
* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *

This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please
check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be
under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada,
check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER
COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD
OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

Title: The Fife of Bodidharma
Author: Smith, Cordwainer [Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony]
   (1913-1966)
Date of first publication: June 1959
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Fantastic, June 1959
   [New York: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company]
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 23 July 2017
Date last updated: 23 July 2017
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1455

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.






THE FIFE OF BODIDHARMA

By CORDWAINER SMITH



  _This licorice stick blew a tune that
  was definitely not for squares..._



_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 pre-discovery
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 combination 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 tree-like way struck even more mightily
into the earth and up to the sky reaching for nourishment with new but
dim and tree-like 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.




III

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
copper-like 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 unChinese 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 Fuehrer 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 took 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 second 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 Grn 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 radio 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 Grn was present at the final assembly.  A small part 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 microphone half the size of a sweet pea which
would then translate the sound made by the outer shell into radio
signals which amateurs on the earth surface fifteen hundred miles below
could follow.

Von Grn no longer smoked.  He had stopped smoking that fearful night
in which Allied planes bombed the truck convoy carrying his colleagues
and himself to safety.  Though he had managed to scrounge cigarettes
throughout the war he had even given up carrying his cigarette holder.
He carried instead an odd old copper fife he had found in the highway
and had put back into shape.  Superstitious at his luck in living, and
grateful that the fife reminded him not to smoke, he never bothered to
clean it out and blow it.  He had weighed it, found its specific
gravity, measured it, like the good German that he was, down to the
last millimeter and milligram but he kept it in his pocket though it
was a little clumsy to carry.

Just as they put the last part of the nose cone together, the strut
broke.

It could not break, but it did.

It would have taken five minutes and a ride down the elevator to find a
new tube to serve as a strut.

Acting on an odd impulse, Hagen von Grn remembered that his lucky fife
was within a millimeter of the length required, and was of precisely
the right diameter.  The holes did not matter.  He picked up a file,
filed the old fife and inserted it.

They closed the skin of the satellite.  They sealed the cone.

Seven hours later the message rocket took off, the first one capable of
reaching every standard wave radio on earth.  As Hagen von Grn watched
the great rocket climb he wondered to himself "Does it make any
difference whether those stops were open or closed?"



THE END






[End of The Fife of Bodidharma, by Cordwainer Smith]
