Cordwainer Smith, the pseudonym of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, was an influential SF short story writer in the 1950s and 60s. “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” is a story from his “Instrumentality” universe and was first published in 1961. Smith is probably best well known for his story, “Scanners Live in Vain” from 1950.
“Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” is set in a far future that combines H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Shape of Things to Come (and accompanying film, Things to Come) with what I would describe as proto-cyberpunk elements such as re-engineering the body and mapping new memories and experiences onto the human mind. It’s about a couple recreated as French citizens after the safeties of existence are released to allow accident and disease to modulate the population levels of the “real humans.” In the second paragraph, Smith writes, “Everywhere, things became exciting. Everywhere, men and women worked with a wild will to build a more imperfect world.” The world is populated by homunculi (engineered human-animal hybrids who serve as workers), hominids (humans engineered for enduring the strain of space travel), and real persons (numbered people engineered and maintained by the Instrumentality).
The main characters, Paul and Virginia are considered “real persons.” They run afoul of a bull homunculi, but are saved by C’mell, a cat woman who figures in some of the other Instrumentality stories.
There are some interesting images built into the story that relate to the Great Chain of Being (more info here and here). The humuculi occupy the lower levels of the city, the real persons live and play in the middle levels, and the Instrumentality occupies the upper levels in Earthport. Paul and Virginia are troubled when they learn that the cat-woman, C’mell works in Spaceport, because her kind are regarded as lower and therefore not privileged like real people. In fact, C’mell, when asked her name by Paul, replies, “Does it matter?…I’m not a person.” C’mell’s action to save Paul and Virginia, and later Paul at the Abba-dingo, further reinforces the problematizing nature of culturally understood and maintained hierarchies.
I recommend this story wholeheartedly. I read it in The Norton Book of Science Fiction, but you can also find it in Cordwainer Smith’s complete short fiction collection, The Rediscovery of Man.
Dynamic Subspace 