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Title: Three To A Given Star
Author: Smith, Cordwainer [Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony]
   (1913-1966)
Date of first publication: October 1965
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Galaxy Magazine, October 1965
   [New York: Galaxy Publishing Corporation]
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 15 May 2017
Date last updated: 15 May 2017
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1434

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






  _THREE TO
  A GIVEN STAR_


  by CORDWAINER SMITH



  _They were the outcasts of Earth,
  and Earth had given them a destiny
  that fitted their terrible crimes!_




I

"Stick your left arm straight forward, Samm," said Folly.

He stretched his arm out.

"I can sense it!" cried Folly, "Now wiggle your fingers!"

Samm wiggled them.

Finsternis said nothing, but both of them caught from his mind, riding
clear and wise beside them, a "sense of the situation."  His "sense of
the situation" could be summed up in the one-word comment, which he did
not need to utter:

"Foolishness!"

"It is not foolishness, Finsternis," cried Folly.  "Here are the three
of us, riding empty space millions of kilometers from nowhere.  We are
people once, Earth people from Old Earth Itself.  Is it foolish to
remember what we used to be?  I was a woman once.  A beautiful woman.
Now I'm this--this thing, bent on a mission of murder and destruction.
I used to have hands myself, real hands.  Is it wrong for me to enjoy
looking at Samm's hands now and then?  To think of the past which all
three of us have left behind."

Finsternis did not answer; his mind was blank to both of them.  There
was nothing but space around them, not even much space dust, and the
bluish light of Linschoten XV straight ahead.  From the third planet of
that star they could occasionally hear the cackle and gabble of the
man-eaters.

Once again Folly cried to Finsternis, "Is that so wrong, that I should
enjoy looking at a hand?  Samm has well-shaped hands.  I was a person
once, and so were you.  Did I ever tell you that I was a beautiful
woman once?"



She had been a beautiful woman once and now she was the control of a
small spaceship which fled across emptiness with two grotesque
companions.  She was now a ship only eleven meters long and shaped
roughly like an ancient dirigible.  Finsternis was a perfect cube,
fifty meters to the side, packed with machinery which could blank out a
sun and contain its planets until they froze to icy, perpetual death.
Samm was a man, but he was a man of flexible steel, two hundred meters
high.  He was designed to walk on any kind of planet, with any kind of
inhabitant, with any kind of chemistry or any kind of gravity: he was
designed to bring antagonists, whomever they might be, the message of
the power of man.  The power of man ... followed by terror, followed if
necessary by death.  If Samm failed, Finsternis had the further power
of blocking out the sun, Linschoten XV.  If either or both failed,
Folly had the job of adjusting them so that they could win.  If they
had no chance of winning, she then had the task of destroying
Finsternis and Samm, and then herself.

Their instructions were clear: "You will not, you will not under any
circumstances return.  You will not, you will not under any conditions
turn back toward Earth.  You are too dangerous to come anywhere near
Earth, ever again.  You may live if you wish.  If you can.  But you
must not--repeat not--come back.  You have your duty.  You asked for
it.  Now you have it.  Do not, come back.  Your forms fit your duty.
You will do your duty."

Folly had become a tiny ship, crammed with miniaturized equipment.

Finsternis had become a cube blacker than darkness itself.

Samm had become a man but a man different from any which had ever been
seen on Earth.  He had a metal body, copied from the human form down to
the last detail.  That way the enemies, whoever they might be, would be
given a terrible glimpse of the human shape, the human voice.  Two
hundred meters high he stood, strong and solid enough to fly through
space with nothing but the jets on his belt.

The Instrumentality had designed all three of them.  Designed them well.

Designed them to meet the crazy menace out beyond the stars, a menace
which gave no clue to its technology or origin, but which responded to
the signal "man" with the counter-signal, "gabble cackle! eat, eat!
man, man! good to eat! cackle-gabble! eat, eat!"

That was enough.

The Instrumentality took steps.  And the three of them--the ship, the
cube and the metal giant--sped between the stars to conquer, to
terrorize or to destroy the menace which lived on the third planet of
Linschoten XV.  Or, if needful, to put out that particular sun.

Folly, who had become a ship, was the most volatile of the three.

She had been a beautiful woman once.




II

"You were a beautiful woman once," Samm had said, some years before.
"How did you end up becoming a ship?"

"I killed myself," said Folly.  "That's why I took this name.  Folly.
I had a long life ahead of me, but I killed myself and they brought me
back at the last minute.  When I found out I was still alive, I
volunteered for something adventurous, dangerous.  They gave me this.
Well, I _asked_ for it, didn't I?"

"You asked for it," said Samm gravely.  Out in the middle of nothing,
surrounded by a tremendous lot of nowhere, courtesy was still the
lubricant which governed human relationships.  The two of them observed
courtesy and kindness toward one another.  Sometimes they threw in a
bit of humor, too.

Finsternis did not take part in their talk or their companionship.  He
did not even verbalize his answers.  He merely let them know his sense
of the situation and this time, as in all other times, his response
was--"Negative.  No operation needed.  Communication nonfunctional.
Not needed here.  Silence, please.  I kill suns.  That is all I do.  My
part is my business, not yours.  My past is my business.  All mine."
This was communicated in a single terrible thought, so that Folly and
Samm stopped trying to bring Finsternis into the conversations which
they started up, every subjective century or so, and continued for
years at a time.

Finsternis merely moved along with them, several kilometers away, but
well within their range of awareness.  But as far as company was
concerned, Finsternis might as well not have been there at all.

Samm went on with the conversation, _the_ conversation which they had
had so many hundreds of times since the planoform ship had discharged
them "near" Linschoten XV and left them to make the rest of their way
alone.  (If the menace were really a menace, and if it were
intelligent, the Instrumentality had no intention of letting an actual
planoform ship fall within the powers of a strange form of life which
might well be hypnotic in its combat capacities.  Hence the ship, the
cube and the giant were launched into normal space at high velocity,
equipped with jets to correct their courses, and left to make their own
away to the danger.)

Samm said, as he always did, "You were a beautiful woman, Folly, but
you wanted to die.  Why?"

"Why do people ever want to die, Samm?  It's the power in us, the
vitality which makes us want so much.  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.  We can't stand the
beauty of it, the nearness of the things we want, the remoteness of the
things that we can have.  You and me and Finsternis, now, we're
monsters riding out between the stars.  And yet we're happier now than
we were when we were back among people.  I was a beautiful woman, but
there were specific things which I wanted.  I wanted them myself.  I
alone.  For me.  Only for me.  When I couldn't have them, I wanted to
die.  If I had been stupider or happier I might have lived on.  But I
didn't.  I was me--intensely me.  So here I am.  I don't even know
whether I have a body or not, inside this ship.  They've got me all
hooked up to the sensors and the viewers and the computers.  Sometimes
I think that I may be a lovely woman still, with a real body hidden
somewhere inside this ship, waiting to step out and to be a person
again.  And you, Samm, don't you want to tell me about yourself?  Samm.
SAMM.  That's no name for an actual person--Superordinated Alien
Measuring and Mastery device.  What were you before they gave you that
big body?  At least you still look like a person.  You're not a ship,
like me."

"My name doesn't matter, Folly, and if I told it to you, you wouldn't
know it.  You never knew it."

"How wouldn't I know?" she cried.  "I've never told you my name either,
so perhaps we did know each other back on Old Earth when we were still
people."



"I can tell something," said Samm, "from the shape of words, from the
ring of thoughts, even when we're not out here in nothing.  You were a
lady, perhaps highborn.  You were truly beautiful.  You were really
important.  And I--I was a technician.  A good one.  I did my work and
I loved my family, and my wife and I were happy with every child which
the Lords gave us for adoption.  But my wife died first.  And after a
while my children, my wonderful boy and my two beautiful, intelligent
girls--my own children, they couldn't stand me anymore.  They didn't
like me.  Perhaps I talked too much.  Perhaps I gave them too much
advice.  Perhaps I reminded them of their mother, who was dead.  I
don't know.  I won't ever know.  They didn't want to see me.  Out of
manners, they sent me cards on my birthday.  Out of sheer formal
courtesy, they called on me sometimes.  Now and then one of them wanted
something.  Then they came to me, but it was always just to get
something.  It took me a long time to figure out, but I hadn't done
anything.  It wasn't what I had done or hadn't done.  They just plain
didn't like me.  You know the songs and the operas and the stories,
Folly, you know them all."

"Not all of them," thought Folly gently, "not all of them.  Just a few
thousand."

"Did you ever see one," cried Samm, his thoughts ringing fiercely
against her mind, "did you ever see a single one about a rejected
father?  They're all about men and women, love and sex, but I can tell
you that rejection hurts even when you don't ask anything of your loved
ones but their company and their happiness and their simple genuine
smiles.  When I knew that my children had no use for me, I had no use
for me either.  The Instrumentality came along with this warning, and I
volunteered."

"But you're all right now, Samm," said Folly gently.  "I'm a ship and
you are a metal giant but we're off doing work which is important for
all mankind.  We'll have adventures together.  Even black and grumbly
here," she added, meaning Finsternis, "can't keep us from the
excitement of companionship or the hope of danger.  We're doing
something wonderful and important and exciting.  Do you know what I
would do if I had my life again, my ordinary life with skin and
toenails and hair and things like that?"

"What?" asked Samm, knowing the answer perfectly well from the hundreds
of times they had touched on this point.

"I'd take baths.  Hundreds and hundreds of them, over again.  Showers
and dips in cold pools and soaks in hot bathtubs and rinses and more
showers.  And I would do my hair, over and over again, thousands of
different ways.  And I would put on lipstick, in the most outrageous
colors, even if nobody saw me, except for my own self looking in the
mirror.  Now I can hardly remember what it used to be to be dry or wet.
I'm in this ship and I see the ship and I do not really know if I am a
person or not any more."

Samm stayed quiet, knowing what she would say next.

"Samm, what would you do?" Folly asked.

"Swim," he said.

"Then swim, Samm, swim!  Swim for me in the space between the stars.
You still have a body and I don't, but I can watch you and I can sense
you swimming out here in the nothing-at-all."

Samm began to swim a huge Australian crawl, dipping his face to the
edge of the water--as if there were water there.  The gestures made no
difference in his real motion, since they were all of them in the fast
trajectory computed for them from the point where they left the
Instrumentality's ship and started out in normal space for the star
listed as Linschoten XV.

This time, something very sudden happened, and, it happened strangely.

From the dark gloomy silence of the cube Finsternis, there came an
articulate cry, called forth in clear human speech:

_Stop it!  Stop moving right now.  I attack._

Both Samm and Folly had instruments built into them, so they could read
space around them.  The instruments, quickly scanned, showed nothing.
Yet Folly felt odd, as though something had gone very wrong in her
ship-self, which had seemed so metal, so reliable, so inalterable.

She threw a thought of inquiry at Samm and instead got another command
from Finsternis, _Don't think_.


III

Samm floated like a dead man in his gargantuan body.

Folly drifted like a fruit beside his hand.

At last there came words from Finsternis:

"You can think now, if you want to.  You can chatter at each other
again.  I'm through."

Samm thought at him, and the thought-pattern was troubled and confused:
"What happened?  I felt as though the immaculate grid of space had been
pinched together in a tight fold.  I felt you do something, and then
there was silence around us again."

"Talking," said Finsternis, "is not operational and it is not required
of me.  But there are only three of us here, so I might as well tell
you what happened.  Can you hear me, Folly?"

"Yes," she said, weakly.

"Are we on course," asked Finsternis, "for the third planet of
Linschoten XV?"

Folly paused while checking all her instruments, which were more
complicated and refined than those carried by the other two, since she
was the maintenance unit.  "Yes," said she at last.  "We are exactly on
course.  I don't know what happened, if anything did happen."

"Something happened, all right," said Finsternis, with the gratified
savagery of a person whose quick-and-cruel nature is rewarded only by
meeting and overcoming hostility in real life.

"Was it a space dragon, like they used to meet on the old, old ships?"

"No, nothing like that," said Finsternis, communicative for once, since
this was something operational to talk about.  "It doesn't even seem to
be in this space at all.  Something just rises up among us, like a
volcano coming out of solid space.  Something violent and wild and
alive.  Do you two still have eyes?"

"Seeing devices for the ordinary light band?" asked Samm.

"Of course we do!" said Finsternis.  "I will try to fix it so that you
will have a visible input."

There was a sharp pause from Finsternis.

The voice came again, with much strain.

"_Do not do anything.  Do not try to help me.  Just watch.  If it wins,
destroy me and destroy yourselves very quickly.  It might try to
capture us and get back to Earth._"

Folly felt like telling Finsternis that this was unnecessary, since the
first motion toward return would trigger destruction devices which had
been built into each of the three of them, beyond reach, beyond
detection, beyond awareness.  When the Instrumentality said, "Do not
come back," the Instrumentality meant it.

She said nothing.

She watched Finsternis instead.

Something began to happen.

It was very odd.

Space itself seemed to rip and leak.

In the visible band, the intruder looked like a fountain of water being
thrown randomly to and fro.

But the intruder was not water.

In the visible light-band, it glowed like wild fire rising from a
shimmering column of blue ice.  Here in space there was nothing to
burn, nothing to make light: she knew that Finsternis was translating
unresolvable phenomena into light.

She sensed Samm moving one of his giant fists uncontrollably, in a
helpless, childish gesture of protest.

She herself did nothing but watch, as alertly and passively as she
could.

Nevertheless, she felt wrenched.  This was no material phenomenon.  It
was wild unformed life, intruding out of some other proportion of
space, seeking material on which to impose its vitality, its frenzy,
its identity.  She could see Finsternis as a solid black cube, darker
than mere darkness, drifting right into the column.  She watched the
sides of Finsternis.

On the earlier part of the trip, since they had left the people and the
planoform ship and had been discharged in a fast trajectory toward
Linschoten XV, Finsternis' sides had seemed like dull metal, slightly
burnished, so that Folly had to brush him lightly with radar to get a
clear image of him.

Now his sides had changed.

They had become as soft and thick as velvet.

The strange volcano-fountain did not seem to have much in the way of
sensing devices.  It paid no attention to Samm or to herself.  The dark
cube attracted it, as a shaft of sunlight might attract a baby or as
the rustle of paper might draw the attention of a kitten.

With a slight twist of its vitality and direction, the whole column of
burning, living brightness plunged upon Finsternis, plunged and burned
out and went in and was seen no more.



Finsternis' voice, clear and cheerful, sounded out to both of them:

"It's gone now."

"What happened to it?" asked Samm.

"I ate it," said Finsternis.

"You what?" cried Folly.

"I ate it," said Finsternis.  He was talking more than he ever had
before.  "At least, that's the only way I can describe it.  This
machine they gave me or made me into or whatever they did, it's really
rather good.  It's powerful.  I can feel it absorbing things, taking
them in, taking them apart, putting them away.  It's something like
eating used to be when I was a person.  That wild thing attacked me,
wrapped me up, devoured me.  All I did was to take it in, and now it's
gone.  I feel sort of full.  I suppose my machines are sorting our
samples of it to send away to rendezvous points in little rockets.  I
know that I have sixteen small rockets inside me, and I can feel two of
them getting ready to move.  Neither one of you could have done what I
do.  I was built to absorb whole suns if necessary, break them down,
freeze them down, change their molecular structure and shoot their
vitality off in one big useless blast on the radio spectrum.  You
couldn't do anything like that, Samm, even if you do have arms and legs
and a head and a voice--if we ever get into an atmosphere for you to
use it in.  You couldn't do what I have just done, Folly."

"You're _good_," said Folly, with emphasis.  But she added: "I can
repair you."

Obviously offended, Finsternis withdrew into his silence.

Samm said to Folly, "How much further to destination?"

Said Folly promptly, "Seventy-nine earth years, four months and three
days, six hours and two minutes, but you know how little that means out
here.  It could seem like a single afternoon or it could feel to us
like a thousand lifetimes.  Time doesn't work very well for us."

"How did Earth ever find this place, anyhow?" said Samm.

"All I know is that it was two very strong telepaths, working together
on the planet Mizzer.  An ex-dictator named Casher O'Neill and an
ex-Lady named Celalta.  They were doing a bit of psionic astronomy and
suddenly this signal came in strong and clear.  You know that telepaths
can catch directions very accurately.  Even over immense distances.
And they can get emotions, too.  But they are not very good at actual
images or things.  Somebody else checked it out for them."

"M-m-m," said Samm.  He had heard all this before.  Out of sheer
boredom, he went back to swimming vigorously.  The body might not
really be his, but it made him feel good to exercise it.

Besides, he knew that Folly watched him with pleasure--great pleasure,
and a little bit of envy.



_Casher O'Neill and the Lady Celalta had finished with making love._

_They had lain with their bodies tired and their minds clear, relaxed.
They had stretched out on a blanket just above the big gushing spring
which was the source of the Ninth Nile.  Both telepaths, they could
hear a bird-couple quarreling inside a tree, the male bird commanding
the female to get out and get to work and the female answering by
dropping deeper and deeper into a fretful and irritable sleep._

_The Lady Celalta had whispered a thought to her lover and master,
Casher O'Neill._

"_To the stars?_"

"_The stars?_" _thought he with a grumble.  They were both strong
telepaths.  He had been imprinted, in some mysterious way, with the
greatest telepath-hypnotist of all time, the Honorable Agatha Madigan,
who had gone down in history as the Hechizera of Gontalon, the only
person in history to hypnotize the men and robots of a battle fleet so
that it destroyed itself in open space.  Casher O'Neill had also
retained dim memories of a half-grown girl, incredibly lovely in a
simple blue dress, lost to him somewhere beyond amnesiac stars, but in
the Lady Celalta he had a companion worthy of his final talents, a
natural telepath who could herself reach not only all of Mizzer but
some of the nearer stars.  When they teamed up together, as she now
proposed, they could plunge into dusty infinities of depth and bring
back feelings or images which no Go-Captain had ever found with his
ship._

_He sat up with a grunt of assent._

_She looked at him fondly, possessively, her dark eyes alight with
alertness, happiness, possessiveness and adventure._

"_Can I lift?_" _she asked, almost timidly._

_When two telepaths worked together, one cleared the vision for both of
them as far as their combined minds could reach and then the other
sprang, with enormous effort as far and as fast as possible toward any
target which presented itself.  They had found strange things,
sometimes beautiful or dramatic ones, by this method._

_Casher was already drinking enormous gulps of air, filling his lungs,
holding his breath, letting go with a gasp, and then inhaling deeply
and slowly again.  In this way he reoxygenated his brain very
thoroughly for the huge effort of a telepathic dive into the remote
depth of space.  He did not even speak to her, nor did he telepath a
word to her; he was conserving his strength for a good jump._

_He merely nodded to her._

_The Lady Celalta, too, began the deep breathing, but she seemed to
need it less than did Casher._

_They were both sitting up, side by side, breathing deeply._

_The cool night sands of Mizzer were around them, the harmless gurgle
of the Ninth Nile beside them, the bright star-cluttered sky of Mizzer
was above them._

_Her hand reached out and took hold of his._

_She squeezed his hand.  He looked at her and nodded to her again._

_Within his mind, Mizzer and its entire solar system seemed to burst
into flame with a new kind of light.  The radiance of Celalta's mind
trailed off unevenly in different directions but there, almost 2 off
the pole of Mizzer's ecliptic, he felt something wild and strange, a
kind of being which he had never sensed before.  Using Celalta's mind
as a base, he let his mind dive for it._

_The distance of the plunge left them both dizzy, sitting on the quiet
night sands of Mizzer.  It seemed to both of them that the mind of man
had never reached so far before._

_The reality of the phenomenon was undoubtable._

_There were animals all around them, the usual categories: runners,
hunters, jumpers, climbers, swimmers, hiders and handlers.  It was some
of the handlers who were intensely telepathic themselves._

_The image of man created an immediate, murderous response:_

"_Cackle gabble, gabble cackle, man, man, man, eat them, eat them!_"

_Casher and Celalta were both so surprised that they let the contact
go, after making sure that they had touched a whole world full of
beings, some of them telepathic and probably civilized._

_How had the beings known "man"?  Why had their response been
immediate?  Why anthropophagous and homicidal?_

_They took time, before coming completely out of the trance, to make a
careful, exact note of the direction from which the danger-brains had
shrieked their warning._

_This they submitted to the Instrumentality, shortly after the
incident._

And that was how, unknown to Folly, Samm and Finsternis, the
inhabitants on the third planet of Linschoten XV had come to the
attention of mankind.




IV

As a matter of fact, the three wanderers later on felt a vague, remote
telepathic contact which they sensed as being warm-hearted and human,
and therefore did not try to track down, with their minds or their
weapons.  It was O'Neill and Celalta, many years later by Mizzer time,
reaching to see what the Instrumentality had done about Linschoten XV.

Folly, Samm and Finsternis had no suspicion that the two most powerful
telepaths in the human area of the galaxy had stroked them, searched
them, felt them through, and seen things about them which the three of
them did not know about themselves or about each other.

Casher O'Neill said to the Lady Celalta:

"You got it, too?"

"A beautiful woman, encased in a little ship?"

Casher nodded: "A red-head with skin as soft and transparent as living
ivory?  A woman who was beautiful and will be beautiful again?"

"That's what I got," said the Lady Celalta.  "And the tired old man,
weary of his children and weary of his own life because his children
were weary of him."

"Not so old," said Casher O'Neill.  "And isn't that a spectacular piece
of machinery they put him into?  A metal giant.  It felt like something
about a quarter of a kilometer high.  Acid-proof.  Cold-proof.  Won't
he be surprised when he finds that the Instrumentality has rejuvenated
his own body inside that monster?"

"He certainly will be," said the Lady Celalta happily, thinking of the
pleasant surprise which lay ahead of a man whom she would never know or
see with her own bodily eyes.

They both fell silent.

Then said the Lady Celalta, "But the third person..."  There was a
shiver in her voice as though she dared not ask the question.  "The
third person, the one in the cube."  She stopped, as though she could
neither ask nor say more.

"It was not a robot or a personality cube," said Casher O'Neill.  "It
was a human being all right.  But it's crazy.  Could you make out,
Celalta, as to whether it was male or female?"

"No," said she, "I couldn't tell.  The other two seemed to think that
it was male."

"But did _you_ feel sure?" asked Casher.

"With that being, I felt sure of nothing.  It was human, all right, but
it was stranger than any lost hominid we have ever felt around the
forgotten stars.  Could you tell, Casher, whether it was young or old?"

"No," said he.  "I felt nothing--only a desperate human mind with all
its guards up, living only because of the terrible powers of the black
cube, the sun-killer in which it rode.  I never sensed someone before
who was a person without characteristics.  It's frightening."

"The Instrumentality are cruel sometimes," said Celalta.

"Sometimes they have to be," Casher agreed.

"But I never thought that they would do that."

"Do what?" asked Casher.

Her dark eyes looked at him.  It was a different night, and a different
Nile, but the eyes were only a very little bit older and they loved him
just as much as ever.  The Lady Celalta trembled as though she herself
might think that the all-powerful Instrumentality could have hidden a
microphone in the random sands.  She whispered to her lover, her master:

"You said it yourself, Casher, just a moment ago."

"Said what?" He spoke tenderly but fearlessly, his voice ringing out
over the cool night sands.



The Lady Celalta went on whispering, which was very unlike her usual
self: "You said that the third person was 'crazy.'  Do you realize that
you may have spoken the actual literal truth?"  Her whisper darted at
him like a snake.

At last, he whispered back: "What did you sense?  What could you guess?"

"They have sent a madman to the stars.  Or a mad woman.  A real
psychotic."

"Lots of pilots," said Casher, speaking more normally, "are cushioned
against loneliness with real but artificially activated psychoses.  It
gets them through the real or imagined horrors of the sufferings of
space."

"I don't mean that," said Celalta, still whispering urgently and
secretly.  "I mean a real psychotic."

"But there aren't any.  Not loose, that is," said Casher, stammering
with surprise at last.  "They either get cured or they are bottled up
in thought-proof satellites somewhere."

Celalta raised her voice a little, just a little, so that she no longer
whispered but spoke urgently.

"But don't you see, that's what they _must_ have done.  The
Instrumentality made a star-killer too strong for any normal mind to
guide.  So the Lords got a psychotic somewhere, a real psychotic, and
sent a madman out among the stars.  Otherwise we could have felt its
gender or its age."

Casher nodded in silent agreement.  The air did not feel colder, but he
got gooseflesh sitting beside his beloved Celalta on the familiar
desert sands.

"You're right.  You must be right.  It almost makes me feel sorry for
the enemies out near Linschoten Fifteen.  Do you see nothing of them
this time?  I couldn't perceive them at all."

"I did, a little," said the Lady Celalta.  "Their telepaths have caught
the strange minds coming at them with a high rate of speed.  The
telepathic ones are wild with excitement but the others are just going
cackle-gabble, cackle-gabble with each other, filled with anger, hunger
and the thought of man."

"You got that much?" he said in wonder.

"My lord and my lover, I dived this time.  Is it so strange that I
sensed more than you did?  Your strength lifted me."

"Did you hear what the weapons called each other?"

"Something silly."  He could see her knitting her brows in the bright
starshine which illuminated the desert almost the way that the Old
Original Moon lit up the nights sometimes on Manhome Itself.  "It was
Folly, and something like 'Superordinated Alien Measuring and Mastery
machine' and something like 'darkness' in the Ancient Doyches Language."

"That's what I get, too," said Casher.  "It sounds like a weird team."

"But a powerful one, a terribly powerful one," said the Lady Celalta.
"You and I, my lover and master, have seen strange things and dangers
between the stars, even before we met each other, but we never saw
anything like this before, did we?"

"No," said he.

"Well, then," said she, "let us sleep and forget the matter as much as
we can.  The Instrumentality is certainly taking care of Linschoten
Fifteen, and we two not need bother about it."

And all that Samm, Folly and Finsternis knew was that a light touch,
unexplained but friendly, had gone over them from the far star region
near home.  Thought they, if they thought anything about it at all,
"The Instrumentality, which made us and sent us, has checked up on us
one more time."




V

A few years later, Samm and Folly were talking again while
Finsternis--guarded, impenetrable, uncommunicating, detectable only by
the fierce glow of human life which shone telepathically out of the
immense cube--rode space beside them and said nothing.

Suddenly Folly cried out to Samm loudly:

"I can _smell_ them."

"Smell who?" asked Samm mildly.  "There isn't any smell out here in the
nothingness of space."

"Silly," thought Folly back, "I don't mean really smell.  I mean that I
can pick up _their_ sense of odor telepathically."

"Whose?" said Samm, being dense.

"Our enemies', of course," cried Folly.  "The man-rememberers who are
not man.  The cackle-gabble creatures.  The beings who remember man and
hate him.  They smell thick and warm and alive to each other.  Their
whole world is full of smells.  Their telepaths are getting frantic
now.  They have even figured out that there are three of us and they
are trying to get our smells."

"And we have no smell.  Not when we do not even know whether we have
human bodies or not, inside these things.  Imagine this metal body of
mine smelling.  If it did have a smell," said Samm, "it would probably
be the very soft smell of working steel and a little bit of lubricants,
plus whatever odors my jets might activate inside an atmosphere.  If I
know the Instrumentality, they have made my jets smell awful to almost
any kind of being.  Most forms of life think first through their noses
and then figure out the rest of experience later.  After all, I was
built to intimidate, to frighten, to destroy.  The Instrumentality did
not make this giant to be friendly with anybody.  You and I can be
friends, Folly, because you are a little ship which I could hold like a
cigar between my fingers, and because the ship holds the memory of a
very lovely woman.  I can sense what you once were.  What you may still
be, if your actual body is still inside that boat."

"Oh, Samm!" she cried.  "Do you think I might still be alive, really
alive, with a real me in a real me, and a chance to be myself somewhere
again, out here between the stars?"

"I can't sense it plainly," said Samm.  "I've reached as much as I can
through your ship with my sensors, but I can't tell whether there's a
whole woman there or not.  It might be just a memory of you dissected
and laminated between a lot of plastic sheets.  I really can't tell,
but sometimes I have the strangest hunch that you are still alive, in
the old ordinary way, and that I am alive too."

"Wouldn't that be wonderful!"  She almost shouted at him.  "Samm,
imagine being us again, if we fulfill our mission and conquer this
planet and stay alive and settle there!  I might even meet you and--"

They both fell silent at the implications of being ordinary-alive
again.  They knew that they loved each other.  Out here, in the immense
blackness of space, there was nothing they could do but streak along in
their fast trajectories and talk to each other a little bit by
telepathy.

"Samm," said Folly, and the tone of her thought showed that she was
changing a difficult subject.  "Do you think that we are the furthest
out that people have ever gone?  You used to be a technician.  You
might know.  Do you?"

"Of course I know," thought Samm promptly.  "We're not.  After all,
we're still deep inside our own galaxy."

"I didn't know," said Folly contritely.

"With all those instruments, don't you know where you are?"

"Of course I know where I am, Samm.  In relation to the third planet of
Linschoten XV.  I even have a faint idea of the general direction in
which Old Earth must lie, and how many thousands of ages it would take
us to get home, travelling through ordinary space, if we did try to
turn around."  She thought to herself but didn't add in her thought to
Samm, "Which we can't."  She thought again to him, "But I've never
studied astronomy or navigation, so I couldn't tell whether we were at
the edge of the galaxy or not."

"Nowhere near the edge," said Samm.  "We're not John Joy Tree and we're
nowhere near the two-headed elephants which weep forever in
intergalactic space."



"John Joy Tree?" sang Folly; there was joy and memory in her thoughts
as she sounded the name.  "He was my idol when I was a girl.  My father
was a subchief of the Instrumentality and always promised to bring John
Joy Tree to our house.  We had a country and it was unusual and very
fine for this day and age.  But mister and Go-Captain Tree never got
around to visiting us, so there I was, a big girl with picture-cubes of
him all over my room.  I liked him because he was so much older than
me, and so resolute-looking and so tender too.  I had all sorts of
romantic day-dreams about him, but he never showed up and I married the
wrong man several times, and my children got given to the wrong people,
so here I am.  But what's this stuff about two-headed elephants?"

"Really?" said Samm.  "I don't see how you could hear about John Joy
Tree and not know what he did."

"I knew he flew far, far out, but I didn't know exactly what he did.
After all, I was just a child when I fell in love with his picture.
What _did_ he do?  He's dead now, I suppose, so I don't suppose it
matters."

Finsternis cut in, grimly and unexpectedly: "John Joy Tree is not dead.
He's creeping around a monstrous place on an abandoned planet, and he
is immortal and insane."

"How did you know that?" cried Samm, turning his enormous metal head to
look at the dark burnished cube which had said nothing for so many
years.

There was no further thought from Finsternis, not a ghost, not an echo
of a word.

Folly prodded him:

"It's no use trying to make that thing talk if it doesn't want to.
We've both tried, thousands of times.  Tell me about the two-headed
elephants.  Those are the big animals with large floppy ears and the
noses that pick things up, aren't they?  And they make very wise,
dependable underpeople out of them?"

"I don't know about the underpeople part, but the animals are the kind
you mention, very big indeed.  When John Joy Tree got far outside our
cosmos by flying through space he found an enormous procession of open
ships flying in columns where there was nothing at all.  The ships were
made by nothing which man has ever even seen.  We still don't know
where they came from or what made them.  Each open ship had a sort of
animal, something like an elephant with four front legs and a head at
each end, and as he passed the unimaginable ships, these animals howled
at him.  Howled grief and mourning.  Our best guess was that the ships
were the tombs of some great race of beings and the howling elephants
the immortal half-living mourners who guarded them."

"But how did John Joy Tree ever get back?"

"Ah, that was beautiful.  If you go into spaces, you take nothing more
than your own body with you.  That was the finest engineering the human
race has ever done.  They designed and built a whole planoform ship out
of John Joy Tree's skin, fingernails and hair.  They had to change his
body chemistry a bit to get enough metal in him to carry the coils and
the electric circuits, but it worked.  He came back.  That was a man
who could skip through space like a little boy hopping on familiar
rocks.  He's the only pilot Who ever piloted himself back home from
outside our galaxy.  I don't know whether it will be worth the time and
treasure to use spaces for intergalactic trips.  After all, some very
gifted people may have already fallen through by accident, Folly.  You
and Finsternis and I are people who have been built into machines.  We
are now ourselves the machines.  But with Tree they did it the other
way around.  They made a machine out of him.  And it worked.  In that
one deep flight he went billions of times further than we will ever go."

"You think you know," said Finsternis unexpectedly.  "You think you
know.  That's what you always do.  You think you know."

Folly and Samm tried to get Finsternis to talk some more, but nothing
happened.  After a few more rests and talks they were ready for landing
on the third planet of Linschoten XV.



They landed.

They fought.

Blood ran on the ground.  Fire scorched the valleys and boiled the
lakes.  The telepathic world was full of the cackle-gabble of fright,
hatred throwing itself into suicide, fury turning into surrender, into
deep despair, into hopelessness, and at last into a strange kind of
quiet and love.

Let us not tell that story.

It can be written some other time, told by some other voice.

The beings died by thousands and tens of thousands while Finsternis sat
on a mountain-top, doing nothing.  Folly wove death and destruction,
uncoded languages, drew maps, showed Samm the strong-points and the
weapons which had to be destroyed.  Part of the technology was very
advanced, other parts were still tribal.  The dominant race was that of
the beings who had evolved into handlers and thinkers; it was they who
were the telepaths.

All hatred ceased as the haters died.

Only the submissive ones lived on.

Samm tore cities about with his bare metal hands, ripped heavy guns to
pieces while they were firing at him, picking the gunners off the gun
carriages as though they were lice, swimming oceans when he had to,
with Folly darting and hovering around or ahead of him.

Final surrender was brought by their strongest telepath, a very wise
old male who had been hidden inside a deep mountain:

"You have come, people.  We surrender.  Some of us have always known
the truth.  We are Earth-born, too.  A cargo of chickens settled here
unimaginable times ago.  A time-twist tore us out of our convoy and
threw us here.  That's why, when we sensed you far across space, we
caught the relationship of eat-and-eaten.  Only, our brave ones had it
wrong.  You eat us: we don't eat you.  You are the masters now.  We
will serve you forever.  Do you seek our death?"

"No, no," said Folly.  "We came only to avert a danger, and we have
done that.  Live on, and on, but plan no war and make no weapons.
Leave that to the Instrumentality."

"Blessed is the Instrumentality, whoever that may be.  We accept your
terms.  We belong to you."



When this was done, the war was over.

Strange things began to happen.

Wild voices sang from within Folly and Samm, voices not their own:

_Mission gone.  Work finished.  Go to hill with cube.  Go and rejoice!_

Samm and Folly hesitated.  They had left Finsternis where they landed,
halfway around the planet.

The singing voices became more urgent:

_Go.  Go.  Go now.  Go back to the cube.  Tell the chicken-people to
plant a lawn and a grove of trees.  Go, go, go now to the good reward!_

They told the telepaths what had been said to them and voyaged wearily
up out of the atmosphere and back down for a landing at the original
point of contact, a long low hill which had been planted with huge
patches of green turf and freshly transplanted trees even in the hours
in which they flew off the world and back on it again.  The
bird-telepaths must have had strong and quick commands.

The singing became pure music as they landed, chorales of reward and
rejoicing, with the hint of martial marches and victory fugues woven in.

_Alan, stand up_, said the voices to Samm.

Samm stood on the ridge of the hill.  He stood like a colossus against
the red-dawning sky.  A friendly, quiet crowd of the chicken-people
fell back.

_Alan, put your hand to your right forehead_, sang the voices.

Samm obeyed.  He did not know why the voices called him "Alan."

_Ellen_, land, sang the rejoicing voices to Folly.  Folly, herself a
little ship, landed at Samm's feet.  She was bewildered with happy
confusion and a great deal of pain which did not seem to matter much.

_Alan, come forth_, sang the voices.  Samm felt a sharp pain as his
forehead--his huge metal forehead, two hundred meters above the
ground--burst open and closed again.  There was something pink and
helpless in his hand.

The voices commanded, _Alan, put your hand gently on the ground_.

Samm obeyed and put his hand on the ground.  The little pink toy fell
on the fresh turf.  It was a tiny miniature of a man.

_Ellen, stand forth_, sang the voices again.  The ship named Folly
opened a door and a naked young woman fell out.

_Alma, wake up_.  The cube named Finsternis turned darker than
charcoal.  Out of the dark side, there stumbled a black-haired girl.
She ran across the hill-slope to the figure named Ellen.  The man-body
named Alan was struggling to his feet.

The three of them stood up.

The voices spoke to them: "This is our last message.  You have done
your work.  You are well.  The boat named Folly contains tools,
medicine and the other equipment for a human colony.  The giant named
Samm will stand forever as a monument to human victory.  The cube named
Finsternis will now dissolve.  Alan!  Ellen!  Treat Alma lovingly and
well.  She is now a forgetty."

The three naked people stood bewildered in the dawn.

"Good-by and a great high thanks from the Instrumentality.  This is a
pre-coded message, effective only if you won.  You have won.  Be happy.
Live on!"

Ellen took Alma--who had been Finsternis--and held her tight.  The
great cube dissolved into a shapeless slag-heap.  Alan, who had been
Samm, looked up at his former body dominating the skyline.

For reasons which the travelers did not understand until many years had
passed, the bird-people around them broke into ululant hymns of peace,
welcome and joy.

"My house," said Ellen, pointing at the little ship which had spat
forth her body just minutes ago, "is now a home for all of us."

They climbed into the successful little ship which had been called
Folly.  They knew, somehow, that they would find clothes and food.  And
wisdom, too.  They did.




VI

Ten years later, they had the proof of happiness playing in the yard
before their house--a substantial building, made of stone and brick,
which the local people had built under Alan's directions.  (They had
changed their whole technology in the process of learning from him,
and--thanks to the efficiency and power of the telepathic priestly
caste--things learned at any one spot on the planet were swiftly
disseminated to the whole group of races on the planet.)  The proof of
happiness consisted of the thirty-five human children playing in the
yard.  Ellen had had nine, four sets of twins and a single.  Alma had
had twelve, two sets of quintuplets and a pair of twins.  The other
fourteen had been bottle-grown from ova and sperm which they found in
the ship, the frozen donations of complete strangers who had done their
bit for the off world settling of the human race.  Thanks to the
careful genetic coding of both the womb-children and the
bottle-children, there was a variety of types, suitable for natural
breeding over many generations to come.

Alan same to the door.  He measured the time by the place where the
great shadow fell.  It was hard to realize that the gigantic,
indestructible statue which loomed above them all had once been his own
self.  A small glacier was beginning to form around the feet of Samm
and the night was getting cold.

"I'm bringing the children in already," said Ch-tikkik, one of the
local nurses they had hired to help with the huge brood of human
babies.  She, in return, got the privilege of hatching her eggs on the
warm shelf behind the electric stove; she turned them every hour,
eagerly awaiting the time that sharp little mouths would break the
shell and human-like little hands would tear an opening from which a
human-like baby would emerge, oddly-pretty-ugly like a gnome, and
unusual only in that it could stand upright from the moment of birth.

One little boy was arguing with Ch-tikkik.  He wore a warm robe of
vegetable-fiber veins knitted to serve as a base for a feather cloak.
He was pointing out that with such a robe he could survive a blizzard
and claiming, quite justly, that he did not have to be in the house in
order to stay warm.  Was that Rupert? thought Alan.

He was about to call the child when his two wives came to the door, arm
in arm, flushed with the heat of the kitchen where they had been
cooking the two dinners together--one dinner for the human, now
numbering thirty-seven, and the other for the bird-people, who were
tremendously appreciative of getting cooked food, but who had odd
requirements in the recipes, such as "one quart of finely ground
granite gravel to each gallon of oatmeal, sugared to taste and served
with soybean milk."

Alan stood behind his wives and put a hand on the shoulder of each.

"It's hard to think," he said, "that a little over ten years ago, we
didn't even know that we were still people.  Now look at us, a family,
and a good one."

Alma turned her face up to be kissed, and Ellen, who was less
sentimental, lifted her face to be kissed too, so that her co-wife
would not be embarrassed at being babied separately.  The two liked
each other very much.  Alma came out of the cube Finsternis as a
forgetty, conditioned to remember nothing of her long sad psychotic
life before the Instrumentality had sent her on a wild mission among
the stars.  When she had joined Alan and Ellen, she knew the words of
the Old Common Tongue, but very little else.

Ellen had had some time to teach her, to love her and to mother her
before any of the babies were born, and the relationship between the
two of them was warm and good.



The three parents stood aside as the bird-women, wearing their
comfortable and pretty feather cloaks, herded the children into the
house.  The smallest children had already been brought in from their
sunning and were being given their bottles by bird-girls who never got
tired of watching the cuteness and helplessness of the human infant.

"It's hard to think of that time at all," said Ellen, who had been
"Folly."  "I wanted beauty and fame and a perfect marriage and nobody
even told me that they just didn't go together.  I have had to come to
the end of the stars to get what I wanted, to be what I might become."

"And me," said Alma, who had been "Finsternis," "I had a worse problem.
I was crazy.  I was afraid of life.  I didn't know how to be a person.
I didn't even know how to be a woman, a sweetheart, a female, a mother.
How could I ever guess that I needed a sister and wife, like the one
you have been, to make my life whole?  Without you to show me, Ellen, I
could never have married our husband.  I thought I was carrying murder
among the stars, but I was carrying my own solution as well.  Where
else could I turn out to be me?"

"And I," said Alan, who had been "Samm," "became a metal giant between
the stars because my first wife was dead and my own children forgot me
and neglected me.  Nobody can say I'm not a father now.  Thirty-five,
and more than half of them mine.  I'll be more of a father than any
other man of the human race has ever been."

There was a change in the shadow as the enormous right arm swung
quietly but heavily toward the sky as a prelude to the sharp robotic
call that nightfall, calculated with astronomical precision, had indeed
come to the place where he stood.

The arm reached its height, pointing straight up.

"I used to do that," said Alan.

The cry came, something like a silent pistol-shot which all of them
heard, but a shot without echoes, without reverberations.

Alan looked around.  "All the children are in.  Even Rupert.  Come in,
my darlings, and let us have dinner together."  Alma and Ellen went
ahead of him and he barred the heavy doors behind them.

This was peace and happiness; that at last was goodness.  They had no
obligation but to live and to be happy.  The threat and the promise of
victory were far, far behind.






[End of Three To A Given Star, by Cordwainer Smith]
