The Best of Cordwainer Smith, Edited by John J. Pierce – 1975 (1977) [Darrell Sweet]

Scanners Live in Vain, Fantasy Book, 1950

The Lady Who Sailed The Soul, Galaxy, 1960

The Game of Rat and Dragon, Galaxy, 1955

The Burning of The Brain, Worlds of If, 1958

The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal, Amazing Stories, 1964

Golden the Ship Was – Oh! Oh! Oh!, Amazing Science Fiction Stories, 1959

The Dead Lady of Clown Town, Galaxy, 1964

Under Old Earth, Galaxy, 1966

Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons, Galaxy, 1961

Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1961

The Ballad of Lost C’Mell, Galaxy, 1962

A Planet Named Shayol, Galaxy, 1961

______________________________

Alpha Ralpha Boulevard

This was a sudden return to the whole we had known. 
Earthport stood on its single pedestal, twelve miles high,
at the eastern edge of the small continent. 
At the top of it, the lords worked amid machines which had no meaning any more. 
There the ships whispered their way in from the stars.

______________________________

We turned from the ruined road into an immense boulevard. 
The pavement was so smooth and unbroken that nothing grew on it,
save where the wind and dust had deposited random little pockets of earth. 

Macht stopped.

“This is it,” he said, “Alpha Ralph Boulevard.”

We fell silent and looked at the causeway of forgotten empires.

To our left the boulevard disappeared in a gentle curve. 
It led far north of the city in which I had been reared. 
I knew that there was another city to the north, but I had forgotten its name. 
Why should I have remembered it? 
It was sure to be just like my own.

But to the right –

To the right the boulevard rose sharply, like a ramp. 
It disappeared into the clouds. 
Just at the edge of the cloud-line there was a hint of disaster. 
I could not see for sure,
but it looked to me
as though the whole boulevard had been sheared off by unimaginable forces. 
Somewhere beyond the clouds there stood the Abba-dingo,
the place where all questions were answered…

Or so they thought.