 
Dr. Paul Linebarger, aka Cordwainer Smith
Cats, cruelty and children
Idealism and morality in the
Instrumentality of Mankind
[I found this article in the WayBack Machine, no current links for attrbution, so my apologies in advance for once again simply repurposing* content I find appropriate and essential for Sun Pop Blue.—kb]
"The Lords of the Instrumentality who are here
on Fomalhaut III. There is the Lord Femtiosex, who is just and without
pity ... There is the Lady Goroke ... who has shown kindnesses to
underpeople, as long as the kindnesses were lawful ones. And there is
the Lady Arabella Underwood, whose justice no man can understand."
["The Dead Lady of Clown Town",
Cordwainer Smith]
The science-fiction writings of Cordwainer Smith consist of some
twenty-odd short stories and two novels, which chart the history of an
evolving civilisation over some fifteen thousand years. The history is
internally consistent, and each story contributes to a coherent picture
of the technological, social and spiritual development of the future
described.
In real life, Smith was Dr Paul Linebarger, Professor in Asiatic
Studies at Johns Hopkins university and colonel in US military
intelligence, accomplished linguist and foreign policy adviser to the
state department. His writing style, partly inspired by Chinese
narrative techniques, more closely resembles poetry than the
conventional dry prose of science-fiction, and his stories are dense
with literary and historical references and more or less complex
linguistic puns. Running through the entire work is a consistent
morality and outlook, whose principal themes recur again and again in
stories often written many years apart.
The broad outlines of Smith's future civilisation can be briefly
sketched. Travel between the stars and the consequent expansion of
human culture through the universe is made possible by the invention of
'planoforming' ships that travel faster than light, and by the
development of novel systems to protect their passengers and crew
against the dangers of space. In this new interstellar culture, true
humans live lives of privileged ease, while work is done by robots and
by 'underpeople', animals genetically modified to have near-human
intelligence and form. Over it all presides the Instrumentality, a
benign but absolute dictatorship composed of a ruling nobility who use
their technological and telepathic powers to maintain the status quo
and to dispense an abstract and dispassionate justice. It is against
this background that the principal themes of Smith's stories - love,
courage, cruelty, hope, innocence, belief - are played out.
*Repurposing: dot-com-speak for outright theivery.
Cats
Smith's primary purpose in writing his stories seems to have been to
entertain himself and a select few appreciative readers. He says as
much in an epilogue published in the collection "Space Lords". This
being the case, he was free to indulge himself by seeding his writings
with complex literary and linguistic jokes, and by concentrating on his
own favourite subjects.
An obvious example is the special place reserved for cats in his
work. The description of the 'partners' that help the pinlighters
protect planoforming ships in "The game of rat and dragon" is a virtual eulogy to all things feline. In "The ballad of lost C'mell",
C'mell is a cat-derived underperson (named for Smith's own cat,
Melanie) who forms the central pivot on which the programme of moral
growth for his future society turns. Griselda, in "Down to a sunless sea", embodies the grace and innocence of Xanadu as much as her human counterparts, Madu and Lari.
It is not sheer self-indulgence that motivates Smith to give place
to cats in his work. Throughout the stories, animals and underpeople
represent qualities which the wise, dispassionate, nearly immortal
humans of the Instrumentality lack. Cats in particular are symbolic of
grace and affection, while dogs stand for loyalty and devotion. By
adopting the genre of science fiction and inventing the device of
underpeople created from animals, Smith could use the traits of the
different animal species as symbolic tokens in his moral and
metaphysical program.
The underpeople exist in Smith's works as moral guides to their
human masters. The fact that they are not seen as such by their
contemporaries indicates the moral sterility of civilisation under the
Instrumentality. It is a bull-derived underperson, B'dikkat, who
recalls the Empire to its moral duty in "A planet named Shayol":
"You understand people. I only obey them. But this I will not obey."
["A planet named Shayol", Cordwainer Smith]
The despised D'alma in "Quest of the three worlds", is both wiser and better than her human masters. In "The Dead Lady of Clown Town",
the forbearance of the underpeople of the Brown and Yellow Corridor
with respect to the human woman Elaine contrasts with the casual manner
in which they would be - and are - exterminated by the true men if they
set foot outside. D'joan, in the same story, is more than a match both
intellectually and morally for Lord Femtiosex.
More seriously still, the true humans who reject the underpeople
reject not only their moral responsibilities, but even something of
their own humanity. Smith's message is that humanity requires not only
the intelligence and rigid justice of the true men but also the
qualities of the underpeople - the grace and affection displayed by the
cats and cat-derived underpeople (C'mell, Griselda), the loyalty and
wisdom of the dog people (D'joan, D'alma), the patience of the turtles
(T'ruth), and the unswerving bovine sense of right and wrong of the
bull-man B'dikkat. Even the brief, squalid and chaotic lives of the
underpeople have a dignity and a richness - in terms of the possibility
of love and hope - which the ordered near-immortality of the true
humans lacks. A crucial element of the Rediscovery of Man is the
reduction of the human lifespan to something closer to that of the
underpeople, so that true humans may live as intensely as their
animal-derived fellow citizens.
The underpeople stand for natural justice, a justice which thinks
and feels, where the Instrumentality represents an absolute, impartial
blind justice. While Smith recognises the value of impartiality, he
also recognises one of its possible consequences. It is this that forms
the theme of the next section.
Cruelty
Cruelty is a key theme in Smith's work, and is to be understood in a
very special sense. Cruelty for Smith is not sadism but expediency. It
is not enjoyment of the pain of others, but rather a kind of deliberate
insensitivity to their pain, motivated often by a code of justice as
high-minded as it is rigid and bureaucratic. Atrocities are the product
not of viciousness, but of good intentions and high ideals that make no
allowance for humanity and the rights of the individual.
Cruelty is, above all, the prerogative of the Lords of the Instrumentality. Two Lords, Jestocost in "The Ballad of Lost C'mell" and Crudelta in "Drunkboat", even receive the word as a proper name.
Jestocost - 'cruelty' in Russian - is thus named by his mother to atone for the atrocity committed by Femtiosex in "The Dead Lady of Clown Town",
but Crudelta - 'cruelty' in Italian - is cruel himself, in the sense in
which Smith understands it. In the interests of a scientific
experiment, Crudelta plays with the lives of two people, fatally
injuring the one to induce the necessary rage in the other that will
enable him to leap through space-3 to her side.
Crudelta's cruelty goes unpunished because this kind of cruelty is
practically the essence of the Instrumentality. Rather than punishing
him, his fellow Lords condemn him to:
"... long life, great responsibility, immense rewards and the fatigue of being his own difficult and complicated self." ["Drunkboat", Cordwainer Smith]
Smith constantly reminds us that the Instrumentality exists to
maintain the status quo. It is a utilitarian organisation, concerned
only with the greatest good for the greatest number which, in this
case, does not include robots or underpeople.
"We know what the Lords Femtiosex and Limanao thought they were doing. They were maintaining established order." ["The Dead Lady of Clown Town", Cordwainer Smith]
The execution of the underpeople and the burning of D'joan is
justified by this need to maintain stability. Even Femtiosex's invasion
of D'joan's mind - 'the cruellest step of all' - as she burns at the
stake, so that she loses her composure and howls out her pain is
intended only to transmit a lesson to the spectators. Femtiosex's
judgement and that of the Instrumentality is, as ever, '... just and
without pity ...'. His cruelty is disinterested, expedient.
"I am not a bad man, little dog-girl, but you are a bad animal and we must make an example of you. Do you understand that?" ["The Dead Lady of Clown Town", Cordwainer Smith]
Individual happiness is always sacrificed to the general good, as in the case of the psionic used against Raumsog's empire:
"... a poor crazy little girl who
wept, and whom the Lords of the Instrumentality had cruelly refused to
heal because her talents were better in unshielded form ..." ["Golden the ship was - oh! oh! oh!", Cordwainer Smith]
or Rambo and Elizabeth, Crudelta's subjects in "Drunkboat".
Despite this, Smith never presents the Instrumentality as
tyrannical. It is merely pragmatic, with a well-defined and not
unworthy mandate.
"Watch, but do not govern; stop war, but do not wage it; protect, but do not control; and first, survive!" ["Drunkboat", Cordwainer Smith]
The irony and the tragedy - the imbalance at the heart of the
Instrumentality - is that in the pursuit of these goals, any step that
the Lords of the Instrumentality choose to take can be justified.
There are some genuine tyrants in Smith's work and they too can be
cruel, but once again only from the best intentions. Kuat, in "Down to a Sunless Sea",
is probably the most evil person in Smith's writings, but even he
believes that he is being kind when he cripples Lari. Kuraf, in "Quest of the Three Worlds",
is a relatively harmless degenerate concerned only with his own
pleasure but the virtuous and idealistic Wedder, who overthrows him,
puts his people:
"... through a dozen torments for a Utopia which never quite comes true." ["Quest of the Three Worlds", Cordwainer Smith]
What Smith evidently feared was the cruelty of systems or ideologies
rather than of individuals. The order that the Instrumentality
maintains is seen as a good, but it is not a sufficient good to justify
the abuses it inflicts. Moreover, it is a good that excludes many of
those who have a right to it - the underpeople, who in their ability to
feel and to love, are more fully human than the true humans who alone
have rights under the Instrumentality of Man. For human civilisation to
attain its full moral growth, this right must be recognised, and the
abstract justice of the Instrumentality replaced by something more
compassionate.
Children
With the loss of Smith's notebooks, it sometimes becomes difficult
to work out the order in which the different stories should be fitted
together. The recognised canon of Instrumentality stories contains at
least one that should not be there at all. This is "The colonel came back from Nothing-at-All",
and it should be eliminated because it is one of the rare occasions in
which Smith falls into a gross anachronism.
The doctors attempting to
heal Colonel Harkening make use of pinlighter's helmets - but the
technique of pinlighting only evolved after the successful development
of planoforming, the very technology which was being tested by
Harkening. It is slightly as if Wilbur Wright, injured in a test flight
of the Wright Flyer, should be taken to hospital by helicopter. The
story can only have been written - it was never apparently published
before being collected into the anthology "The Instrumentality of
Mankind" - before Smith had worked out the full and consistent details
of his future history. The events of the story are never referred to by
any other story (the true Instrumentality stories are full of
cross-references) and Smith even re-uses the names of the doctors -
Vomact, Grosbeck, Timofeyev - and the key situation in "Drunkboat", suggesting that he had decided to remove "The colonel came back" from the canon.
In another sense, however, "The colonel came back"
is a typical Smith story in that it contains one of his prototypical
figures, the innocent girl-child. Liana, the telepath who heals the
colonel, is the first occurrence of a type which comes to dominate the
most crucial sequences of Smith's writings:
"... scarcely more than twelve. She
was a little girl with a long, lean face, a soft, mobile mouth, quick
gray-green eyes, a mop of tan hair that fell over her shoulders. She
had expressive, tapering hands. She showed no shock at all at the sight
of the naked man lost in the depths of his insanity." ["The colonel came back from Nothing-at-All", Cordwainer Smith]
She is a child who is at once wise and innocent, a healer who
preaches a message of spiritual love, a pre-adolescent who nonetheless
has about her the very faintest aura of sexuality. Liana is also,
significantly, a Quaker, something that will be discussed at greater
length in the next section.
The classic little-girl figures in Smith's work are of course D'joan ("The Dead Lady of Clown Town") and T'ruth ("Quest of the Three Worlds").
Both of these are innocents who contain the wisdom of centuries - the
significantly-named T'ruth has the memories of the witch-woman the
Hechizera of Gonfalon, D'joan has the combined memories of Elaine and
the Hunter and the Lady Panc Ashash and more besides. For Smith,
innocence and ignorance are by no means synonymous. Both are spiritual
healers - T'ruth heals Casher O'Neill, while D'joan's ministry is to an
entire culture. Both face martyrdom, or the threat of martyrdom.
T'ruth's relationship with Casher includes a mischievous and ambiguous
sexual element that is at odds with her substantive age, while D'joan
is present, if not aware, while Elaine and the Hunter make love, and
the description of her dead body after her martyrdom also explicitly
calls attention to her physical sexual characteristics.
The same pattern is repeated with other female characters in Smith's stories. Veesey in "Think blue, count two"
is also a classic girl-child; precociously sexual in her relations with
Trece, threatened with an unspeakable martyrdom by Talatashar, finally
victorious through her innocence and love. She is less selfless than
T'ruth or D'joan, but otherwise she fits the pattern well. Genevieve,
in "Quest of the Three Worlds", is physically and emotionally mature, but when she links telepathically with Casher O'Neill her thoughts are:
"brilliant, clean, bright, innocent"
["Quest of the Three Worlds", Cordwainer Smith]
Even C'mell, whose profession of girlygirl makes her something
between a geisha and a courtesan, is characterised by innocence and
love (for her people and for Jestocost) and by her dedication to an
ideal, the healing of a civilisation. She too risks punishment - which
for an underperson can only be death - in order to achieve her goal.
Perhaps the most interesting figure is Madu, in "Down to a sunless sea".
Like her sisters in Smith's other writings, she is a threatened
innocent, but unlike them what is threatened is not her life but rather
her innocence itself. For D'joan, martyrdom is a fulfilment that makes
her mission possible; Veesey's innocence is unassailable, and allows
her to redeem herself and her companions (with the help of the wisdom
of Tiga-Belas/Sh'san). But Madu's innocence is vulnerable, and it is
this that makes "Down to a sunless sea" genuinely tragic; Kemal and E'duard's victory over Kuat is achieved, but at an immense cost:
"Lord Kemal would be tortured for
more than two centuries by a question. When did the ends justify the
means? When was the law absolute? He saw in his mind's eye Griselda
bounding over dunes and plains - a Madu innocent as dawn - Lari dancing
under a sunless moon." ["Down to a sunless sea", Cordwainer Smith]
"Down to a sunless sea" was
completed after Smith's death by his widow, and it is interesting to
speculate how much Madu owes to Genevieve Linebarger. Certainly there
appears to be a new understanding at work, an understanding that death
is not the worst that we have to fear and that even the high ideals of
the reformed Empire cannot be achieved without cost. It is this that
makes Madu perhaps the most compelling and real of Smith's heroines,
and her story the most moving.
Smith is not overly concerned with male children. The murder of the boy Johnny by Benjacomin Bozart in "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons" is almost incidental and arouses no strong emotions in either the author or the reader. In "A planet named Shayol" Smith reiterates his belief that cruelty to children is the one unpardonable sin:
"This is a crime worse than any crime we have committed! And the Empire has done it." ["A planet named Shayol", Cordwainer Smith]
but the children themselves (who are of both sexes) are incapable of
inspiring pity because they have no characters. The idiot boy whom
Casher O'Neill heals in "Quest of the Three Worlds"
comes perhaps the closest to having an identity of his own, but his
identity begins only after an act of cruelty has already been
perpetrated against him. Before Casher heals him, he can have only the
vaguest and most abstract kind of innocence because he is an idiot, and
a rather unappealing one at that.
Innocence, for Smith, also requires intelligence; to arouse feeling, they must be like Genevieve:
"... so intelligent that she knew there was nothing, nothing to be done about her fate." ["Quest of the three worlds", Cordwainer Smith]
Like the emotions of the underpeople, innocence and love are in
opposition to the abstract and impartial justice of the
Instrumentality. The redemption of human culture requires that these
opposites should be reconciled, and a new Utopia be constructed based
not on materialism and order, but on a living justice which includes
equal parts of each. This is Smith's programme in his own words:
"We today know that variety,
flexibility, danger and the seasoning of a little hate can make life
and love bloom as they never bloomed before; we know it is better to
live with the complications of thirteen thousand old languages
resurrected from the dead ancient past than with the cold blind-alley
perfection of the Old Common Tongue." ["The Dead Lady of Clown Town", Cordwainer Smith]
It is this programme that Jestocost and C'mell set in motion; it is
this that makes possible the new lords of the Instrumentality, like
Kemal bin Permaiswairi. But for Smith something else is needed as well.
The Old Strong Religion
Christianity and science-fiction seldom mix. The scientific leanings
of most writers predispose them also towards atheism, and the few
attempts on the part of fundamentalist Christians such as Dilwyn Horvat
to branch out into the genre are best avoided. Luckily for
science-fiction, the requirement for imagination and creativity seems
to ensure that those Christian writers such as C.S. Lewis who do make
the genre their own are necessarily open-minded and of superior
literary and intellectual ability.
Like Lewis, Cordwainer Smith was a committed Christian, but his
injection of Christianity into his works is so unprogrammatic and
discreet as to make even Lewis's relatively subtle writings look like
the most blatant propaganda. He denied being a 'fussy sectarian', and
in "The Lady who sailed the Soul" he
has Lord Wait assign twenty-six thousand religious fanatics to be Helen
America's cargo, on the grounds that they are less valuable than
convicts.
He also acknowledges the existence of a moral code more basic than the Christian moral code:
"... I use the word 'evil' not only
in this sense" (he held up the cross of the God Nailed High) "but in
its sense of the basic violation of the rights of the living. I mean
the right of an entity to exist, to exist on its own terms provided
they do not violate the rights of others, to come to its own terms with
life, and to make its own decisions."
For a second time Lord Kemal Permaiswairi nodded in respect and agreement. "These are inalienable rights."
["Down to a sunless sea", Cordwainer Smith]
The moral rejuvenation of human civilisation which must come about
by the granting of civil rights to the underpeople and by the
Rediscovery of Man will have, for Smith, a religious element, but it is
secondary to the basic freedoms to love and to learn and to enjoy
justice and equal rights independent of any system of belief.
Christianity comes not as a moral code, but as an enrichment of life in
a society which has already arrived at a 'Christian' morality from
first principles.
The embargo on religion under the Instrumentality means that
Christianity has reverted to the form that it must have had in the
early church. It is preserved among the underpeople as a secret cult,
and communicated only by signs. While this is socially and historically
plausible, it also seems likely that Smith preferred this kind of
fundamental Christianity - fundamental not in the present-day sense of
dogmatic or literalist, but in the sense of essential or basic - to the
organized religions that followed it. Christianity, for Smith, is alive
and personal and intimate; there are no priests or churches in his
works and his form of Christianity has little need of them.
"We don't need a church for this,
though I suppose there are still churches on some planets. What we need
is a place to find ourselves, and be ourselves ..."
["Quest of the three worlds",
Cordwainer Smith]
As has already been mentioned, Liana in "The colonel came back from Nothing-at-all"
is a 'Post-Soviet Eastern Orthodox Quaker'. The Quaker interpretation
of Christianity with its absence of any priesthood to intercede between
God and Man and its emphasis on the personal and basic aspects of
worship and morality rather than an impersonal and hierarchical
organization, is ideally suited to Smith's view of Christianity and his
overall moral programme. No other Christian sects are mentioned by name
(unless the Copt in the alluded-to but never written story of the
Robot, the Rat and the Copt, is taken to be a member of the Coptic
church, a church which was, incidentally, perhaps the earliest
Christian church).
Christianity is often present but never intrusive in Smith's works.
The martyrdom of D'joan is a crucifixion, and she is unmistakably a
Christ-figure, but it is also more simply a retelling of the story of
Jeanne d'Arc. Christian characters - T'ruth, E'duard, Liana, D'alma in "Quest of the three worlds"
- may be presented as admirable examples, but there are also many
non-Christians - Kemal, Jestocost, Tiga-Belas, the Hunter - who are
equally wise or good or courageous. What Smith had in mind for the
story of the Robot, the Rat and the Copt, which would have dealt with
the rediscovery of the Trinity may never - perhaps fortunately - be
known.
The Rediscovery of Man
The future history of Cordwainer Smith deals with a society which
has denied a part of itself. The Instrumentality offers stability and
an abstract and impartial justice, the santaclara drug offers virtual
immortality to its users, but however desirable these things may be,
they are not sufficient by themselves.
True humanity also requires the
qualities - love, courage, innocence, self-sacrifice, loyalty, faith -
which are shown by the very people to whom the status of humanity is
denied. For human civilisation to attain its true spiritual growth, the
underpeople must be granted equal rights, not only in the name of an
abstract justice but because the qualities that they have are those of
which civilisation stands most in need.
The question of civil rights
for the underpeople may well have been a deliberate reflection of the
civil rights movement in America at the time that Smith was writing,
but it is also more than that. It is an assertion that in all societies
at all times, human rights must be universal, both out of basic
considerations of justice and for the health of the civilisation
itself. A political or social system based merely on blind
utilitarianism is inadequate; it must take account and even put first
the individual and spiritual needs of its members.
Bibliography
"The Best of Cordwainer Smith" Cordwainer Smith, Del Rey Books 1975, J.J. Pierce (ed).
"Space Lords" Cordwainer Smith, HBJ Books 1979
"Quest of the Three Worlds" Cordwainer Smith, Del Rey Books 1978
"The Instrumentality of Mankind" Cordwainer Smith, Del Rey Books 1979, Frederik Pohl (ed).
"Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1" Peacock Books 1976, Terry Carr (ed).
Links
Links to other Cordwainer Smith sites
Acknowledgement
This piece was originally written for, and appeared in, Outsider magazine. It was reproduced by kind permission
of Outsider and Steve Glover. And then I found it and posted it here on Sun Pop Blue.
© Angus McIntyre 2001
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