The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal

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The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal is a science fiction short story by Cordwainer Smith, set in Smith's "Instrumentality" universe. It was first published in Amazing Stories in May 1964, and is collected in The Rediscovery of Man compendium.

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Commander Suzdal is a captain of "The Navy and the Instrumentality" sent on a "one-man" mission of exploration (in actuality he is accompanied by several generations of "Turtle-People"). During the mission, he is awakened from his cryogenic sleep (the turtle people living out their extremely long lives and running the ship, while Suzdal hibernates until the need for a "true human" arises) when a deep space probe (similar to many other "SOS" signals sent back towards the core worlds of humanity) is encountered. It tells a brilliantly concieved but utterly false story about a group of settlers calling themselves the Arachosians. Suzdal is lured in by their plight and (it is implied) the blatantly female character of the voice and message, enters cryogenic suspension and turns his ship towards Arachosia. When he arrives he finds that in fact, the original settlers nearly went extinct, succumbing to a plague that (in Smith's words) rendered "femininity carcinogenic." They only saved themselves by chemically (and later genetically) becoming male. The planet, deeply unbalanced by the lack of females and ordinary family structure (a point of view which most likely representing Smith's religious and societal beliefs), falls into a kind of cultural pychosis in which the "natural order" of male/female is regarded as unbelievably insane and the Arachosians, not truly male or female (calling themselves "klopts") long for nothing more than the destruction of all "ordinary" human beings. To carry out this plan they have dispatched traps in the form of messages, such as the one Sudzal encountered, throughout the galaxy.

Desperate, and with Arachosians crawling all over the outside of his ship, Suzdal, at the advice of an artificial security officer, uses the ship's spacedrive to hurl feline genetic material as well as a "life-bomb" (presumably a device to make the surrounding area habitable for the cats) millions of years back in time to the far side of the local moon. A race of sentient cat-descendants appear instantaneously and, hailing Sudzal as a god and their creator, engage the Arachosians at his order, allowing Suzdal to make his escape.

Despite saving the ship and successfully concealing Earth's location from the Arachosians, Sudzal's misuse of the time device is taboo, and he is stripped of rank, name, life and finally death, finding himself sentenced to the prison planet Shayol. He is later seen in the story "A Planet Named Shayol".