Past Master

by R. A. Lafferty

  Astrobe’s wildernesses are “the psychic power-house” of the planet, filled to overflowing with terrifying libidinal energy. They have “no close Earth equivalent”; though they resemble “certain Earth rain-forests” and sustain astonishing biodiversity, they are neither picturesque nor paradisiac: fearsome rouks and “twenty other species of creatures” in the Feral Lands are “capable of slicing up a man and eating him.” This portion of the novel is often left out of summaries and descriptions of it, and it isn’t present in his short-story draft—strangely, for in book and planet alike, the Feral Lands cannot be eliminated or even much regulated without throwing off the balance of plant and animal life, and perhaps ruining the resources on which the cities of golden Astrobe depend. In fact, from the ecomonstrous point of view, “the civilized world of Astrobe is really of no consequence. . . . It is a but a thin yellow fungus growing on a part of the hide of the planet. Should this shaggy orb shiver its hide uncommonly but once, the Golden Astrobe civilization would be destroyed instantly.” All the accomplishments of the Utopian architects, all the pinnacles to which they have pushed humanity (or pushed humanity off of), are as nothing in the face of deeper ecological might. Even the great Nothingness, Ouden itself, is stalemated in the encounter with the nonhuman: the same “intense flashes of insane lightning” that reveal Ouden’s face stamped on the very sky of the world also enable Thomas to escape certain death on the mountaintop. No wonder then that it is during his encounters in the Feral Lands, and with the people whose lives have been shaped by the struggle for survival there, that Thomas first begins to question his initial embrace of the Astrobe Dream. And no wonder either that this ecocritical ethos resonates more strongly today, as new terrors daily attest to the great cost and fragility of our own accomplishments, than it did for critics back in 1968 when the U.S. environmental movement was only beginning to emerge.

  So where then does Past Master fit into Lafferty’s work and legacy? For the former, it builds out the semiconsistent universe of his off-world stories, in which Astrobe takes its place among other planets such as Camiroi, Klepsis, Aranea, Hokey Planet, and so on; it also, through the unlikely figure of Thomas More, provides a bridge to the complex, spiritually unsteady protagonists of other Lafferty novels: Hannali Innominee in Okla Hannali; Dana Cos­cuin in The Flame Is Green; Finnegan in Archipelago, The Devil Is Dead, and elsewhere. For the latter, his legacy, Past Master brings together cutting-edge science fiction with Lafferty’s boisterous Catholicism, setting out a space or staking a claim for traditional faith within a genre that often eschews it, and without the moralizing or simplistic allegory that such efforts are prone to. It does so in a style and voice that are so immediately distinct and different from anything else in the field that it made intense fans out of many people whose philosophical preconceptions were diametrically opposed to Lafferty’s own. In all these ways, it serves as an excellent introduction to the work of a writer who, whatever your own cultural and ideological allegiances, will show you a new vantage point on this world and all the new worlds that may yet come.

  It breaks here. It isn’t like other space. And persons and things in it aren’t the same persons and things they were before.

  1. Theodore Sturgeon, “Introduction to ‘Quiz Ship Loose,’” Chrysalis 2 (1978).

  2. R. J. Whitaker, “Maybe They Needed Killing & The Importance of Happiness,” in The Cranky Old Man from Tulsa (Weston, Ontario: United Mythologies Press, 1990).

  3. In Patti Perret, The Faces of Science Fiction (New York: Bluejay Books, 1984).

  4. Tom Jackson, “An Interview with R. A. Lafferty,” Feast of Laughter 2 (March 2015).

  5. Terry Carr to R. A. Lafferty, April 6, 1967. Lafferty Papers, McFarlin Library Special Collections, University of Tulsa.

  6. R. J. Whitaker, “Maybe They Needed Killing & The Importance of Happiness,” in The Cranky Old Man from Tulsa.

  7. Daniel Otto Jack Petersen, “Ecomonstrous Encounters in the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy and R. A. Lafferty,” online at https://www.academia.edu/13205984/Ecomonstrous_Environments_in_the_Fiction_of_R._A._Lafferty_and_Cormac_McCarthy.

  THE THREE big men were met together in a private building of one of them. There was a clattering thunder in the street outside, but the sun was shining. It was the clashing thunder of the mechanical killers, ravening and raging. They shook the building and were on the verge of pulling it down. They required the life and the blood of one of the three men and they required it immediately, now, within the hour, within the minute.

  The three men gathered in the building were large physically, they were important and powerful, they were intelligent and interesting. There was a peculiar linkage between them: each believed that he controlled the other two, that he was the puppeteer and they were the puppets. And each was partly right in this belief. It made them an interlocking nexus, taut and resilient, the most intricate on Astrobe.

  Cosmos Kingmaker, who was too rich. The Heraldic Lion.

  Peter Proctor, who was too lucky. The Sleek Fox.

  Fabian Foreman, who was too smart. The Worried Hawk.

  “This is Mankind’s third chance,” said Kingmaker. “Ah, they’re breaking the doors down again. How can we talk with it all going on?”

  He took the speaking tube. “Colonel,” he called out. “You have sufficient human guards. It is imperative that you disperse the riot. It is absolutely forbidden that they murder this man at this time and place. He is with us and is one of us as he has always been.”

  “The colonel is dead,” a voice came back. “I am Captain John Chezem the Third, next in command.”

  “You be Colonel Chezem now,” Kingmaker said. “Call out what reinforcements you need and prevent this thing.”

  “Foreman,” said Peter Proctor softly within the room. “Whatever you are thinking this day, do not think it so strongly. I’ve never seen the things so avid for your life.”

  “It is Mankind’s third chance we have been throwing away here,” Kingmaker intoned to the other two in the room, speaking with great serenity considering the siege they were under. Even when he spoke quietly, Kingmaker was imposing. He had the head that should be on gold coins or on Great Seals. They called him the lion, but there were no lions on Astrobe except as statuary. He was a carven lion, cut out of the Golden Travertine, the fine yellow marble of Astrobe. He had a voice of such depth that it set up echoes even when he whispered. It was part of the aura of power that he set up about himself.

  “Mankind’s first chance was the Old World of Old Earth,” Kingmaker said. “What went wrong there, what continues to go wrong there, has been imperfectly analyzed. Earth is still a vital thing, and yet we must speak of it and think of it as something in the past. It didn’t make it before in that Old World, and it isn’t going to make it now. It has shriveled.”

  Thunder and bedevilment! They were howling and quaking worse than ever. They’d take the building apart stone by stone to get their prey, and they wouldn’t be long about it. The mechanical killers were relentless when they came near their kill, and Fabian Foreman was their intended kill.

  “Mankind’s second chance was America, the New World of Old Earth,” Kingmaker continued. “In one sense it was the First New World, a sort of childhood of ourselves. And Mankind experienced its second failure there. That was really the end of Old Earth. She lives in our shadow now, has done so since we were big enough to cast a shadow.”

  Thunder, thumping thunder outside! The screaming of maniac machines!

  “Astrobe is Mankind’s third chance,” continued the regal Kingmaker. “If we fail here we may not be given another opportunity. There is something of number and balance that tells us we cannot survive another loss. If we fail here we fail forever. And we are failing. Our luck has run out.”

  Howling, undermining, and a section of one of the outside walls beginning to slide!

  “Our luck will never run out,” Proc
tor stated. “We’ve oceans of luck still untapped. We are doing quite well.”

  “Those cases on Old Earth did not end in total failure,” Foreman stated in a somewhat shaky voice, “though they did end in total death. And it is not a one, two, three thing. It is cyclic and it has happened many times.”

  It was veritable explosions outside when Foreman spoke. It was his life that the mechanical killers demanded right now. Hereafter all the conversation was a little difficult, almost submerged in the ocean of noise and violence.

  “Oh my bleeding ears! They were black enough failures,” Kingmaker cut back in, “but that blackness was shot full of lightning. True, there were many failures, Fabian, but I make three the magic number. The clock stood at the twenty-fifth hour so often that the very survival of man through it all appears a miracle.”

  “Let’s drag it back to daylight,” Proctor growled softly above the noise that indicated that the killers had already broken into some of the upper rooms of the building. “Only ourselves are here and we are not impressed by each other’s eloquence. We are here to select a candidate. We are not here to stay the crack of doom.”

  “Wrong, Proctor,” Kingmaker rumbled like buried thunder, and Kingmaker was always impressed by his own eloquence. “We are here to stay the crack of doom. It has fallen to us three, the inner circle of the Masters, to do exactly that thing.”

  “Doom’s been cracking for a long time, Cosmos,” Proctor jibed. He was a sleek and pleasant man even when he took exception. His voice was a sort of mechanical purr, or was that of a fox that has been eating honey.

  “Aye, how it cracks!” said Kingmaker. “If you have an ear for history, Peter, you will notice that it cracks louder every time. In many ways we are a meaner people this time around. Would we three be at the top of the heap in any of the earlier orders?”

  “I repeat that the earlier testings of man were not total failures,” Foreman said, “and perhaps they were not failures at all. They were deaths. It is not the same thing.”

  The floors were being undermined. You could hear the hate-roaring of the things underfoot now.

  “There has always been a web of desperate and quite incredible triumph,” Foreman continued. “The indomitableness of man has so far been the most amazing thing about him. I hate to see it going out of us.” Foreman’s voice did have a little of the hawk’s cry in it, but also a jingle of old laughter. He was tall and graying and lined. He seemed older than the other two, and he wasn’t. “We’ve lost so much! Every time we die we lose something. So much could have been done, so much became livid with rottenness, that we belittle what was done. So for one not quite total failure in the Old World of Old Earth we were given another life something over one thousand years ago. We were given the American thing.”

  “And failed even worse,” Proctor purred with a sort of cheerful bitterness.

  “No, we did not,” Kingmaker protested. “We failed even better. It’s an ascending spiral—till it breaks.”

  “That’s true,” Foreman said. “Our American failure was less nearly total. With a New World to work in, and with unlimited prospects, we limited them shamefully. There was no error of the Old World that we did not commit again in the New World on a vaster plane. But there was another side to it. There were times when we almost balanced the loaded scales, when we reanimated both the Old and New Worlds. There were times when we won hands down when we didn’t have a chance. We enlarged ourselves, the two hemispheres of us, and we set to tasks that before could not have been conceived.

  “Oh, our failures were abysmal enough to sicken a scavenger, but we did come near to appreciating just how high the challenge is. That world died, though history does not record the event. So for that death, which was not quite a total failure, we were given yet another life.”

  “On Astrobe!” said Proctor with smiling contempt.

  “Yes, here on Golden Astrobe,” said Kingmaker with affection. “Foreman says the other worlds all died, and in a sense he is right. This is the world that must not die. We are—and I do mean to be flowery—the third and possibly last chance of mankind. Foreman uses another count than mine and I am never sure that we mean the same thing, but I know what I mean. Another failure will finish us. If we die here, that is the end of everything. Our contrivances the machines, which say that they will succeed us, can save neither themselves nor us. We have walked the fine line too long and it almost disappears.

  “How have we failed? For five hundred years everything went right. We had success safe in our two hands.”

  “And dropped it,” said Foreman. “In twenty years everything has come apart.”

  They were all cool, considering the howling menace outside, and now perhaps within. But they had to pause for a moment when the noise completely overwhelmed them with its waves.

  “I’m puzzled,” Kingmaker said when it was possible to be heard again. “For days at a time the killers don’t bother about you Foreman. And then they go wild to get at you, as now. I believe they’ll have your life this time.”

  “For days at a time I am not clear in my own thinking,” Foreman stated. “Today I am, and they sense what it is. But they’re mistaken in my motives. Nobody has the welfare of Astrobe so much at heart as myself.”

  “We’ve had the sensor machines run a few logs on you, Foreman,” Kingmaker said heavily. “It’s certain that you’ll be murdered. Today, I believe. Your logs say within the next several months at the most. You will be literally torn to pieces, Foreman, your body dismembered. What fury but that of the mechanical killers could tear you apart as your logs indicate?”

  “I suspect another such fury building up, Kingmaker. It will upset all my personal plans severely if I’m murdered today. I’ll need the several months that my logs give me as possible.”

  “Why did you have us meet you here, Fabian?” Proctor asked. “There are many stronger places where you could be better protected.”

  “This building has some curiosities of design that I had put in twenty years ago. It’s my own building, and I know a way out.”

  “You belong to the Circle of the Masters the same as Kingmaker and I do,” Proctor said. “You have as much to do with the programming as does anyone, and you understand it better than either of us. If something is wrong with the programming of the mechanical killers, then fix it. Certainly they should not attempt to kill you. They’re programmed only to kill those who would interfere with the Astrobe dream.”

  “And by definition all members of the Circle of Masters are utterly devoted to the Astrobean dream, and are all of one mind. But even we three aren’t of one mind. Kingmaker wants to continue the living death of Astrobe at all cost. You, Proctor, do not believe that there is anything very wrong with Astrobe; but I believe there is something very wrong with you. You are both attached in your own way to the present sickness. I want a death and resurrection of the thing, and the mechanical killers do not understand this.”

  Rending and screaming of metal! A crash deep beneath them that echoed through the floor.

  “The building is going down,” Kingmaker said. “We have only minutes. We must agree on our candidate for World President.”

  “We don’t necessarily want a great man or even a good man,” Proctor said. “We want a man who can serve as a catchy symbol, a man who can be manipulated by us.”

  “I want a good man,” Kingmaker insisted.

  “I want a great man,” Foreman cried, “and we’ve come to believe that great men are nothing but myths. Let’s get one anyhow! A myth-man will satisfy Proctor, and it will do no harm if he’s a good man also.”

  “Here is my list of possibilities,” Kingmaker said, and began to read. “Wendt? Esposito? Chu? Foxx? Doane?” He paused and looked at the other two after each name, and they avoided his eyes. “Chezem? Byerly? Treva? Pottscamp?”

  “We’re not sure that Pottscamp belongs to the Cen
ter Party,” Foreman objected. “We’re not even sure that he’s a man. With most of them you can tell, but he’s like quicksilver.”

  “Emmanuel? Garby? Haddad? Dobowski? Lee?” Kingmaker continued. “Do you not think that one of them by some possibility—? No, I see that you don’t. Are these really the best men in the party? The best men on Astrobe?”

  “I’m afraid they are, Cosmos,” Foreman said. “We’re stuck fast.”

  There was a rending crash rising above the ocean of noise, and one of the mechanical killers splintered the upper part of an interior door to the room and came through it, head and thorax. It contorted its ogre face and gathered to heave itself through. Then came something almost too swift to follow.

  With a blindingly swift flick of a hand knife Proctor struck the killer where the thorax emerges from the lorica. He killed it or demobilized it.

  Proctor often showed this incredible speed of motion which seemed beyond the human. The mechanical killer dangled there, the upper part of him through the broken door. The thing had a purplish nightmarish ogre appearance designed to affright.

  Kingmaker and Foreman were both shaking, but Proctor remained cool.

  “He was alone,” Proctor said. “They go in patrols of nine, and the other eight of his group are still howling in the hallway above. I can keep track of the things. Two other patrols have now entered the building, but they blunder around. All deliberate speed now! We can’t have more than two minutes left with all possible luck. Back to our business!

  “We know the next step. By recent decree all Earth Citizens are also Citizens of Astrobe. That doesn’t necessarily make them better, but there’s a psychological advantage in reaching out for a man. It’s true that Earth has shrunken in importance—but shrinking produces an unevenness; it thrusts up mountains the while it creates low places. There are new outstanding men on Earth even though the level has fallen dismally. How about Hunaker? Rain? Oberg? Yes, I know they sound almost as dismal as do the leaders of Astrobe. Quillian? Paris? Fine?”