The Fife of Bodidharma - Cordwainer Smith, ebook, Temp
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The Fife of Bodidharma
by Cordwainer Smith
Music (said Confucius) awakens the mind, propriety finishes it, melody
completes it.
—The Lun Yu, Book VIII, Chapter 8
I
It was perhaps in the second period of the proto-Indian Harappa culture,
perhaps earlier in the very dawn of metal, that a goldsmith accidentally found
a formula to make a magical fife. To him, the fife became death or bliss, an
avenue to choosable salvations or dooms. Among later men, the fife might be
recognized as a chancy prediscovery of psionic powers with sonic triggering.
Whatever it was, it worked! Long before the Buddha, long-haired Dravidian
priests learned that it worked.
Cast mostly in gold despite the goldsmith's care with the speculum alloy, the
fife emitted shrill whistlings but it also transmitted supersonic vibrations
in a narrow range—narrow and intense enough a range to rearrange synapses in
the brain and to modify the basic emotions of the hearer.
The goldsmith did not long survive his instrument. They found him dead.
The fife became the property of priests; after a short, terrible period of use
and abuse, it was buried in the tomb of a great king.
II
Robbers found the fife, tried it and died. Some died amid bliss, some amid
hate, others in a frenzy of fear and delusion. A strong survivor, trembling
after the ordeal of inexpressibly awakened sensations and emotions, wrapped
the fife in a page of holy writing and presented it to Bodidharma the Blessed
One just before Bodidharma began his unbelievably arduous voyage from India
across the ranges of the spines of the world over to far Cathay.
Bodidharma the Blessed One, the man who had seen Persia, the aged one bringing
wisdom, came across the highest of all mountains in the year that the Northern
Wei dynasty of China moved their capital out of divine Loyang. (Elsewhere in
the world where men reckoned the years from the birth of their Lord Jesus
Christ, the year was counted as Anno Domini 554, but in the high land between
India and China the message of Christianity had not yet arrived and the word
of the Lord Gautama Buddha was still the sweetest gospel to reach the ears of
men.)
Bodidharma, clad by only a thin robe, climbed across the glaciers. For food he
drank the air, spicing it with prayer. Cold winds cut his old skin, his tired
bones; for a cloak he drew his sanctity about him and bore within his
indomitable heart the knowledge that the pure, unspoiled message of the Lord
Gautama Buddha had, by the will of time and chance themselves, to be carried
from the Indian world to the Chinese.
Once beyond the peaks and passes he descended into the cold frigidity of high
desert. Sand cut his feet but the skin did not bleed because he was shod in
sacred spells and magical charms.
At last animals approached. They came in the ugliness of their sin, ignorance,
and shame. Beasts they were, but more than beasts—they were the souls of the
wicked condemned to endless rebirth, now incorporated in vile forms because of
 the wickedness with which they had once rejected the teachings of eternity and
the wisdom which lay before them as plainly as the trees or the nighttime
heavens. The more vicious the man, the more ugly the beast: this was the rule.
Here in the desert the beasts were very ugly.
Bodidharma the Blessed One shrank back.
He did not desire to use the weapon. "O Forever Blessed One, seated in the
Lotus Flower, Buddha, help me!"
Within his heart he felt no response. The sinfulness and wickedness of these
beasts was such that even the Buddha had turned his face gently aside and
would offer no protection to his messenger, the missionary Bodidharma.
Reluctantly Bodidharma took out his fife.
The fife was a dainty weapon, twice the length of a man's finger. Golden in
strange, almost ugly forms, it hinted at a civilization which no one living in
India now remembered. The fife had come out of the early beginnings of
mankind, had ridden across a mass of ages, a legion of years, and survived as
a testimony to the power of early men.
At the end of the fife was a little whistle. Four touch holes gave the fife
pitches and a wide variety of combinations of notes.
Blown once the fife called to holiness. This occurred if all stops were
closed.
Blown twice with all stops opened the fife carried its own power. This power
was strange indeed. It magnified every chance emotion of each living thing
within range of its sound.
Bodidharma the Blessed One had carried the fife because it comforted him.
Closed, its notes reminded him of the sacred message of the Three Treasures of
the Buddha which he carried from India to China. Opened, its notes brought
bliss to the innocent and their own punishment to the wicked. Innocence and
wickedness were not determined by the fife but by the hearers themselves,
whoever they might be. The trees which heard these notes in their own treelike
way struck even more mightily into the earth and up to the sky reaching for
nourishment with new but dim and treelike hope. Tigers became more tigerish,
frogs more froggy, men more good or bad, as their characters might dispose
them.
"Stop!" called Bodidharma the Blessed One to the beasts.
Tiger and wolf, fox and jackal, snake and spider, they advanced.
"Stop!" he called again.
Hoof and claw, sting and tooth, eyes alive, they advanced.
"Stop!" he called for the third time.
Still they advanced. He blew the fife wide open, twice, clear and loud.
Twice, clear and loud.
The animals stopped. At the second note, they began to thresh about,
imprisoned even more deeply by the bestiality of their own natures. The tiger
snarled at his own front paws, the wolf snapped at his own tail, the jackal
 ran fearfully from his own shadow, the spider hid beneath the darkness of
rocks, and the other vile beasts who had threatened the Blessed One let him
pass.
Bodidharma the Blessed One went on. In the streets of the new capital at
Anyang the gentle gospel of Buddhism was received with curiosity, with calm,
and with delight. Those voluptuous barbarians, the Toba Tartars, who had made
themselves masters of North China, now filled their hearts and souls with the
hope of death instead of the fear of destruction. Mothers wept with pleasure
to know that their children, dying, had been received into blessedness. The
Emperor himself laid aside his sword in order to listen to the gentle message
that had come so bravely over illimitable mountains.
When Bodidharma the Blessed One died he was buried in the outskirts of Anyang,
his fife in a sacred onyx case beside his right hand. There he and it both
slept for thirteen hundred and forty years.
Ill
In the year 1894 a German explorer—so he fancied himself to be— looted the
tomb of the Blessed One in the name of science.
Villagers caught him in the act and drove him from the hillside.
He escaped with only one piece of loot, an onyx case with a strange copperlike
fife. Copper it seemed to be, although the metal was not as corroded as actual
copper should have been after so long a burial in intermittently moist
country. The fife was filthy. He cleaned it enough to see that it was fragile
and to reveal the un-Chinese character of the declarations along its side.
He did not clean it enough to try blowing it: he lived because of that.
The fife was presented to a small municipal museum named in honor of a German
grand duchess. It occupied case No. 34 of the Dorotheum and lay there for
another fifty-one years.
IV
The B-29s had gone. They had roared off in the direction of Rastatt.
Wolfgang Huene climbed out of the ditch. He hated himself, he hated the
Allies, and he almost hated Hitler. A Hitler youth, he was handsome, blond,
tall, craggy. He was also brave, sharp, cruel, and clever. He was a Nazi. Only
in a Nazi world could he hope to exist. His parents, he knew, were soft
rubbish. When his father had been killed in a bombing, Wolfgang did not mind.
When his mother, half-starved, died of influenza, he did not worry about her.
She was old and did not matter. Germany mattered.
Now the Germany which mattered to him was coming apart, ripped by explosions,
punctured by shock waves, and fractured by the endless assault of Allied air
power.
Wolfgang as a young Nazi did not know fear, but he did know bewilderment.
In an animal, instinctive way, he knew—without thinking about it— that if
Hitlerism did not survive he himself would not survive either. He even knew
that he was doing his best, what little best there was still left to do. He
was looking for spies while reporting the weak-hearted ones who complained
against the Fiihrer or the war. He was helping to organize the Volkssturm and
he had hopes of becoming a Nazi guerrilla even if the Allies did cross the
Rhine. Like an animal, but like a very intelligent animal, he knew he had to
fight, while at the same time, he realized that the fight might go against
 him.
He stood in the street watching the dust settle after the bombing.
The moonlight was clear on the broken pavement.
This was a quiet part of the city. He could hear the fires downtown making a
crunching sound, like the familiar noise of his father eating lettuce. Near
himself he could hear nothing; he seemed to be all alone, under the moon, in a
tiny forgotten corner of the world.
He looked around.
His eyes widened in astonishment: the Dorotheum museum had*been blasted open.
Idly, he walked over to the ruin. He stood in the dark doorway.
Looking back at the street and then up at the sky to make sure that it was
safe to show a light, he then flashed on his pocket electric light and cast
the beam around the display room. Cases were broken; in most of them glass had
fallen in on the exhibits. Window glass looked like puddles of ice in the cold
moonlight as it lay broken on the old stone floors.
Immediately in front of him a display case sagged crazily.
He cast his flashlight beam on it. The light picked up a short tube which
looked something like the barrel of an antique pistol. Wolfgang reached for
the tube. He had played in a band and he knew what it was. It was a fife.
He held it in his hand a moment and then stuck it in his jacket. He cast the
beam of his light once more around the museum and then went out in the street.
It was no use letting the police argue.
He could now hear the laboring engines of trucks as they coughed, sputtering
with their poor fuel, climbing up the hill toward him.
He put his light in his pocket. Feeling the fife, he took it out.
Instinctively, the way that any human being would, he put his fingers over all
four of the touch holes before he began to blow. The fife was stopped up.
He applied force.
He blew hard.
The fife sounded.
A sweet note, golden beyond imagination, softer and wilder than the most
thrilling notes of the finest symphony in the world, sounded in his ears.
He felt different, relieved, happy.
His soul, which he did not know he had, achieved a condition of peace which he
had never before experienced. In that moment a small religion was born. It was
a small religion because it was confined to the mind of a single brutal
adolescent, but it was a true religion, nevertheless, because it had the
complete message of hope, comfort, and fulfillment of an order beyond the
limits of this life. Love, and the tremendous meaning of love, poured through
his mind. Love relaxed the muscles of his back and even let his aching eyelids
drop over his eyes in the first honest fatigue he had admitted for many weeks.
 The Nazi in him had been drained off. The call to holiness, trapped in the
forgotten magic of Bodidharma's fife, had sounded even to him. Then he made
his mistake, a mortal one.
The fife had no more malice than a gun before it is fired, no more hate than a
river before it swallows a human body, no more anger than a height from which
a man may slip; the fife had its own power, partly in sound itself, but mostly
in the mechano-psionic linkage which the unusual alloy and shape had given the
Harappa goldsmith forgotten centuries before.
Wolfgang Huene blew again, holding the fife between two fingers, with none of
the stops closed. This time the note was wild. In a terrible and wholly
convincing moment of vision he reincarnated in himself all the false
resolutions, the venomous patriotism, the poisonous bravery of Hitler's Reich.
He was once again a Hitler youth, consummately a Nordic man. His eyes gleamed
with a message he felt pouring out of himself.
He blew again.
This third note was the perfecting note—the note which had protected
Bodidharma the Blessed One fifteen hundred and fifty years before in the
frozen desert north of Tibet.
Huene became even more Nazi. No longer the boy, no longer the human being. He
was the magnification of himself. He became all fighter, but he had forgotten
who he was or what it was that he was fighting for.
The blacked-out trucks came up the hill. His blind eyes looked at them. Fife
in hand, he snarled at them.
A crazy thought went through his mind. "Allied tanks . .."
He ran wildly toward the leading truck. The driver did not see more than a
shadow and jammed on the brakes too late. The front bumper burst a soft
obstruction.
The front wheel covered the body of the boy. When the truck stopped the boy
was dead and the fife, half crushed, was pressed against the rock of a German
road.
V
Hagen von Griin was one of the German rocket scientists who worked at
Huntsville, Alabama. He had gone on down to Cape Canaveral to take part in the
fifth series of American launchings. This included in the third shot of the
series a radio transmitter designed to hit standard wave radios immediately
beneath the satellite. The purpose was to allow ordinary listeners throughout
the world to take part in the tracking of the satellite.
This particular satellite was designed to have a relatively short life. With
good luck it would last as long as five weeks, not longer.
The miniaturized transmitter was designed to pick up the sounds, minute though
they might be, produced by the heating and cooling of the shell and to
transmit a sound pattern reflecting the heat of cosmic rays and also to a
certain degree to relay the visual images in terms of a sound pattern.
Hagen von Griin was present at the final assembly. A small parf of the
assembly consisted of inserting a tube which would serve the double function
of a resonating chamber between the outer skin of the satellite and a tiny
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