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Title: The Burning of the Brain
Author: Smith, Cordwainer [Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony]
   (1913-1966)
Date of first publication: October 1958
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   If, October 1958
   [Buffalo, New York: Quinn Publishing Co.]
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 14 April 2017
Date last updated: 14 April 2017
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1424

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.






  A.D. 2500:
  The Burning of the Brain


  BY CORDWAINER SMITH



_As the ship's power failed, coldness and blackness and death would
crush in on them.  And that would be all, all of the_ Wu-Feinstein,
_all of Dolores Oh..._




1.  Dolores Oh

I tell you, it is sad, it is more than sad, it is fearful--it is a
dreadful thing to go into the Up and Out, to fly without flying, to
move between the stars as a moth may drift among the leaves on a summer
night.

Of all the men who took the great ships into planoform none was braver,
none stronger, than Captain Magno Taliano.

Scanners had been gone for centuries and the jonasoidal effect had
become so simple, so manageable, that the traversing of light-years was
no more difficult to most of the passengers of the great ships than to
go from one room to the other.

Passengers moved easily.

Not the crew.

Least of all the captain.

The captaincy of a jonasoidal ship which embarked on an interstellar
journey was a man subject to rare and overwhelming strains.  The art of
getting past all the complications of space was far more like the
piloting of turbulent waters in ancient days than like the smooth seas
which legendary men once traversed with sails alone.

Go-Captain on the _Wu-Feinstein_, finest ship of its class, was Magno
Taliano.

Of him it was said, "He could sail through hell with the muscles of his
left eye alone.  He could plow space with his living brain if the
instruments failed..."

Wife to the Go-Captain was Dolores Oh.  The name was Japonical, from
some nation of the ancient days.  Dolores Oh had been once beautiful,
so beautiful that she took men's breath away, made wise men into fools,
made young men into nightmares of lust and yearning.  Wherever she went
men had quarreled and fought over her.

But Dolores Oh was proud beyond all common limits of pride.  She
refused to go through the ordinary rejuvenescence.  A terrible yearning
a hundred or so years back must have come over her.  Perhaps she said
to herself, before that hope and terror which a mirror in a quiet room
becomes to anyone,

"Surely I am me.  There must be a _me_ more than the beauty of my face,
there must be a something other than the delicacy of skin and the
accidental lines of my jaw and my cheekbone.

"What have men loved if it wasn't me?  Can I ever find out who I am or
what I am if I don't let beauty perish and live on in whatever flesh
age gives me?"

She had met the Go-Captain and had married him in a romance that left
forty planets talking and half the ship lines stunned.

Magno Taliano was at the very beginning of his genius.  Space, we can
tell you, is rough--rough like the wildest of storm-driven waters,
filled with perils which only the most sensitive, the quickest, the
most daring of men can surmount.

Best of them all, class for class, age for age, out of class, beating
the best of his seniors, was Magno Taliano.

For him to marry the most beautiful beauty of forty worlds was a
wedding like Eloise and Abelard's, or like the unforgettable romance of
Helen America and Mr. Grey-no-more.

The ships of the Go-Captain Magno Taliano became more beautiful year by
year, century by century.

As ships became better he always obtained the best.  He maintained his
lead over the other Go-Captains so overwhelmingly that it was
unthinkable for the finest ship of mankind to sail out amid the
roughnesses and uncertainties of two-dimensional space without himself
at the helm.

Stop-Captains were proud to sail space beside him.  (Though the
Stop-Captains had nothing more to do than to check the maintenance of
the ship, its loading and unloading when it was in normal space, they
were still more than ordinary men in their own kind of world, a world
far below the more majestic and adventurous universe of the
Go-Captains.)

Magno Taliano had a niece who in the modern style used a place instead
of a name: she was called "Dita from the Great South House."

When Dita came aboard the _Wu-Feinstein_ she had heard much of Dolores
Oh, her aunt by marriage who had once captivated the men in many
worlds.  Dita was wholly unprepared for what she found.

Dolores greeted her civilly enough, but the civility was a sucking pump
of hideous anxiety, the friendliness was the driest of mockeries, the
greeting itself an attack.

"What's the matter with the woman?" thought Dita.

As if to answer her thought, Dolores said aloud and in words: "It's
nice to meet a woman who's not trying to take Taliano from me.  I love
him.  Can you believe that?  Can you?"

"Of course," said Dita.  She looked at the ruined face of Dolores Oh,
at the dreaming terror in Dolores' eyes, and she realized that Dolores
had passed all limits of nightmare and had become a veritable demon of
regret, a possessive ghost who sucked the vitality from her husband,
who dreaded companionship, hated friendship, rejected even the most
casual of acquaintances, because she feared forever and without limit
that there was really nothing to herself, and feared that without Magno
Taliano she would be more lost than the blackest of whirlpools in the
nothing between the stars.

Magno Taliano came in.

He saw his wife and niece together.

He must have been used to Dolores Oh.  In Dita's eyes Dolores was more
frightening than a mud-caked reptile raising its wounded and venomous
head with blind hunger and blind rage.  To Magno Taliano the ghastly
woman who stood like a witch beside him was somehow the beautiful girl
he had wooed and had married one hundred sixty-four years before.

He kissed the withered cheek, he stroked the dried and stringy hair, he
looked into the greedy terror-haunted eyes as though they were the eyes
of a child he loved.  He said, lightly and gently,

"Be good to Dita, my dear."

He went on through the lobby of the ship to the inner sanctum of the
planoforming room.

The Stop-Captain waited for him.  Outside on the world of Sherman the
scented breezes of that pleasant planet blew in through the open
windows of the ship.

_Wu-Feinstein_, finest ship of its class, had no need for metal walls.
It was built to resemble an ancient, pre-historic estate named Mount
Vernon, and when it sailed between the stars it was encased in its own
rigid and self-renewing field of force.

The passengers went through a few pleasant hours of strolling on the
grass, enjoying the spacious rooms, chatting beneath a marvelous
simulacrum of an atmosphere-filled sky.

Only in the planoforming room did the Go-Captain know what happened.
The Go-Captain, his Pinlighters sitting beside him, took the ship from
one compression to another, leaping hotly and frantically through
space, sometimes one light year, sometimes a hundred light years, jump,
jump, jump, jump until the ship, the light touches of the captain's
mind guiding it, passed the perils of millions upon millions of worlds,
came out at its appointed destination and settled as lightly as one
feather resting upon others, settled into an embroidered and decorated
countryside where the passengers could move as easily away from their
journey as if they had done nothing more than to pass an afternoon in a
pleasant old house by the side of a river.




2.  The Lost Locksheet

Magno Taliano nodded to his Pinlighters.  The Stop-Captain bowed
obsequiously from the doorway of the planoforming room.  Taliano looked
at him sternly, but with robust friendliness.  With formal and austere
courtesy he asked,

"Sir and colleague, is everything ready for the jonasoidal effect?"

The Stop-Captain bowed even more formally.  "Truly ready, sir and
master."

"The Locksheet in place?"

"Truly in place, sir and master."

"The passengers secure?"

"The passengers are secure, numbered, happy and ready, sir and master."

Then came the last and the most serious of questions.  "Are my
Pinlighters warmed with their pinsets and ready for combat?"

"Ready for combat, sir and master."  With these words the Stop-Captain
withdrew.  Magno Taliano smiled to his Pinlighters.  All Pinlighters
were telepathic.  Through the minds of all of them there passed the
same thought.

"How could a man that pleasant stay married all those years to a hag
like Dolores Oh?  How could that witch, that horror, have ever been a
beauty?  How could that beast have ever been a woman, particularly the
divine and glamorous Dolores Oh whose image we still see in four-di
every now and then?"

Yet pleasant he was, though long he may have been married to Dolores
Oh.  Her loneliness and greed might suck at him like a nightmare, but
his strength was more than enough strength for two.

Was he not the captain of the greatest ship to sail between the stars?

Even as the Pinlighters smiled their greetings back to him, his right
hand depressed the golden ceremonial lever of the ship.  This
instrument alone was mechanical.  All other controls in the ship had
long since been formed telepathically or electronically.

Within the planoforming room the black skies became visible and the
tissue of space shot up around them like boiling water at the base of a
waterfall.  Outside that one room the passengers still walked sedately
on scented lawns.

From the wall facing him, as he sat rigid in his Go-Captain's chair,
Magno Taliano sensed the forming of a pattern which in three or four
hundred milliseconds would tell him where he was and would give him the
next clue as to how to move.

He moved the ship with the impulses of his own brain, to which the wall
was a superlative complement.

The wall was a living brickwork of locksheets, laminated charts, one
hundred thousand charts to the inch, the wall pre-selected and
preassembled for all imaginable contingencies of the journey which,
each time afresh, took the ship across half unknown immensities of time
and space.  The ship leapt, as it had before.

The new star focused.

Magno Taliano waited for the wall to show him where he was, expecting
(in partnership with the wall) to flick the ship back into the pattern
of stellar space, moving it by immense skips from source to destination.

This time nothing happened.

"Nothing?"

For the first time in a hundred years his mind knew panic.

It couldn't be nothing.  Not _nothing_.  Something had to focus.  The
locksheets always focused.

His mind reached into the lock-sheets and he realized with a
devastation beyond all limits of ordinary human grief that they were
lost as no ship had ever been lost before.  By some error never before
committed in the history of mankind, the entire wall was made of
duplicates of the same locksheet.

Worst of all, the Emergency Return Sheet was lost.  There were midstars
none of them had ever seen before, perhaps as little as five hundred
million miles, perhaps as far as forty parsecs.

And the locksheet was lost.

And they would die.

As the ship's power failed coldness and blackness and death would crush
in on them in a few hours at the most.  That then would be all, all of
the _Wu-Feinstein_, all of Dolores Oh.




3.  The Secret of the Old Dark Brain

Outside of the planoforming room of the _Wu-Feinstein_ the passengers
had no reason to understand that they were marooned in the
nothing-at-all.

Dolores Oh rocked back and forth in an ancient rocking chair.  Her
haggard face looked without pleasure at the imaginary river that ran
past the edge of the lawn.  Dita from the Great South House sat on a
hassock by her aunt's knees.

Dolores was talking about a trip she had made when she was young and
vibrant with beauty, a beauty which brought trouble and hate wherever
it went.

"... so the guardsman killed the captain and then came to my cabin and
said to me, 'You've got to marry me now.  I've given up everything for
your sake,' and I said to him, 'I never said that I loved you.  It was
sweet of you to get into a fight, and in a way I suppose it is a
compliment to my beauty, but it doesn't mean that I belong to you the
rest of my life.  What do you think I am, anyhow?'"

Dolores Oh sighed a dry, ugly sigh, like the crackling of subzero winds
through frozen twigs.  "So you see, Dita, being beautiful the way you
are is no answer to anything.  A woman has got to be herself before she
finds out what she is.  I know that my lord and husband, the
Go-Captain, loves me because my beauty is gone, and with my beauty gone
there is nothing but _me_ to love, is there?"

An odd figure came out on the verandah.  It was a Pinlighter in full
fighting costume.  Pinlighters were never supposed to leave the
planoforming room, and it was most extraordinary for one of them to
appear among the passengers when the ship was in flight.

He bowed to the two ladies and said with the utmost courtesy,

"Ladies, will you please come into the planoforming room?  We have need
that you should see the Go-Captain now."

Dolores' hand leapt to her mouth.  Her gesture of grief was as
automatic as the striking of a snake.  Dita sensed that her aunt had
been waiting a hundred years and more for disaster, that her aunt had
craved ruin for her husband the way that some people crave love and
others crave death.

Dita said nothing.  Neither did Dolores, apparently at second thought,
utter a word.

They followed the Pinlighter silently into the planoforming room.

The heavy door closed behind them.

Magno Taliano was still rigid in his Captain's chair.

He spoke very slowly, his voice sounding like a record played too
slowly on an ancient parlophone.

"_We are lost in space, my dear_," said the frigid, ghostly voice of
the Captain, still in his Go-Captain's trance.  "_We are lost in space
and I thought that perhaps if your mind aided mine we might think of a
way back._"

Dita started to speak.

A Pinlighter told her: "Go ahead and speak, my dear.  Do you have any
suggestion?"

"Why don't we just go back?  It would be humiliating, wouldn't it?
Still it would be better than dying.  Let's use the Emergency Return
Locksheet and go on right back.  The world will forgive Magno Taliano
for a single failure after thousands of brilliant and successful trips."

The Pinlighter, a pleasant enough young man, was as friendly and calm
as a doctor informing someone of a death or of a mutilation.  "The
impossible has happened, Dita from the Great South House.  All the
Locksheets are wrong.  They are all the same one.  And not one of them
is good for emergency return."

With that the two women knew where they were.  They knew that space
would tear into them like threads being pulled out of a fiber so that
they would either die bit by bit as the hours passed and as the
material of their bodies faded away a few molecules here and a few
there.  Or, alternatively, they could die all at once in a flash if the
Go-Captain chose to kill himself and the ship rather than to wait for a
slow death.  Or, if they believed in religion, they could pray.

The Pinlighter said, "We think we see a familiar pattern at the edge of
your own brain.  May we look in?"

Taliano nodded very slowly, very gravely.

The Pinlighter stood still.

The two women watched.  Nothing visible happened, but they knew that
beyond the limits of vision and yet before their eyes a great drama was
being played out.  The minds of the Pinlighters probed deep into the
mind of the frozen Go-Captain, searching amid the synapses for the
secret of the faintest clue to their possible rescue.

Minutes passed.  They seemed like hours.

At last the Pinlighter spoke.  "We can see into your midbrain, Captain.
At the edge of your paleocortex there is a star pattern which resembles
the upper left rear of our present location."

The Pinlighter laughed nervously.  "We want to know can you fly the
ship home on your brain?"

Magno Taliano looked with deep tragic eyes at the inquirer.  His slow
voice came out at them once again since he dared not leave the
half-trance which held the entire ship in stasis.  "_Do you mean can I
fly the ship on a brain alone?  It would burn out my brain and the ship
would be lost anyhow...._

"But we're lost, lost, lost," screamed Dolores Oh.  Her face was alive
with hideous hope, with a hunger for ruin, with a greedy welcome of
disaster.  She screamed at her husband, "Wake up, my darling, and let
us die together.  At least we can belong to each other that much, that
long, forever!"

"Why die?" said the Pinlighter softly.  "You tell him, Dita."

Said Dita, "Why not try, sir and uncle?"

Slowly Magno Taliano turned his face toward his knees.  Again his
hollow voice sounded.  "_If I do this I shall be a fool or a child or a
dead man, but I will do it for you._"

Dita had studied the work of the Go-Captains and she knew well enough
that if the paleocortex was lost the personality became intellectually
sane, but emotionally crazed.  With the most ancient part of the brain
gone the fundamental controls of hostility, hunger and sex disappeared.
The most ferocious of animals and the most brilliant of men were
reduced to a common level--a level of infantile friendliness in which
lust and playfulness and gentle, unappeasable hunger became the
eternity of their days.

Magno Taliano did not wait.

He reached out a slow hand and squeezed the hand of Dolores Oh.  "_As I
die you shall at last be sure I love you._"

Once again the women saw nothing.  They realized they had been called
in simply to give Magno Taliano a last glimpse of his own life.

A quiet Pinlighter thrust a beam-electrode so that it reached square
into the paleocortex of Captain Magno Taliano.

The planoforming room came to life.  Strange heavens swirled about them
like milk being churned in a bowl.

Dita realized that her partial capacity of telepathy was functioning
even without the aid of a machine.  With her mind she could feel the
dead wall of the locksheets.  She was aware of the rocking of the
_Wu-Feinstein_ as it leapt from space to space, as uncertain as a man
crossing a river by leaping from one ice-covered rock to the other.

In a strange way she even knew that the paleocortical part of her
uncle's brain was burning out at last and forever, that the star
patterns which had been frozen in the locksheets lived on in the
infinitely complex pattern of his own memories, and that with the help
of his own telepathic Pinlighters he was burning out his brain cell by
cell in order for them to find a way to the ship's destination.  This
indeed was his last trip.

Dolores Oh watched her husband with a hungry greed surpassing all
expression.

Little by little his face became relaxed and stupid.

Dita could see the midbrain being burned blank, as the ship's controls
with the help of the Pinlighters searched through the most magnificent
intellect of its time for a last course into harbor.

Suddenly Dolores Oh was on her knees, sobbing by the hand of her
husband.

A Pinlighter took Dita by the arm.

"We have reached destination," he said.

"And my uncle?"

The Pinlighter looked at her strangely.

She realized he was speaking to her without moving his lips--speaking
mind-to-mind with pure telepathy.

"Can't you see it?"

She shook her head dazedly.

The Pinlighter thought his emphatic statement at her once again.

"As your uncle burned out his brain, you picked up his skills.  Can't
you sense it?  You are a Go-Captain yourself and one of the greatest of
us."

"And he?"

The Pinlighter thought a merciful comment at her.

Magno Taliano had risen from his chair and was being led from the room
by his wife and consort, Dolores Oh.  He had the amiable smile of an
idiot, and his face for the first time in more than a hundred years
trembled with shy and silly love.


END






[End of The Burning of the Brain, by Cordwainer Smith]
