Past Master

by R. A. Lafferty

  “We’re in a blind maze of midget men,” Kingmaker said. “There are no real leaders. It’s become all automatic. Let’s go the whole way, then. The Programmed Persons propose once more that they manufacture the perfect candidate and that all parties endorse him. I’m tempted to go with them.”

  “We’ve been there before,” Foreman protested. “It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now. The old-recension humans simply aren’t ready to accept a mechanical man as world president. Remember, that’s how Northprophet had his being. They fabricated him, some years ago, to be the perfect leader. And so he would have been—from their viewpoint. And, according to rumor, that is the origin of Pottscamp also. No, it’s a human leader that we need. We must keep the balance of a human for president and a mechanical for surrogate president. A mechanical man can’t stop the doom clock from striking on us. He’s part of the clock.”

  “There’s one other field of search,” Kingmaker came in as if on cue. If he hadn’t, Foreman would have had to suggest it himself and that would have taken the edge off it. “We need not limit ourselves to men now living. Chronometanastasis has been a working thing for a dozen years. Find a dead man who once led well. Let him lead again. It will catch the fancy of the people, especially if they guess it themselves and are not told it outright. There’s a bit of mystery attached to a man who has been dead.

  “But the dead of Astrobe will not do. A man doesn’t get hoary enough in five hundred years. Let’s go back to Earth for a really big man, or one who can be presented as really big. How about Plato?”

  “Too cold, too placid,” said Foreman. “He was the first and greatest of them, but actually he was a programmed person himself—no matter that he designed the program. He wrote once that a just man can never be unhappy. I want a man who can be unhappy over an unjust situation! Have you suggestions for dead Earth-men, Proctor?”

  “For the sake of formality, yes. King Yu. Mung K’o. Chandragupta. Stilicho. Charles the Great. Cosimo I. Macchiavelli. Edward Coke. Gustavas Vasa. Lincoln. Inigo Jones. They’d make an interesting bunch and I’d like to meet every one of them. And yet, for our purpose, there is a little something lacking in each.”

  “They are men who are almost good enough,” said Kingmaker. “We already have plenty of men who are almost good enough. Have you a list, Foreman?”

  “Yes.” Foreman took a folded paper from his pocket. He made a great show of unfolding it and smoothing it out; he cleared his throat.

  “Thomas More,” he read.

  He folded the paper again and put it back in his pocket.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Only one name on my list. He had one completely honest moment right at the end. I can’t think of anyone else who ever had one.”

  “He did lose his head once in a time of crisis,” Proctor jibed.

  “I believe he can handle it,” Foreman said. “All that’s required is a mustard seed.”

  “Lay off it, you damned riddle maker,” Kingmaker growled sharply. “We have to hurry. It’s your life they are after this day, Fabian. Yes, he’ll make a nice novelty, and he’ll be presentable. I could say a dozen things against his selection. I could say twice as many against any other candidate we might propose. Shall we?”

  They all nodded together.

  “Send for him!” Kingmaker smote his chair with finality. “Will you handle it, Foreman?”

  “If I live through the next five minutes I will handle it. If not, then one of you do it. Out now, you two! The killers will not touch you at all! And if I slip them this day they may not bother me again for a week. The violence of their reaction to me comes and goes. Out with you! How handy! The wall opens to give you way!”

  The shattered wall did open. Kingmaker and Proctor were out, and the mechanical killers were in with a surge. Foreman stood and trembled as the walls staggered and the whole undermined building collapsed. Then it was so murky that neither eyes nor sensors could make it out. The second and third stories came down on the first, the debris exploded inward, the killers, ten patrols of them, went through its stones and beams gnashing for flesh, and they covered the place completely.

  It was his own building, Foreman had said, and he knew a way out.

  THE PILOT chosen by Fabian Foreman to bring Thomas More from Earth to Astrobe was named Paul. Paul was two meters of walking irony, a long, strong, swift man, and short of speech. His voice was much softer than would be expected from his appearance, and had only a slight rough edge to it. What seemed to be a perpetual crooked grin was partly the scar of an old fight. He was a compassionate man with a cruel and crooked face. From his height, his rough red hair and ruddy face, and his glittering eyes he was sometimes called The Beacon.

  For a record of irregular doings, classified as criminal, Paul had had his surname and his citizenship taken away from him. Such a person loses all protection and sanction. He is at the mercy of the Programmed Persons and their Killers, and mercy was never programmed into them.

  The Programmed Killers are inhibited from killing a human citizen of Astrobe, though often they do so by contrived accident. But an offender who has had his citizenship withdrawn is prey to them. He has to be very smart to survive, and Paul had survived for a year. For that long he had evaded the remorseless stiff-gaited Killers who follow their game relentlessly with their peculiar stride. Paul had lived as a poor man in the Barrio, and in the ten thousand kilometers of alleys in Cathead. He had been running and hiding for a year, and quite a bit of money had been bet on him. There is always interest in seeing how long these condemned can find a way to live under their peculiar sentence, and Paul had lived with it longer than any of them could remember. And he was ahead of those stiff killers. He had killed a dozen of them in their brushes, and not one of them had ever killed him.

  An ansel named Rimrock, an acquaintance of both of them, had got in touch with Paul for Fabian Foreman. And Paul arrived now, remarkably uncowed by his term as fugitive. He arrived quite early in the morning, and he already had an idea from the ansel of what the mission was.

  “You sent for me, Hawk-Face?” he asked Foreman. “I’m an irregular man. Why should you send me on a mission? Send a qualified citizen pilot, and keep yourself clean.”

  “We want a man capable of irregular doings, Paul,” Foreman said. “You’ve been hunted, and you’ve become smart. There will be danger. There shouldn’t be, since this was decided on by the Inner Circle of the Masters, but there will be.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. You’ve been living in the meanest circumstances on the planet. You are intelligent. You must have seen what is wrong with Astrobe.”

  “No, I don’t know what is wrong with our world, Inner Circle Foreman, nor how to set it right. I know that things are very wrong; and that those who use words to mean their opposites are delighted about the whole thing. You yourself are a great deal in the company of the subverters. I don’t trust you a lot. But you are hunted by the killers. You slipped them yesterday by a fox trick that nobody understands, so you enter the legendary of the high hunted. There must be something right about a man they hate so much.”

  “We are trying to find a new sort of leader who can slow, even reverse, the break-up, Paul. We’ve selected a man from the Earth Past, Thomas More. We will present him to the people only as the Thomas, or perhaps, to be more fanciful, as the Past Master. You know of him?”

  “Yes, I know him as to time and place and reputation.”

  “Will you go and get him?”

  “All right. I’ll be back with him in two months,” Paul said. And he started to leave the room.

  “Wait, you red-headed fool!” Foreman ordered sharply. “You are a man of intelligence? What sort of oaf have I settled onto here? I haven’t briefed you, I haven’t given you any details at all yet. How will you—?”

  “Don’t give it a thought, gra
nd Foreman,” Paul said. He had a crooked mean grin on his face. How was Foreman to know that the grin was the scar of an old fight and that Paul’s expression could never change much? “I said I’d do it, Foreman. I’ll do it.”

  “But what will you go in? How—?”

  “I’ll steal your own craft, of course. I nearly stole it once before. I’d rather have it than Kingmaker’s flying palace. There isn’t a finer small craft to be had, and there isn’t a man I’d rather steal from than you. And I have to leave in such sudden fashion if I’m to leave alive.”

  “But I will have to set up contacts for you.”

  “I know your Earth contacts, and I know those of Cosmos Kingmaker. In fact, I have conned several of them in the past in my record of irregular doings. I’m a competent pilot in both mediums, time and space. I must leave at once or there will be some leak to it. I’m no good to either of us dead.”

  “But I will have to get you off Astrobe alive. You’re still a marked prey for the Programmed Killers.”

  “I’d die of your kindness, Foreman. I’ll get off alive in my own way.”

  “But you must have some questions!”

  “None. I can find London on Old Earth. I can find A Thousand Years Ago. I can locate a well-known man there. I can bring him back if he wants to come. And I can make him want to come.”

  Paul strolled out, leaped into Foreman’s grasshopper which stood in the open entry hall, and jammed the identification counterpart on it. Then he took flight. The grasshopper, of course, emitted the Stolen signal as it flew, and all Foreman’s keying of permission could not override that signal.

  “Why did I ever listen to an ansel and select a wild man like that?” Foreman moaned to himself. “Ten seconds on the mission, and he’s done everything wrong. He’ll have every guard at spaceport on him, and they’ll kill him before I can explain. Why did the ruddy fool jam the counterpart?”

  Within seconds Paul came to spaceport in the grasshopper; and in the same short seconds, three groups had gathered to deal with him variously. One group, however, had known of Paul’s sudden impulsive action some hours before.

  Paul was thinking rapidly in this, but he also had a friend who was feeding things into his mind. Paul knew that it is sometimes better to have two groups than one in pursuit of you. If you can get the bears and the hounds to close in on you from opposite directions at the same time, somebody is likely to get mauled. Luck holding, it may be the bears and the hounds.

  Having a few bear-baiters and hound-baiters in ambush ready to take a hand may also help.

  The bears were the spaceport guards, huge and lumbering, reacting to the Stolen signal of the grasshopper. And the bears got there first, too fast, or the hounds were too slow. They dragged Paul out of the grasshopper with their grapples, and he knew that they were about the business of killing him. One of them shagged him a bloody swipe that took skin and deep flesh off arm, shoulder, and left ribs. And one, but only one, clasped him to crush him to death. But the primary aim of these bears, these mechanical guards, was to secure the stolen vehicle and clear the status of it. Killing Paul was only a secondary aim.

  “Timing not right,” rattled through Paul’s head in what seemed his last moment. “Other killers too late. Never was anything late about them before.” He was crushed too tight to talk, almost too tight to think. With the grip that the thing had on him, he would never breathe in another breath. But he fought mightily with the iron bear, unwilling to give death an unearned advantage.

  The hounds were the Programmed Killers, the same who had been haunting Paul for a year. Stiff and bristling, they now reacted to a frantic signal in their own sensing devices, the Escape signal sent out by Paul’s actions. Their programming told them that their prey, the Paul Person, was attempting an off-world escape from them, and that it was urgent. They closed in on Paul for the kill, blind to everything else; and the spaceport guards as blindly reacted to this sudden intrusion into their own area of investigation.

  The tangle, when it came, was of blinding speed and deafening fury. Here were two different groups of mechanical killers: one programmed for patrol, defense and counterattack, the Bears; the other programmed for stalking and direct assault, the Hounds or Hound-Cats. But a bear was crushing Paul to death, however much the strong and slippery man struggled against it.

  And yet the crusher was diverted in the churning confusion. Twice it had to stop to smash gnashing metal hounds into mechanical death and disarray. Every device there had one or more alarms or sirens or hooters going off inside him, and the signals did not make for clarity.

  Then was the maddening clash and jangle as the third force entered. Paul felt it in his brain, and both sorts of mechanicals felt it in their gell-cells. And there was a direct command in Paul’s brain: “Breathe, dammit!” So he took one more great breath, having been loosened for the veriest instant. He was too far gone to have known to breathe without being told.

  But this third assault was a human one, more or less. The voice in Paul’s brain was that of Rimrock the ansel. Whether Rimrock could be called human or not, he was associated with humans. Now Paul also heard the voice of Walter Copperhead, the necromancer who could spook the matrix out of the mechanicals and confuse their programming completely. Paul heard other voices, and he was able to get another breath.

  Paul was not dead. He refused to die. His crushing iron bear had had to loose him completely to smash down three of the mechanical hound-cats at once. And the sudden men were in it now. Battersea was as tall a man as Paul and twice as thick. He swung a battleaxe that weighed as much as an ordinary man, and he knew where were located the nexus and centers of every sort of mechanical. He’d battered them to death before. Shanty was near as huge a man as Battersea, and was faster. Copperhead’s powers included the power to disable and kill, and Rimrock the ansel, of that most gentle species, had nevertheless slicers three feet long.

  Others were there. There was Slider, but Slider had never been sure which side he was on. And Paul himself was into the battle now. He had a long stabber up from a sheath at his loins; and Paul also knew a little bit about how these contrivances were put together. On many of them, an upthrust below the base of the third center plate will sever communications in the mechanical and leave it helpless; and it was there that Paul thrust. He got it; his thrust severed communications and life; it was a man and not a mechanical that he battled that time, and Paul killed him. A man masquerading as a Programmed Killer! So there were, the more to confuse the event, human men on both sides.

  “The time is now!” the voice of Rimrock the ansel shrilled in Paul’s brains, and yet the silent Rimrock was battling one of the iron bears and seemed not even aware of Paul’s location. But Rimrock was a devious fellow.

  Paul, free again for a moment, bounded like a springbuck and was into Foreman’s spacecraft. Foreman had keyed permission, and the identification counterpart had not been jammed on this. Paul was in sudden flight.

  Well, it had been a curious and bitter battle, quite brief and quite deadly. At least two humans had been killed, and half a dozen mechanicals. And the battle will have to explain itself as it goes along, for it is not over. It is to be fought again and again in its variations.

  But Paul was free and in flight—painfully swiped and giddy from loss of blood, but in flight beyond pursuit. The Programmed Killers had Paul on their death list as an enemy of the Astrobe Ideal; and yet he was now on mission for the three big men, the Inner Circle of the Masters, who were supposed to be the mainstays of that ideal.

  Paul had been whistling happily, whenever he had the breath for it, during the whole confused battle in which he had killed a man and demolished a Programmed Person. He was still whistling happily when he was in flight in Foreman’s spacecraft; and none of those in the melee (except the ansel) had any idea what he was about. And he still whistled when he was in Hopp-Equation Space.

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

  Astrobe is about a parsec and a half from Earth. Going at light speed it would take more than five years to make the trip. But by Hopp-Equation Travel, it could be made in one Astrobe month, a little less than one Earth month, about seven hundred standard hours.

  Paul’s craft would disappear as it traversed the parsec and a half to Earth. But, to the pilot who made the run, it was the rest of the universe that disappeared. To him there was no motion, no worlds or stars—really no sense of duration, or of time in passage.

  Odd things happened to pilots and passengers during Hopp-Equation travel. During the period of cosmic disappearances, Paul always became left-handed. In addition, there was always an absolutely fundamental reversal in him. He knew from the private jokes of other pilots that this total reversal happened to them also. There was more sniggering about this than about anything else in space lore, for Hopp-Equation travel was very new. But it happened, it happened every time: the total reversal of polarity in a person. Man, what a reversal in polarity!

  “Oh well, it’s the only way I could ever sing soprano,” Paul would say; and he often did so when in this state.

  Paul would cat-nap on the trip, but his state of sleep would register on the craft’s instrumentation, and he was not permitted to sleep beyond ninety seconds at one time. He became adept at this, however. Very intricate dreams can be experienced in ninety seconds.

  Paul calculated that he had at least twenty thousand of these memorable dreams during the passage. Each was gemlike, self-contained, perfectly timed, widely different from any other. Each was a short life of its own, many of them with large sets of characters and multitudinous happenings, some completely gentle, some nostalgic for things never known before but clearly remembered, some sheer horror beyond the ride of any nightmare. The Law of Conservation of Psychic Totality will not be abridged. There were four and a half years of psychic awareness to be compressed into one month, and it forced its compression into these intense and rapid dreams.