“Steady on, old girl. McBans never run from nothing, and to nothing!”
She gulped but she joined pace with him.
People began looking up at them as they approached.
Nothing was to be told from the expressions.
It was little Lord Redlady, unconventional to the end, who broke the sign to them.
He held up one finger.
Only one.
Immediately thereafter Rod and Lavinia saw their twins. Ted, the fairer one, sat on a chair while Old Bill tried to give him a drink. Ted wouldn’t take it. He looked across the land as though he could not believe what he saw. Rich, the darker twin, stood all alone.
All alone, and laughing.
Laughing.
Rod McBan and his missus walked across the land of Doom to be civil to their neighbors. This was indeed what inexorable custom commanded. She squeezed his hand a little tighter; he held her arm a little more firmly.
After a long time they had done their formal courtesies. Rod pulled Ted to his feet. “Hullo, boy. You made it. You know who you are?”
Mechanically the boy recited, “Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan to the hundred-and-fifty-second, Sir and Father!”
Then the boy broke, for just a moment. He pointed at Rich, who was still laughing, off by himself, and then plunged for his father’s hug:
“Oh, dad! Why me? Why me?”
About the Author
Cordwainer Smith was the pseudonym of Dr. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913–1966).
A member of the Foreign Policy Association and professor of Asiatic Politics at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Linebarger was one of America’s most competent specialists on the Far East and on psychological warfare.
The son of a retired judge who helped finance the Chinese revolution of 1911, he grew up in China, Japan, France and Germany, learning six languages by his late teens. Sun Yat-sen himself was Linebarger’s godfather.
Already involved in diplomatic negotiations at the age of seventeen, Linebarger spent the 1930s assisting his father as legal advisor to Chiang Kai-shek and writing his own authoritative texts on Chinese affairs.
Despite having been blinded in one eye as a child, Linebarger contrived to have himself commissioned in the U.S. Army as an intelligence operative in China during World War II. First named to the Office of War Planning, he drew up such stringent specifications for the job that only he could qualify!
As Lt. Col. Linebarger, he again saw service in the Korean War. One of his coups was persuading Chinese soldiers to give themselves up while saving face by shouting words which sounded like “honor” and “duty,” but which meant, when spoken in the right order, “I surrender.”
His Korean experience led to his writing Psychological Warfare, still regarded as the textbook in the field. But he passed up Vietnam, feeling our involvement there was a mistake.
“Scanners Live in Vain,” his first science-fiction story as Cordwainer Smith, appeared in 1950. But “War No. 81-Q” had been published in 1928 under the same Anthony Bearden by-line used for poetry quoted in Norstrilia; unfortunately, no one can remember where it appeared.
That story, and others that began appearing in 1955, formed parts of a strange history of the future that was a mixture of Oriental and Occidental influence and literary techniques and of scientific and religious philosophy. A High-Church Episcopalian, Linebarger seems to have been striving — perhaps by coincidence — for a synthesis similar to that of Teilhard de Chardin. Smith’s shorter stories (A number of which will be published in The Best of Cordwainer Smith, later this year by Ballantine Books) trace humanity’s rise from the destruction of the Ancient Wars through the adventurous age of space sailors to the decadence of a perfect Utopia — all under the ruthless benevolence of the Instrumentality of Mankind.
Norstrilia, Smith’s only sf novel, was intended to be the centerpiece of a mosaic of shorter works about the Rediscovery of Man and the Holy Insurgency. These shorter works shed more light on events casually referred to in the novel — previous activities of C’mell and Lord Jestocost, the martyrdom of D’joan and others.
First written in 1960, Norstrilia was split into two parts — with material grafted on to make them look like separate novels — for paperback publication elsewhere, following the magazine appearance of excerpts in 1964. This edition is the first appearance anywhere of Norstrilia in its original form — something for which all admirers of Smith’s work should be grateful.
J. J. Pierce
August, 1974