety as such men when he regards the wonder of Earth for the first time and says, with ingenuous wisdom: “When people have such a wide, wet, beautiful world, all full of life, why should they kill me?” (N/142). It is no easy question to answer. The fault is not with Rod, it is with ourselves. We have our priorities wrong. Rod’s words, the wonderful wisdom underlying the vision of Akhnaton, even the sheer joy displayed by the little gun-watching robot, Harry Hadrian, when, relieved of duty, he asks, “Can-I-go-wait-in-the-garden-and-look-at-the-live-things?” (Q/105)—these are intimations of a true and healing humanity and of how we should go about finding it.

Jung has alerted us to the danger of failing to see our vital priorities, claiming that in our present-day age “we are courting disaster”43 through spiritual atrophy and neglect of our humanity; just as Smith is alerting his questing heroes and Lords. Like Jung, who says that any change must begin with the individual, Smith believes that each of us must, through self-realization, come to an understanding of what is best for us as a race. The “word that quickens” (N/211) is the word human (potentially, going even further, life) and the whole vast healing enterprise of the Rediscovery of Man is a rediscovery of self, the objective being a better, more complete humanity.

The Uttermost Mission

“To know one’s self is to know others,
for heart can understand heart.”

—Chinese proverb

Even at his most pragmatic and ruthless, Smith was a pro-Jungian thinker and writer. His whole life conforms to the creed of helping and healing; of close spiritual contact with all life. We see this in the repeated articulation of the archetypes; in his acceptance of the collective unconscious and his yearning for a higher meaning; in the creation and relocation of the great myths; in the rich patterns of symbols by which this is done. Of all the modern psychological and spiritual thinkers, it was Carl Jung who pointed out that it is the individual’s paramount obligation to discover and realize his own unique self. To do anything else was to cause tension and conflict between the various aspects of that self; psychic storms that reflected the lack of cohesion and adjustment in the personality—the lack of personal fulfillment.

Little wonder, then, that the turtle-girl, T’ruth, should say:

“You are right...about each of us being what she has to be. Isn’t that liberty itself? If we each one must be something, isn’t liberty the business of finding it out and then doing it—that one job, that uttermost mission compatible with our natures? How terrible it would be, to be something and never know what!” (Q/65)

So it is self-realization, the fulfillment of our natures, that is vitally important.

In this struggle, death is immaterial. Even the horse on Pontoppidan—its thoughts monitored by the dog-woman telepath, D’alma—can discriminate:

“Do you know what dying is?”

Thought the horse promptly: “Certainly. No-horse.”

“Do you know what life is?”

“Yes. Being a horse.” (Q/26)

In other words, fulfilling his nature, being everything he can be. When Casher asks, “Do you want to die?,” he is given the answer: “To no-horse? Yes, if this room, forever, is the end of things” (Q/27). When asked what it would prefer, the horse’s answer is quick: “Dirt beneath my hooves, and wet air again, and a man on my back” (Q/27). In short, true to its nature, the horse wants fulfillment in terms of a horse life-view: it is totally itself. This recalls the truism in D.H. Lawrence’s poem, “Lizard”: “If men were as much men as lizards are lizards they’d be worth looking at.”44

Death is no enemy when it provides relief and a release from what is not natural. Indeed, for the fulfilled—as with Laird, Jestocost, Sto Odin and D’joan—it can be a blessing: the moment of transfer and transcendence. Life to us, as for the horse, is a fulfilling of one’s nature. T’ruth tells Casher:

“That’s what life is, isn’t it? Doing what you have to do in the first place. We’re lucky people if we find it out.” (Q/101-102)

The Meek Shall Inherit

Having considered a wide array of themes and stories, it will be useful to conclude by examining a single story—showing the patterns of winning and conflict and victory, and attainment-of-love-and-humanity at work, in a set piece.

This story is “On the Sand Planet” (1965)—the third part of Quest of Three Worlds and the next-to-last Cordwainer Smith story published before Linebarger’s death in 1966. Along with the final story published in his lifetime, “Under Old Earth” (1966), it is perhaps the most elusive and potentially most difficult story in the Instrumentality canon, reflecting the same growing mystical dimension as that final tale of the Lord Sto Odin’s descent into the Gebiet—a mystical dimension always present in classical Instrumentality stories but never before so strongly displayed.

Here, in Casher O’Neill’s return to Mizzer, we have a real spiritual progress—a pilgrimage laden with private sanctions and personal revelations. Though it has a pronounced Christian cast to it (through the various devotional references—which account for much of its difficulty) the story also bridges the gap between the great religious teachings of East and West, synthesizing the best of human beliefs. By the time Casher returns to the desert planet, Mizzer, through Space Three, he has learned from T’ruth the lesson of the Old Strong Religion: that the meek (but not necessarily the weak) shall inherit, and that love is the greatest weapon. From the moment he defeats Colonel Wedder by changing him from within, making him “more human” (Q/122), there is only one task left for Casher—the “uttermost mission” anticipated by T’ruth: “I have to find out who I myself may be” (Q/124).

The crisis that Casher feels once he has won is crucial, for it challenges the whole point of committing oneself to the struggle in the first place. Even though he has done what “he had to do” (Q/125), even though he has done “what is right” (Q 125), and can anticipate a continuing self-discovery when he speaks with his mother, Trihaet (“I have done what I had to do and much later perhaps, I will come back and see you again. When both of us know more about what we have to do” (Q/126), he is confronted, for a moment, with one of the most terrible fears a person can have: the prospect of a purposeless life. Like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, Casher has entered the Slough of Despond:

Where do I go now? thought he. Where do I go when I’ve done everything I had to do? When I’ve loved everyone I wanted to love, when I have been everything I had to be? What does a man with a mission do when the mission is fulfilled? Who can be more hollow than a victor? If I had lost, I could still want revenge. But I haven’t. I’ve won. And I’ve won nothing.... Where do I go when I have nowhere to go? What do I become when I am not ready for death and I have no reason whatsoever. (Q/128-29)

These questions are, of course, asked in a moment of self-doubt, when one can see the future only in terms of a completed past, which is nearsightedness in the extreme. The points raised by Casher’s questions are simply not true. From the moment Casher asks them, the rest of “On the Sand Planet” shows how pointless and unfounded his misgivings are. He has not yet loved everyone he has wanted to love, for he has not yet met Calelta. He cannot have won “nothing” when he has won—through love—a non-violent peace for the whole world (a victory that is another stage in his continuing growth), or when he has won the self-awareness that brings him to such a point of crisis as his present one. A less civilized (wild) or a more civilized (tame) person would not have had these doubts, but Casher is a true man, balanced between the tame and the wild, still raw with his own inner progress-through-adversity.

Nor can he have truly fulfilled his mission when the “uttermost mission” is not yet completed (it cannot have been, for such a task can never end with such despair; that alone is an assurance that the progress is far from over). How can any real person ever say that he has been all that he had to be and so lacks a reason for living? Casher has forgotten himself.

But this is the black night of the soul, and from this point Casher moves toward a real victory—over fear and loneliness, over ideas and self. (He has already shown compassion and courage and remained human among the stars.) Later, motivated by the mystery of the First, Second, and Third Forgotten Ones, he begins his real progress “to find himself again” (Q/133). Ironically, this brings the quest full circle, for Casher ends up understanding the happiness of the slatternly dog-woman, D’alma, and being able to answer the questions raised when he first met her on Pontoppidan:

Work had been her life and she had had plenty of it. Casher O’Neill felt a twinge of envy when he realized that happiness goes by the petty chances of life and not by the large destiny. This dog-woman, with her haggard face and her stringy gray hair, had more love, happiness and sympathy than Kuraf had found with his pleasures, Colonel Wedder with his powers, or himself with his crusade. Why did life do that? Was there no justice ever? Why should a worn-out old underwoman be happy when he was not? (Q/25)

True to the mystery of the Three Forgotten Ones by which Casher’s particular progress is directed, D’alma demonstrates just how “the meek shall inherit.” Casher’s reflections about her are truer than he knows. When he considers that “work had been her life and she had had plenty of it,” the ambiguity is clear to us: she has had plenty of life!

By the end of “On the Sand Planet” Casher O’Neill has left behind the City of Hopeless Hope (where all forms of organized religion are carried out) just as he has left behind the City of the Perfect Ones (where the Jwindz dwell in their sterile perfection). Both are cities that “stay away from life” (Q/141). He has even left Kermesse Dorgueil, the city where all happy things “come together” (Q/140), but “where the man and the two pieces of wood never filter through” (Q/140). Though a veritable Mecca for thousands from all over the human universe—even known and cherished by some ex-Lords of the Instrumentality as an ultimate, civilized goal and a haven of true peace—it is not enough. Given the great wisdom and controlling benevolence of the Instrumentality, Kermesse Dorgueil is an enlightened and working concern. As Howard says: “We have nothing here but simple and clean pleasures; we have only those vices which help and support” (Q/141). To be sure, it is “a very civilized place” (Q/141), but it is too tame, lacking something of the “wild” first nature that makes man human. Folly later reminds us of the necessary balance, the paradox of what it means to be human; she tells Samm:

“Life always trembles on the edge of disappointment. If we hadn’t been vital and greedy and lustful and yearning, if we hadn’t had big thoughts and wanted bigger ones, we would have stayed animals, like all the little things back on Earth. It’s strong life that brings us so close to death.” (Q/153)

This is Smith as ethical pragmatist again, the same informed idealist who excused the behavior of Benjacomin Bozart but not the Arachosians.

So, Kermesse Dorgueil, idyllic and refined, is nonetheless unbalanced, and so not altogether human. Again, the uttermost quest remains: to fulfill our natures, to be what the “word that quickens” would have all sentient life be—human. About to move on from Kermesse Dorgueil with Calelta, Casher says:

“I am looking...for something which is more than power between the worlds. I am looking for a sphinx that is bigger than the sphinx on old Earth. For weapons which cut sharper than lasers, for forces that move faster than bullets. I am looking for something which will take the power away from me and put the simple humanity back into me.” (Q/146)

Smith makes Casher reject those centers where there are the hidebound, death-oriented religions, or the enlightened, atheistic (but sterile and foolish) humanists, or the elegant, dignified, and tolerant vitalists, and moves him on to a more personal and esoteric Adam and Eve rebirth with Calelta. He opts for simplicity and exuberance and new untainted beginnings, full of innocence through experience—the next stage in an unending cycle of hope and renewal, with victory made all the more sweet through loss and suffering.

The terms of expression by which Casher understands what is needed to draw nearer to a final victory are mystical:

“I am looking for something which will be nothing, but a nothing I can serve and can believe in.” (Q/146)

When they reach the Quel of the Thirteenth Nile—“The final source and the mystery” (Q/147)—Calelta observes that this is their destination.

“But this is nothing,” said Casher.

“Exactly. Nothing is victory, nothing is arrival, nowhere is getting there.” (Q/147)

This is a baffling reply from Calelta, tapping the vast mysteries of the Orient—from Zen to Taoism—that were as much a part of Smith’s understanding of life as were the Christian mysteries. While Casher—operating in terms of his own spiritual imperatives—feels that their goal is there, where he feels “The presence of the First Forbidden One, the Second Forbidden One and the Third Forbidden One” (Q/148), Calelta—oddly in command of the situation and very much reflecting the archetype of an all-knowing Earth Mother—tells him:

“We’re Adam and Eve in a way. It’s not up to us to be given a god or to be given a faith. It’s up to us to find the power and this is the quietest and last of the searching places. The others were just phantoms, hazards on our route. The best way to find freedom is not to look for it, just as you obtained your utter revenge on Wedder by doing him a little bit of good.... You have won at last the immense victory that makes all battles seem vain.” (Q/148)

It is by her words as traditional “civilizer” and “humanizer” that we are taken away from a merely neo-Christian resolution for Casher’s quest to a private, nonpartisan, mystical resolution. As true humans, they await a revelation from that higher power to which their humanity has exposed them. How ironical are Casher’s earlier thoughts, when he thought that he had “nowhere to go,” for the searching individual need not go anywhere: the place of his revelation is within himself.

Later, in “Three to a Given Star,” we hear of Casher and Calelta again, doing their great service for life, happy and fulfilled, themselves now an example and an agency of fulfillment for others. This happy state, achieved through self-fulfillment, through being human, is sustained in this story. When the huge mechanical body of Samm is left “to stand forever as a monument of human victory” (Q/171), it is a monument to “humanity” the concept—rediscovered by those three “re-born” ones, whose self-realization has made them fit to be truly human again. Ellen/Folly says, echoing Casher and Calelta, “I have had to come to the end of the stars to get what I wanted, to be what I could become” (Q/174). Alma/Finsternis makes a similar remark: “Where else could I turn out to be me?” (Q/174).

An Ending of the Ways

“One generation opens the road upon which another generation travels.”

—Chinese proverb

To conclude, then: the winnings, so wonderful and pure in their telling, are largely private things—amplified out into the larger world, but nevertheless often only initially “relative” victories, just as the losses are relative. The cycle continues; the struggle continues; for this is the lot of creatures forever at war with themselves—individuals experiencing their individual fulfillments and being able to share something of these experiences with others.

And while we are told that “centuries passed before mankind finally came to grips with the problem of the underpeople and decided what ‘life’ was within the limits of the human community” (B/193), it is not this final never-recounted victory that is so very wonderful, but the fact that the struggle is made at all, by creatures forever striving, forever hoping, through love and true caring and a sense of justice. We are tantalized by an entry in J.J. Pierce’s Timeline referring to the never-finished, projected series The Lords of the Afternoon, which states: “Common destiny of men and underpeople; religious climax” (B/ix), for this suggests the wonderful victories and resolutions in store, so often hinted at in the stories we have to hand.

We already have such promising relative victories in the appearance of a person like T’ruth, for she is “the first of the underpeople really and truly to surpass humanity” (Q/103). Meeting such positive developments halfway, we find changes in the Instrumentality itself—suggestions that this nobly-motivated but sometimes fallible institution is once again firmly and wisely in control of the affairs of all humanity, well on the way to achieving the “common destiny” of men and underpeople, and the religious “climax” (B/ix)45 referred to by Pierce: the “ending of the ways” foreseen by the robot Livius. For instance, when Casher rejects the three cities that lie beyond the Ninth Nile, even the city known and sought by so many citizens of the Instrumentality-governed universe; when he has gone beyond the Deep Dry Lake of the Damned Irene to the “Shrine of Shrines” (Q/143) that is in fact no church, nothing more than just a place (a goal that is to be made meaningful by an inner revelation)—it is then that Calelta, an ex-Lady of the Instrumentality, says:

“I was once Instrumentality, my Lord, and I know that the Instrumentality likes to do things suddenly and victoriously. When I was there we never accepted defeat, but we never paid anything extra. The shortest point between two points might look like the long way around; it isn’t. It’s merely the cheapest human way of getting there. Has it ever occurred to you, that the Instrumentality might be rewarding you for what you have done for this planet?” (Q/149)

This important revelation comes at the very end of “On the Sand Planet” and is never challenged or undercut. It is a final reassurance that mankind is in safe hands, in the hands of “the oldest servant of mankind, the Instrumentality itself” (N/272).

Once again that ruling body is benevolent and effective, tolerant and just; the good and faithful custodian of humanity (as an idea as well as a physical fact). Now, more than ever before, it conforms to the distinct religious connotations of the word “instrumentality” (noted by J. J. Pierce when he says that “in Roman Catholic and Episcopalian theology the priest performing the sacrament is the ‘instrumentality’ of God Himself” (B/xiv-xv). Its chosen members (who are “called” to service—to a life of sacrifice—as Eleanor is called in Norstrilia) are “the instruments of human destiny” (B/xv), motivated by a reverence for life, governed by love, mindful of a higher power behind the humanity whose good stewards they are.

An Immolation in Perpetual Hope

“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”

—R. L. Stevenson

We should not be surprised by the wonderful resolution to a life such as Casher’s; we are to have faith and hope. Just as we can make our own projection of “God is Love and all Life; we know Love and Life; God, Life and Love is us,” so we should accept the stories’ idea that it is in each of us, through knowing love, to be able to work miracles.

There is always the suggestion of this miraculous, transforming dimension. Talatashar makes a significant remark to the recuperating Veesey:

“You saved us all.... You tuned in help. You let Sh’san work. It all came through you. If you hadn’t been honest and kind and friendly, if you hadn’t been terribly intelligent, no cube could have worked. That wasn’t any dead mouse working miracles on us. It was your mind and your own goodness that saved us.” (I/118)

In other words, despite a scientific and empirical basis, it is goodness and faith that summoned up the mystical wardens (all of whom are strong archetypes). Love and a kind heart can work miracles, whether it be from Veesey, Go-Captain Taliano, or Casher O’Neill; in C’mell or in Mercer down on Shayol. Such prospects always lie behind mankind’s somewhat wearying progress.

Perhaps our best and truest comfort is contained in the “fringe” story, “Nancy,” when Gordon Greene returns from space reflecting how:

The effect of Nancy was an immolation in perpetual hope, the promise of something that could never be lost, and a promise of something that cannot be lost is often better than a reality which can be lost. (I/200)

An “immolation in perpetual hope” is what Smith’s stories provide. When we cannot be sure of arriving at our destination, nor be certain of the shape our destiny will take; when the journey is all we know; then all we can seek to do is travel hopefully, with faith. And as the technician tells Veesey:

“The hard part is when you don’t quite succeed and you have to keep on fighting. When you must keep going on and on and on in the face of really hopeless odds, of real temptations to despair.” (B/56)

These “real temptations to despair” are the perils of the way. It is no coincidence that conflicts we have discussed recall those besetting Christian in Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, for his, too, are struggles against self-doubt, fear and loneliness, evil and despair, and the hardships of the way.46 And just as faith, hope, and love are Christian’s weapons for obtaining victory, so are they the prime weapons for personal victory in the Instrumentality canon.

When in Man and his Symbols Carl Jung notes how mankind is “courting” disaster in the present century, he is speaking of a condition of carelessness and neglect very much like that unwittingly permitted by the Instrumentality. When he also writes that change for the better can only begin “with an individual; it might be any one of us,” we have a localization of responsibility onto individual commitment which closely agrees with Linebarger’s beliefs. By his written work and by his own example, this is a responsibility he would urge us to accept: to be civilized and human and to each become a “lever of life” upon the times in which we live.

When, too, Laurens van der Post advances Jung’s claim that the task of man is “to illuminate the ancient truths, the ancient intimations of the unconscious, the ancient intimations of the soul” so that balance is restored and healing can begin, he also reminds the individual who would do this that instead of trying to fathom these truths in their ancient manifestations, he should try to make them “immediate and contemporary, to give them a meaning in the here and now.”47

This is what Linebarger has done in his Instrumentality canon. When we witness the hope and humanity that sustains the underpeople, that motivates Jestocost, Sto Odin and E’telekeli, that brings Casher through his moment of despair, that stands with so many of his characters in the face of the “dark forever”—we take these things together with those acts of charity and kindness and honor that marked his professional life as Paul Linebarger, the political scientist and military adviser, we see to what extent this “Cordwainer Smith” became an effective “lever of life” himself, and a true “immolation in perpetual hope” for us all.

Appendix

The collection titled The Best of Cordwainer Smith provides a sampling of stories which reveal Smith’s major thematic emphases. (However, one wishes this collection included the neglected “Think Blue, Count Two,” which is a key thematic and stylistic work in the canon.)

SCANNERS LIVE IN VAIN

Martel and Adam Stone win freedom for the scanners and habermans and a future for humanity in space. Martel wins a normal life with Luci. “And if he won, he won Luci. If he lost, he lost nothing—an unconsidered and expendable haberman. It happened to be himself. But in contrast to the immense reward, to mankind, to the Confraternity, to Luci, what did that matter?” (B/30).

THE LADY WHO SAILED THE SOUL

Helen America wins the love of Mr. Gray-no-more, and through self-sacrifice and perseverance, she strives to keep it. “The hard part is when you don’t quite succeed and you have to keep on fighting. When you must keep going on and on and on in the face of really hopeless odds, of real temptations to despair” (B/56).

THE GAME OF RAT AND DRAGON

One episode in the life of Underhill, his fellow pinlighters and their cat partners as they win new worlds for mankind. An insight into the conquest of space and the price paid to keep it.

THE BURNING OF THE BRAIN

The classic Smith adventure: tightly written, containing all the heroism, passion, honor, and formality of Smith’s best stories. A classic example, too, of the importance of the theme of winning in Smith’s canon. In making a routine planoform jump from the planet Sherman, the great Go-Captain Magno Taliano, master of the Wu-Feinstein, discovers that a locksheet is missing and that his ship is doomed to be stranded in transit, “lost as no ship had ever been lost before” (B/89). Taliano loses his sanity, burning out his brain to bring his lost ship home. Through this final act as Go-Captain he wins innocence and peace in love; Dolores Oh obtains her ultimate reassurance; and Dita wins all his skills and aptitudes in a wonderful “rebirth” through telepathic transference.

THE CRIME AND THE GLORY
OF COMMANDER SUZDAL

Commander Suzdal discovers the “civilization” of the once-human klopts of Arachosia—creatures who have renounced their humanity—and so threatens to lose the security of mankind. By creating a race of sentient Cats, he wins back this security. Choice is celebrated as a major factor determining the attainment or loss of our humanity.

GOLDEN THE SHIP WAS—OH! OH! OH!

Lord Admiral Tedesco and Prince Lovaduck defeat Raumsog. The decadent, effete Tedesco wins for himself a moment of pure joy in service: “Earth won and the others lost because the leaders of Earth never put other considerations ahead of survival” (B/114).

THE DEAD LADY OF CLOWN TOWN

By losing herself among the renegade underpeople of Clown Town on Fomalhaut III, the already-lost witch-girl Elaine joins D’joan, Hunter, and the Lady Panc Ashash, and is able to help “bring mankind back to humanity” (B/141) by giving the Instrumentality a valuable insight into its own decadence and nearsightedness. D’joan loses her own life to win “real life” (B/150) for all who seek a way through love. Elaine wins nobility and understanding, and “the world`s great age begins anew” (B/137).

UNDER OLD EARTH

Lord Sto Odin goes down into the Gebiet to win “a cure for the weary happiness of mankind” (B/215). He does this by destroying Sun-boy and discovering Santuna, who is to become the Lady Alice More. She will become an important champion of life in the Rediscovery of Man.

MOTHER HITTON’S LITTUL KITTONS

An insight into the price of peace: eternal vigilance. With so much to lose, Norstrilia must win at any cost.

ALPHA RALPHA BOULEVARD

The discovery of self, free will, and true freedom (to choose, to suffer, to die) under the Rediscovery. Paul and Virginia, despite their impending loss, “are freer than people have been for a hundred centuries” (B/304).

THE BALLAD OF LOST C’MELL

Jestocost, C’mell, and E’telekeli work to buy time (and so a future) for the underpeople; time in which to draw misguided humankind back onto the path of love and kindness—“the best part there is to being people” (B/330). Jestocost, who had so little love in his life, wins in death a vision and understanding of C’mell’s love for him. Of the plot, involving C’mell:

She was a girly girl and they were true men, the lords of creation, but she pitted her wits against them and she won. It had never happened before, and it is sure never to happen again, but she did win. (B/315)

A PLANET NAMED SHAYOL

On the hell planet, Shayol, Mercer and the Lady Da must struggle to remain human. It is Mercer who fights “to keep the honor he knew before he came to Shayol” (B/367) and who, when “the drugs were deepest and the pain was greatest... was the one who always tried to think” (B/377). By not losing his conscious mind, by his example of humanity to others, he not only wins his humanity back, but is also instrumental in defeating the cruel Empire that has sent him there.

THINK BLUE, COUNT TWO

Veesey, Talatashar, and Trece win their way to Wereld Schemering through the ordeal of space. Good in man wins over evil; man’s humanity defeats his darker side. Talatashar wins Veesey and self-realization.

Work Discussed

The page references cited in this study are to the following editions, coded in the text as indicated:

B = J.J. Pierce, ed., The Best of Cordwainer Smith (Ballantine, 1975)

I = Cordwainer Smith, The Instrumentality of Mankind (Ballantine, 1979)

N = Cordwainer Smith, Norstrilia (Ballantine, 1975)

Q = Cordwainer Smith, Quest of the Three Worlds (Ace, 1966).

Other source material includes:

Andrew Porter, ed., Exploring Cordwainer Smith (Algol, 1975)

Cordwainer Smith, Preface to Space Lords (Pyramid, 1965).

Dedication

From Mottile to Ambaloxi

Through Space Three and back again,

For Sheridan—a lever.

39. The page references cited are to the editions coded in the text as indicated at the end of this study.

40. A rum victory, this: “From Gustible’s Planet” is, by its tone, the only distinctly anomalous tale in the canon, less integral even than the tenuously-linked “Nancy.”

41. Cecil Y. Lang, ed., The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle (1968), 383.

42. Laurens van der Post citing Carl Jung, BBC television program, The Story of Carl Gustav Jung (1975).

43. Carl G. Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964), 101.

44. D. H. Lawrence, Selected Poems (1950), 156.

45. In view of the City of Hopeless Hope, “spiritual” would be a better term here.

46. Without wishing to make more of Linebarger’s High Anglican upbringing than is possibly relevant, there can be no doubt that Bunyan’s work was a formative text. There is much of Mr. Worldly-Wiseman in the inhabitants of Jwindz Jo and Kermesse Dorgueil, and many correlatives for the Slough of Despond and the Giant Despair.

47. Laurens van der Post citing Jung, The Story of Carl Gustav Jung.