[Instrumentality Of Mankind] Wh Cordwainer Smith

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.When the People Fell ByCordwainer Smith"Can you imagine a rain of people through an acid fog? Can you imagine thousands and thousands of human bodies, without weapons, overwhelming the unconquerable monsters? Can you—""Look, sir," interrupted the reporter."Don't interrupt me! You ask me silly questions.I tell you I saw the Goonhogo itself.I saw it take Venus.Now ask me about that!" The reporter had called to get an old man's reminiscences about bygone ages.He did not expect Dobyns Bennett to flare up at him.Dobyns Bennett thrust home the psychological advantage he had gotten by taking the initiative."Can you imagine showhices in their parachutes, a lot of them dead, floating out of a green sky? Can you imagine mothers crying as they fell? Can you imagine people pouring down on the poor helpless monsters?" Mildly, the reporter asked what showhices were."That's old Chinesian for children," said Dobyns Bennett."I saw the last of the nations burst and die, and you want to ask me about fashionable clothes and things.Real history never gets into the books.It's too shocking.I suppose you were going to ask me what I thought of the new striped pantaloons for women!""No," said the reporter, but he blushed.The question was in his notebook and he hated blushing."Do you know what the Goonhogo did?""What?" asked the reporter, struggling to remember just what a Goonhogo might be."It took Venus," said the old man, somewhat more calmly.Very mildly, the reporter murmured, "It did?""You bet it did!" said Dobyns Bennett belligerently."Were you there?" asked the reporter."You bet I was there when the Goonhogo took Venus," said the old man."I was there and it's the damnedest thing I've ever seen.You know who I am.I've seen more worlds than you can count, boy, and yet when the nondies and the needies and the showhices came pouring out of the sky, that was the worst thing that any man could ever see.Down on the ground, there were the loudies the way they'd always been—"The reporter interrupted, very gently.Bennett might as well have been speaking a foreign language.All of this had happened three hundred years before.The reporter's job was to get a feature from him and to put it into a language which people of the present time could understand.Respectfully he said, "Can't you start at the beginning of the story?""You bet.That's when I married Terza.Terza was the prettiest girl you ever saw.She was one of the Vomacts, a great family of scanners, and her father was a very important man.You see, I was thirty-two, and when a man is thirty-two, he thinks he is pretty old, but I wasn't really old, I just thought so, and he wanted Terza to marry me because she was such a complicated girl that she needed a man's help.The Court back home had found her unstable and the Instrumentality had ordered her left in her father's care until she married a man who then could take on proper custodial authority.I suppose those are old customs to you, boy—"The reporter interrupted again."I am sorry, old man," said he."I know you are over four hundred years old and you're the only person who remembers the time the Goonhogo took Venus.Now the Goonhogo was a government, wasn't it?""Anyone knows that," snapped the old man."The Goonhogo was a sort of separate Chinesian government.Seventeen billion of them all crowded in one small part of Earth.Most of them spoke English the way you and I do, but they spoke their own language, too, with all those funny words that have come on down to us.They hadn't mixed in with anybody else yet.Then, you see, the Waywanjong himself gave the order and that is when the people started raining.They just fell right out of the sky.You never saw anything like it—" The reporter had to interrupt him again and again to get the story bit by bit.The old man kept using terms that he couldn't seem to realize were lost in history and that had to be explained to be intelligible to anyone of this era.But his memory was excellent and his descriptive powers as sharp and alert as ever.Young Dobyns Bennett had not been at Experimental Area A very long, before he realized that the most beautiful female he had ever seen was Terza Vomact.At the age of fourteen, she was fully mature.Some of the Vomacts did mature that way.It may have had something to do with their being descended from unregistered, illegal people centuries back in the past.They were even said to have mysterious connections with the lost world back in the age of nations when people could still put numbers on the years.He fell in love with her and felt like a fool for doing it.She was so beautiful, it was hard to realize that she was the daughter of Scanner Vomact himself.The scanner was a powerful man.Sometimes romance moves too fast and it did with Dobyns Bennett because Scanner Vomact himself called in the young man and said, "I'd like to have you marry my daughter Terza, but I'm not sure she'll approve of you.If you can get her, boy, you have my blessing."Dobyns was suspicious.He wanted to know why a senior scanner was willing to take a junior technician.All that the scanner did was to smile.He said, "I'm a lot older than you, and with this new santaclara drug coming in that may give people hundreds of years, you may think that I died in my prime if I die at a hundred and twenty.You may live to four or five hundred.But I know my time's coming up.My wife has been dead for a long time and we have no other children and I know that Terza needs a father in a very special kind of way.The psychologist found her to be unstable.Why don't you take her outside the area? You can get a pass through the dome anytime.You can go out and play with the loudies [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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