Scanners Live in Vain

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Scanners Live in Vain is a science fiction short story by Cordwainer Smith (pen name of Paul Linebarger), set in his Instrumentality of Mankind future history. It was originally published in the magazine Fantasy Book in 1950.

[edit] Background

This was Linebarger's first published SF story as an adult (his short story "War No. 81-Q", which he wrote at age 15 was published in his high school magazine), and the first appearance of the Cordwainer Smith pen name. It was written in 1945, and had been rejected by a number of magazines before its acceptance and publication in Fantasy Book in 1950. It was in that obscure magazine that it was noticed by SF writer Frederik Pohl who, impressed with the story's powerful imagery and style, subsequently re-published it in 1952 in the more widely read anthology Beyond the End of Time.

[edit] Plot summary

The story is set ca. 6000 A.D. Mankind had colonized planets around other stars, but interstellar travel is constrained by the mysterious "First Effect", which causes the "Great Pain of Space" and induces a death wish in humans. Passengers on interstellar voyages are stored in cold sleep, while the crew of the spaceship is composed of Habermans: convicts and other riff-raff who have undergone an operation in which the brain is severed from all sensory input except that from the eyes. This blocks the Pain of Space but puts them somewhere between men and machines, with zombie-like behavior and disturbed psyches, dependent on constant monitoring and adjustment of their own vital functions via implanted dials and regulatory instruments. The Habermans are supervised in space by Scanners, who undergo the operation voluntarily and are respected by themselves and others as essential to keeping the space lanes open and uniting the Earths of Mankind.

The Scanners live a horribly lonely and difficult life, punctuated by brief intervals of cranching — a temporary restoration of normal neural connectivity. They compensate by maintaining a fanatically elitist confraternity, with secret rituals, absolute loyalty, and a demand for autonomy maintained by the threat that "No ships go" if any Scanner is wronged.

The protagonist of the story is Scanner Martel, set apart by his marriage to a normal woman. At the start of the story he tries to cranch and relax at home, but is summoned to an emergency meeting of the confraternity. The meeting is informed that one Adam Stone is about to make public a method to prevent the Pain of Space in normal people, thereby rendering Scanners obsolete. The meeting votes to eliminate Stone, and only Martel in his cranched state can grasp the moral and practical wrongness of this decision. When he is outvoted, he embarks on a personal mission to reach Stone before the appointed assassin and warn him. His success enables Stone to restore the Scanners to normality; the Instrumentality then appoints them spaceship pilots, allowing them to maintain their guild.