Who Goes There?

Cordwainer Smith was a pseudonym for Paul Linebarger, who wrote SF under as Smith so as to separate that career from his day job as, ya know, working for the US government. Linebarger, as Smith, had one of the most idiosyncratic careers of any writer in the field at the time, this despite his dying relatively young (at just 53) and not having his work pubished regularly until the last half-dozen years of his life. He made his debut, as an adult, with “Scanners Live in Vain” in 1950, after five years of struggling to find a publisher for it, and he would not see print again until 1955 with “The Game of Rat and Dragon.” Smith’s stuff was a little too weird for what was otherwise a highly permissive time in the field’s history; but he had found a couple cheerleaders in the forms of Frederik Pohl and Damon Knight. Pohl and Knight really dug Smith’s material, to the point where Smith appeared in all three issues that Knight had edited for If. “Scanners Live in Vain” would’ve surely wallowed in obscurity longer than it did had Pohl not included it in one of his hardcover anthologies in the early ’50s. From the beginning until his death in 1966, Smith was a “writer’s writer” whose quirks ensured that he would always have a cult following.

When Pohl took over Galaxy and If circa 1961, he made a deal with Smith to have first dibs on Smith’s material going forward, and indeed with a few exceptions all of Smith’s work published from about 1962 until his death saw print in Galaxy or If. “Think Blue, Count Two” is, like nearly all of Smith’s fiction, set in the Instrumentality of Mankind universe, a mind-boggling future history that sadly Smith did not live to finish. You have a far future with comically large spaceships, genetically engineered animal-people, and an interplanetary government that is somehow both omnipresent and whose agents we don’t actually see. This is all conveyed with a style that is rather tell-y and stilted, in a way that either you’ll like or you won’t. Also even by the standards of old-timey writers, Smith was a big fan of cats. Like really. Like he was kind of a proto-furry.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 1963 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It was reprinted in Elsewhere and Elsewhen (ed. Groff Conklin) and the Smith collections The Instrumentality of Mankind and The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Fiction of Cordwainer Smith.

Enhancing Image

“Think Blue, Count Two” is set fairly early in the Instrumentality timeline, taking place sometime after “Scanners Live in Vain” but before “The Game of Rat and Dragon.” Unfortunately Smith lost his notebook that had a mapped-out timeline for his future history, so the best we have is guess work. This makes it even harder to find an entry point for the series. Smith’s style of narration is unconventional no matter how you look at it, since despite the action taking place in the far future, the narrator acts as if said action had already happened in the distant past. We have a future history that is self-mythologizing, and also a far-future humanity whose use of English is a bit different from ours. Smith was fluent in multiple language (something like five or six, which is ridiculous and nigh-incomprehensible by today’s standards), and his childhood being partly spent in China in the early years of the 20th century seemed to shape his understanding of language. Not to say he’s a master stylist, a la Fritz Leiber or Ted Sturgeon if we’re talking contemporaries, but rather he has more in common with J. R. R. Tolkien, for both his worldbuilding and his understanding of linguistics. Smith’s future history is weird and densely packed. As for this story we’re actually told the basic plot right at the beginning, before anything actually happens, although it’s easy to overlook this. “A young man, bright of skin and hair, merry at heart, set out for a new world. An older man, his hair touched with gray, went with him. So, too, did thirty thousand others. And also, the most beautiful girl on earth.” But we won’t be introduced to the girl or the men she’ll be accompanying for a minute.

See, space travel in the Instrumentality universe is a big gamble, and at best still takes a lot of work. Most writers of the period depicted space travel as being convenient to the point of straining one’s suspension of disbelief; there’s always some workaround for the speed-of-light problem, not to mention time dilation is usually not factored into things. Not to mention ships would require a truly monstrous amount of energy and propulsion to get through space. Someone like Poul Anderson would make a game out of how spaceships might work. As for Smith, these ships are impossibly large hulking machines, but also space travel is shown to be quite horrible. The whole plot of “Think Blue, Count Two” kicks off because some technicians are prepping a colony ship for a voyage to a distant planet, in a journey that would take centuries of objective time, without repeating the disaster of Old Twenty-two. Basically what happened on Old Twenty-two is that something happened with the sailor (the ship’s human navigator) that required some of the passengers be awoken from cold sleep. “They did not get on well with one another. Or else they got on too horribly well, in the wrong way.” We don’t get specifics, but the gist of it is that all hell broke loose and life aboard Old Twenty-two descended into death and debauchery. For this next trip, the technicians and the “psychological guard” (Smith doesn’t really explain what a psychological guard, but it’s like a psychologist and an engineer rolled into one job) have a safeguard in the form of Veesey, a 15-year-old girl who does not stand out at all aside from her beauty. In fact, Veesey doesn’t have any special skills, except for one thing: she’s to play the daughter role, so that no adult should wanna harm her.

Now, this next part is very weird, so bear with me: Veesey, while she’s in cold sleep, is mind-linked with a laminated mouse brain that is both dead and alive, or rather the mouse is dead but its brain is active—indeed the brain, which is wrapped in plastic, will be active for literally thousands of years assuming it’s never destroyed. Veesey’s telepathic link with the mouse brain (yeah) relies on her unconsciously memorizing a certain TV serial, as well as a nursery rhyme, which goes like this:

Lady if a man
Tries to bother you, you can
            Think blue,
            Count two,
And look for a red shoe.

If Veesey need ever recite the rhyme, help will come to her aid. How help would come to her aid is not explained, and anyway saying it now would be giving away a big spoiler. You might have noticed that we’re a bit of a ways into the review and, if you’ve read the story already and have it fresh enough in your mind, I’ve barely even tackled the plot. The pacing here is a bit wonky, which truth be told is a problem I often have with Smith, which might have to do with his peculiar style. There is a lot of setup, to the point where we don’t actually get on the ship and are introduced to Veesey’s two male companions until at least a quarter in; but then you might argue we need the setup, or else what follows will not make any damn sense to us. I will say, this really should not be your first Smith or Instrumentality story. I would recommend starting with “Scanners Live in Vain” or “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” or maybe “The Burning of the Brain.” For one, Smith mentions the Scanners offhandedly at the beginning of “Think Blue, Count Two,” and if this is your first Smith story then you would have no clue what a Scanner is, because Smith doesn’t explain it. In fact there is a lot that Smith can’t be bothered to explain, whether it be the jargon or mechanics of his future history. It also doesn’t help that despite psychology figuring very much into the workings of the Instrumentality universe (yeah, you’ve got psi powers and the like), we don’t get much insight into how characters think or how they mentally interact with this strange world around them. As such, there is no singular one-size-fits-all Instrumentality story; but on the plus side, the more of this series you read, the more rewarding it becomes, since these stories piggyback off each other.

Now, Veesey is put in cold sleep and sent aboard, along with 30,000 other passengers. The ship is maintained by the sailor along with a team of robots, but while the robots can do a great deal, a very small number of passengers will have to be awakened if the sailor were to die or become incapacitated. So of course, in seemingly no time at all, the sailor dies; whether it be suicide or an accident is not revealed until later. Veesey thus wakes up, along with two male passengers, the young and handsome Trece and the older and deformed (something had gone wrong with his cryo-chamber) Talatashar. The humans enter and awaken from cold sleep periodically (it would seem like days to them while centuries pass by outside the ship) to help with issues the robots are unable to deal with themselves. That’s the idea. Since this is a story and a story typically requires drama, though, the humans run into problems that are unrelated to the ships—namely that while machinery might be running fine, there’s always the chance for human error and human folly. There’s also the problematic aspect of the equation, which is that every adult (who are bare minimum a decade older than her) wants to get in Veesey’s pants, despite her very young age. I wanna say this sort of thing only happens in this one Smith story, but I’m also thinking of the questionable age-gap relationship at the heart of “On the Storm Planet,” which otherwise is one of Smith’s best. Granted that nothing explicit happens on the page (because this is still magazine SF in the early ’60s), it doesn’t take long for Veesey and Trece to start a sexual relationship.

There Be Spoilers Here

While Veesey and Trece’s relationship progresses, Talatashar becomes kind of an incel, resenting Veesey’s casual pull on his male friend. The result is jealousy that heightens into Talatashar entering a blind rage and going on a rather Elliot Rodger-esque rant about how women are so purely evil that they’re not even aware of their evilness. Yeah, it would be a comical level of misogyny if not for the fact that we now have guys going on shooting sprees basically because they have some awful personalities that they’re unable to get any pussy. Misogyny is the big catalyst for tensions between the three humans escalating, which I’ll be honest, I did not expect considering Smith was a lot of things, but a feminist was not one of them. (Mind you that while he was definitely a right-winger, Smith wasn’t entirely right-wing: for one he seemed to sympathize with the Civil Rights movement, with the Underpeople [the aforementioned genetically engineered animal-people] clearly being an allegory for a oppressed underclass.) Thankfully Veesey is not in any real danger, since all she has to do is think of the nursery rhyme that’s been burned into her brain and the dead-alive mouse brain does its job. A series of holograms comes alive and tell Talatashar to quit being such a bitch baby or else they’ll kick his shit in—a threat that, surprisingly, he ends up taking to heart. The holograms, despite being effectively ghosts, are able to trick the humans’ minds so as to make them think these ghostly doings are for real, to the point where Sh’san, the lead hologram, can apparently fire a “gun” at someone’s head and said head would actually be blown to bits. You have to admit that’s pretty cool.

So, all’s well that ends well. The three humans and their 30,000 fellow passengers reach the planet with the ship in one piece. Of course, Trece dumps Veesey, letting her know that it’s actually not too kosher for a 20-something to be dating a 15-year-old. (He says this after they’ve had sex multiple times, but better late than never, I guess.) Talatashar is much more chill now, having gone over his bout of space-induced insanity, and the technicians waiting for them at the immigration station even repaired his face so he looks reasonably handsome now. This is one of those Smith stories that has a straight-up happy ending, which is not something I would suggest getting used to with Smith.

A Step Farther Out

At some point I’m gonna review a Smith story here that involves the Underpeople, who are quite interesting conceptually, although they don’t actually appear in that many Instrumentality stories. The last Smith story I reviewed, “Drunkboat,” had its points but wasn’t very good, in my opinion, although “Think Blue, Count Two” is better. The appeal of Cordwainer Smith lies in the fact that he’s one of the best and most eccentric old-timey SF writers when it comes to space opera, or more generally space adventure. “Scanners Live in Vain” does not read like any other space adventure story of the time, and similarly “Think Blue, Count Two” takes what is basically a love triangle IN SPAAAAACE and puts a novel spin on it. This is the kind of story you should check out once you’ve become at least a bit acclimated with the Instrumentality series.

See you next time.