Quest of the Three Worlds by Cordwainer Smith

Nothing ever moved in on the solar system.

Here there was nothing to fight, nothing to challenge the mind, to tear the living soul out of a body with its roots dripping in effluvium as tangible as blood. Far above the plane of the ecliptic, he could feel half a ton of dust more or less drifting outside the lanes of human travel. The odd little moons of Mars swung around their planet like frantic mice, yet their regularity was itself an assurance that all was well. Our own solar system was as charming and as simple as an ancient cuckoo clock filled with familiar ticking and with reassuring noises. Out in that nothingness, he could sense the hollow aching horror of space itself and could feel the terrible anxiety which his mind encountered whenever it met the faintest trace of inert dust.Īs he relaxed, the comforting solidity of the Sun, the clockwork of the familiar planets and the moon rang in on him. He felt the squares of space around him, sensed himself at the middle of an immense grid, a cubic grid, full of nothing. What did she think he was-a fool, a loafer, a uniformed nonentity? Didn't she know that for every half-hour of pin-lighting, he got a minimum of two months' recuperation in the hospital?īy now the set was warm. She had looked at it, then looked at him scornfully. He sat down in his chair, laid his head back in the headrest, and pulled the helmet down over his forehead.Īs he waited for the pin-set to warm up, he remembered the girl in the outer corridor. It didn't make much sense to wear a uniform and look like a soldier if people didn't appreciate what you did.

Underhill was furious as he closed the door behind himself. Pinlighting is a hell of a way to earn a living.

if they are willing to dare the dark and twisted dimensions of 'space three,' the 'up-and-out,' and face the 'dragons' that dwell there, malevolent and implacably deadly creatures who strike without warning out of the black hollow nothingness of multidimensional space, and who can only be defeated by-a cat. Here, in what may well be the most imaginative of the science fiction extrapolations in this anthology, he shows us a future in which travelers can flit between the stars in the blinking of an eye. Smith's books include the long novel Norstrilia, and the collections Space Lords, The Best of Cordwainer Smith, You Will Never Be the Same, Stardreamer, Quest of the Three Worlds, and The Instrumentality of Mankind. Linebarger, scholar and statesman-created a science fiction cosmology unique in its scope and complexity: a millennia-spanning Future History, logically outlandish and elegantly strange, set against a vivid, richly colored, mythically intense universe where animals assume the shape of men, vast planoform ships whisper through multidimensional space, immortality can be bought, and the mysterious Lords of the Instrumentality rule a haunted Earth too old for history. The late Cordwainer Smith-in 'real' life Dr.

Quest of the Three Worlds by Cordwainer Smith