I had to laugh at myself, but before I knew what I was doing I was peeling the wrapper off a clean suit, blowing it up, putting it on and skitting for Westwood.
What the hell. Maybe it was the biggest story in the world. How often does that happen?
I can answer that now. I wish I couldn’t, but I can. It only happens once. Damn it.
They fitted me out with a flitterpak. I couldn’t believe it when the cops said they blamed the kid up there on the power wand tower for the failure of their units. I planned to do something with that bit of self-serving alibi when I put together my story. If there was a story.
I kicked the unit on, it hummed prettily, and I took off. Up I went, without any problem. What noodles, those cops, I thought.
I went up, 210 meters. Thank God I’m not afraid of heights. And there he was.
It wasn’t a crazed teen-ager. It was a little boy, about ten years old. He was walking around the maintenance platform. Limping. He was dressed in some soft furry kind of jacket and pants, wearing a pointed cap of the same fur, with a feather in it. He had a striped red and yellow scarf around his neck, and at the end of the scarf he had a flute of intricately carved wood attached by a leather thong. I recognized the flute as wood, and the thong as leather. Do you know how long it’s been since we had any wood or leather around? Do you know how long it’s been since anyone wore fur? Oh, there was a story here, all right.
The kid watched me as I floated up over the guard rails and dropped onto the platform. I kicked off the unit, but I didn’t take it off. He was only about 120 centimeters tall, but I wasn’t taking any chances on his suddenly going wild and doing something unexpected. It was, after all, more than two hundred meters to a messy finish.
He looked at me. I looked at him. Neither of us said anything. Finally I said, “It’s pretty cold up here, son. Don’t you want to come down?”
He spoke very quietly, and it wasn’t just that what he said was so adult, so reasoned; his voice was that of a little man. No, I don’t mean a little man, I mean what they used to call a young chap when he was being plucky and brave and grown-up. “You’re a plucky little man.” That’s what I mean.
“No thank you, sir. I can come down whenever I choose. I’m sorry you had to come up here to see me, but I’m a child and I knew if I asked to see you on the ground, someone bigger would have stopped me. Or just laughed.”
My God, I thought, it’s The Little Prince. This kid was 120 centimeters tall and fifty years old. What a cute little guy. Very serious. And he looked at me with the steadiest gaze I’d ever encountered. I had the fleeting thought that if a politician could get that steady look down correctly, he’d be a dead shot for the Presidency Commissarship of the whole damned planet.
“Well, uh, what’s your name?”
“My name is Willy, sir. And I’ve come a very long distance to speak to you.”
“Why me, Willy?”
“Because you like children, and you remember many things that happened long ago, and you know the poem.”
“The poem?”
“Yes, sir, the poem about the Pied Piper who took the children when the Mayor of Hamelin would not pay him what he had promised to pay him for ridding the town of rats.”
I hadn’t the vaguest idea what the kid was talking about. Yes, I’d memorized Browning’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” off one of the obscure-search scanner fiches when I was just a child, but that had been many, many years before. And what had Browning’s poem to do with this child? And where had he come from? And how had he managed to scale a two-hundred-meter wand? And if he was able to jam the cops’ flitterpaks, as they had said, then why had he let me fly up? And what was this big story he was supposed to have for me? And where had he gotten fur and wood and leather?
And then I ran Browning through my mind.
“But when they saw ’twas a lost endeavor,
And Piper and dancers were gone forever,
They made a decree that lawyers never
Should think their records dated duly
If, after the day of the month and year,
These words did not as well appear:
‘And so long after what happen’d here
On the twenty-second of July,
Thirteen hundred and Seventy-six;’
And the better in memory to fix
The place of the children’s last retreat,
They call’d it the Pied Piper’s Street…”
“In one week it’ll be exactly seven hundred years to the day,” I said to the child. He did not look happy when I said it. He sighed and looked over the edge of the platform, out across the endless expanse of San Frangeles stretching from what long ago had been Vancouver, all the way down to what had been Baja California. And I thought I saw him crying; but when he turned back, his eyes were only moist.
“Yes, sir, that is correct. We feel more than enough time has been allotted for you. And that is why I was sent out. But I try to be fairer than my ancestor, and that is why I asked for you. You can understand; you will be able to tell them, warn them, so I won’t have to…”
He didn’t finish. He just left it hanging, and up there on the wand, as cold as it was, I felt a deeper chill wash through me, as if someone had walked over my grave.
I asked him what he meant to do.
And he told me. It was the biggest story in the history of the world, if it was true.
I said people would need proof.
He said he was willing to provide that proof. A small demonstration.
So I pulled my communication console out of my breast pocket and linked in with Newsservice, and told them I had something; I told Central in Boise to put me on record and instantly felt the sensor pressure as the units imbedded in my throat and ears and eyes were activated.
“July 15th, 2076,” I said. “Exclusive to the World Newsservice. Mike Strathearn reporting. I’m standing atop the power wand tower in Westwood, Greater San Frangeles. With me is a little boy with the most bizarre story I have ever heard…”
And I made a prelim they could edit down when they ’cast it.
“Willy has agreed to give us a demonstration, and for that on-the-scene I transfer you now to our remote in Times Square, New York, state of Manhattan.”
I watched the console in the palm of my hand. The screen flickered and I was staring down at 42nd and Broadway. Beside me, the child put the pipe to his lips and began to play.
The song made no sense to me, but it apparently made sense to the cockroaches. If there is a scientific explanation for how a tune played softly on a flute can be heard a continent away by cockroaches, it is an explanation that exists within the bounds of a science we do not yet understand. A science we will probably never understand.
But as I watched, the cockroaches of Manhattan began to come out. “And the muttering grew to a grumbling and the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling and out of the houses the rats came tumbling.” Browning would have written it very differently had the Pied Piper called out the cockroaches. At first there was a low twittering sound and the twittering grew to a clittering and the clittering grew to a mighty clattering as their claws skittered and scuttled across the plastic streets and slidewalks. And they came in a trickle and then a mass and then a wash and then a flood. They came from the underground and they came from the walls and they came from the rotting rusting rafters and the garbage-laden hallways and they came out and covered the streets so there was nothing but a carpet of carapaces, a black carpet of evil little shapes.
And the screen showed them heading toward the East River and as I watched they all scrabbled across the island that had been made the state of Manhattan, and they plunged into the East River and were drowned.
Then remote came back to me.
I turned to the child.
“Willy, tell the audience watching us what it is you want them to do.”
He turned to me and looked at me, and my sensors held him. “We want everyone to stop what they are d
oing to make this a bad place, or we will take this place away from you.”
And that was all.
He didn’t explain it. He clearly didn’t feel he should set the method. But it was clear what he intended. Stop paving over the green lands with plastic, stop fighting, stop killing friendship, have courage, don’t lie, stop brutalizing each other, value art and wisdom…in short, make over the world or lose it.
I was with him all that next week, as he went from town to town and city to city. They laughed at him, of course. They laughed and they ignored him and several times they tried to take him into custody, but the child stopped them.
And yesterday, when time was almost up, we sat on the bank of a filth-filled stream and Willy toyed with the flute as if he wished it were not there, and he said to me, “I am sorry for you.”
“You’re going to do it, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “We have given you seven hundred years. That is enough time. But I am sorry you will go with them. I like you, you are a nice person.”
“But not nice enough to spare me.”
“You are one with all the others. They did nothing. You did nothing. You are not a bad person; you just did not care enough.”
“I wasn’t strong enough, Willy. I’m not sure anyone is.”
“They should have been. They are not stupid.”
And so, today, Willy began walking, and as he walked he played. And this time I heard the song. It was of finer times and cleaner lands, and I followed him. And everyone else followed him. They came out of the houses and the condos, the towers and the undergrounds. They came from far away and from nearby. And they followed him to an empty field where he piped open the air, and it was black inside. As black as a collapsed star, a black hole. And they marched inside, one after another, all the adults in the world. And as I stepped across the threshold I looked at Willy and he was staring at me, even though he did not stop playing his pipe. His eyes were moist again.
And here we are. There is nothing here, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Willy and the children of Hamelin meant us no harm, they just couldn’t put up with us any longer. We will stay here forever, I’m sure; and perhaps we will die and perhaps this place will keep us as we are now. But here, nonetheless, forever.
And I would tell you what the world is like today, on July 22nd, 2076, but I don’t know. It’s out there somewhere. Peopled by children.
I hope Willy is right. I hope they will make a better showing than we did. God knows we had long enough to try.
INTRODUCTION TO: The New York Review of Bird
What’s the point of lying about it? I am supposed to be Cordwainer Bird. No, correct that: I am Cordwainer Bird. Uh. Well, I am Cordwainer Bird and I am not Cordwainer Bird. Hmmm. This will take some explaining.
Back in 1950, the final issue of a short-lived magazine (a mere six issues between 1947 and 1950) called Fantasy Book, published by William Crawford, one of the pioneering sf fans who risked everything to put science fiction between hardcovers, featured a story titled “Scanners Live in Vain.” It was written by someone using the obviously pseudonymous byline “Cordwainer Smith.” It was a super story, and it attracted some small attention in the microcosm of sf fandom, even at that time. But it was not to achieve “overnight fame” until 1952 when Frederik Pohl, editing a now-almost-forgotten Permabooks paperback anthology called Beyond the End of Time, exhumed the story and reprinted it. This time, for some odd, unexplained reason, the moment to appreciate it had arrived, and the superior imaginative qualities of the story, and the undeniable craft of its author, caused a minor whirlwind in the genre of imaginative literature. Everyone wanted to know who “Cordwainer Smith” was. Clearly, he or she was no amateur. This was the polished, wildly inventive work of a literary professional: wholly integrated, suggesting a new universe of stories lying just behind this first effort, filled with depths and tensions that no first-time writer could have manipulated so stunningly. I remember well the belief, common coin at that time, that “Smith” was in reality A. E. Van Vogt or George O. Smith.
But no one stepped forward to claim credit. If Bill Crawford ever really knew who Smith was, he never said. (As John J. Pierce has noted, in his excellent introduction to The Best of Cordwainer Smith [Nelson Doubleday, 1975; available through the SF Book Club], the story was written in the mid-Forties, was submitted to every sf market and rejected by every sf market, and was finally submitted to Fantasy Book, in the “slush pile,” or unsolicited submissions manner. The magazine was such a marginal enterprise that Crawford never paid for it. And so it is possible Crawford never knew “Smith’s” real identity. Pohl no doubt found out who lurked behind the nom de plume when he paid the reprint fee for his anthology; and that brings us logically to the next step in the mystery story.)
A mystery. One of those great unsolved literary mysteries to which the science fiction in-crowd would make references when they were sitting around juicing, just talking all those hip things in-crowds talk about.
Then, in the September 1955 issue of Galaxy magazine, editor Horace L. Gold announced he would publish, the following month, a new Cordwainer Smith story, “The Game of Rat and Dragon.” The waves of astonishment went out and for the next thirty days the greatest treasure any fan of sf could buy, beg, or steal was an advance issue of the October Galaxy. I was blessed: I was in New York at that time, having only recently been thrown out of Ohio State University, having gone to Manhattan to begin my professional career as a writer; and I copped a copy. With fear that I’d find it a bad story, I opened the issue and began to read.
It was as miraculous as “Scanners Live in Vain.” And I was a devout worshiper of “Cordwainer Smith,” whoever that might be.
In the next few years Gold (and his successor, Frederik Pohl) published a score of Smith stories, all of them brilliant; and everyone became a fan of his/her work. But neither Horace nor Fred ever revealed who Smith really was, and conjecture rose.
But in 1956, when I was beginning to be published here and there, the conjecture was partially tinged with amusement because many of us writing and fanning in the sf medium thought it might be another pen-name trick of Pohl or Lester del Rey or Cyril Kornbluth or someone equally as talented. And so, as a tribute and as a friendly bit of joshing, when it was necessary for me to use a pen name on a story in the July 1957 issue of Fantastic Universe (“Song of Death,” the editor’s retitling) and the August 1957 issue of Super-Science Fiction (“Invasion Footnote”), because I had more than one story in each of the books and it was considered poor form to have the same name twice on a single contents page, I came up with “Cordwainer Bird.” Ironically, the editor of Fantastic Universe, Hans Stefan Santesson, thought there might be some confusion with the names, so it appeared on the title page as “C. Bird,” and Bill Scott, editor of S-SF got the spelling wrong and it turned out as “Cortwainer Bird.”
It was not till many years later that it was revealed that “Cordwainer Smith” had been Dr. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913–1966). There isn’t room here to go into a full recounting of the amazing life and career of Linebarger, and I commend to your attention Mr. Pierce’s introduction in the aforementioned Best of volume for a full detailing of same; but suffice to say by the time it was no longer a secret that Smith had been a famous and distinguished world traveler, professor of Asiatic politics, writer on Far Eastern affairs, and even presidential advisor…“Cordwainer Bird” had become a fact of life.
He was the author of numerous extremely soft-core stories in such magazines as Adam, Knight, Adam Bedside Reader and other Los Angeles-based girlie journals. Between 1963 and 1969 he had his by-line on the following sensational winners: “The Girl with the Horizontal Mind,” “The Man on the Juice Wagon,” “Walk the High Steel,” “Tramp,” “Goodbye, Eadie!” and “The Hungry One,” “The Bohemia of Arthur Archer,” “God Bless the Ugly Virgin,” “The Fine Art of the 15¢ Pick-Up,” “The College Bohemian,” “Make it an ‘L’ and It’s Luck,” and
“Portrait of the Artist as a Zilch Writer.” Many of those were reprints of stories I’d written in the late Fifties, and while they could bring me a desperately needed two or three hundred dollars per appearance, they were–how shall I put it–less memorable works than what I was at that time building my dubious reputation on. And so Cordwainer became the author of record.
It was not till 1964 that Cordwainer switched to television writing, and had it not been for Irwin Allen, the King Croesus of the Disaster Flicks (in many senses of the word disaster), good old Cordwainer might well have passed into the musty files of old magazine collectors.
But Irwin hired me to write a segment of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea during its pre-airing stages, and though I was one of the first scenarists to work that show, Uncle Irwin managed to confuse himself so thoroughly as to what the direction of the series should be that he collapsed the minds of all intelligent writers unfortunate enough to fall within his sphere of influence. In the process he managed to collapse the quality of my script, and I, in one of my well-known and wholly justified fits of pique, invoked the clause in the Writers Guild contract whereby a scenarist can use a preregistered pseudonym on any script he feels has been butchered.
When the time came to tell Irwin what name I wanted on it, almost without thinking I said, “Cordwainer Bird.” The bird, of course, is a double-denigrating reference to “for the birds” and “flipping the bird,” which is the fine American equivalent of the Sicilian two-fingered “horns,” guaranteed to turn milk sour, cause your cow to have a two-headed calf, raise a mustache on your wife, make your husband impotent, turn your fields to dust, and in general make you aware that the invokee doesn’t like you a lot.