Past Master

by R. A. Lafferty

  Astrobe was an urban world. All its great cities were really one, in a single close cluster. The countryside was little used. There were the automated production strips, and there were the feral or wild strips to keep the balance. Few people lived in either. It was the cities that were the heart of Astrobe, and the people of the cities were born knowing everything.

  There were no individuals with sharp edges, there were no dissenting or pernicious elements, there was the high flat plane of excellence in all things. What can you say against a world that has gained every goal ever set? And there was pleasant termination available as soon as a touch of weariness set in.

  “It sets in with me already,” Thomas said. “I have to hold onto myself with both hands every time I pass a termination booth.”

  But one thing seemed to be lacking on Astrobe, and it puzzled Thomas.

  “Where do the people attend mass?” he asked as he stood in the middle of golden Cosmopolis.

  “They don’t, Thomas; they haven’t for centuries,” Paul told him. “Oh, there are a very few who do sometimes. I do myself on occasion, but I am a freak and usually classed as a criminal. And in Cathead there has been a new appearance of the thing, along with other oddities. But not one person in ten thousand on Astrobe has ever attended.”

  “Are there no churches at all, then?”

  “In Cathead and the Barrio and the feral strips there are a very few that might still be called by the name. Such buildings as remain in Cosmopolis and the other Cities are under the department of antiquities. Some of them have period statuary that is of interest to the specialist. While mass itself cannot be found in any of them here, the replica can be played on demand.”

  “Let us go to one of them.”

  After groping about in some rather obscure streets that Paul knew imperfectly, they found one. It was quite small and tucked away in a corner. They entered. There was the sense of total emptiness. There was no Presence.

  “I wonder what time is the next mass,” Thomas said. “Or the mass that is not quite a mass. I’m not sure that I understand you on it.”

  “Oh, put in a stoimenof d’or in the slot, and push the button. Then the mass will begin.”

  Thomas did. And it did.

  The priest came up out of the floor. He was not human, unless he was zombie human. He was probably not even a programmed person. He may have been a mechanical device. He wore a pearl-gray derby hat, swish-boy sideburns, and common green shorts or breechcloth. His depilated torso was hermaphroditic. He or it smoked a long weedjy-weed cigarette in a period holder. He began to jerk and to intone with dreadful dissonance.

  Then a number of other contrivances arrived from somewhere, intoning in mock chorus to the priest, and twanging instruments.

  “For the love of Saint Jack, what are those, Paul?” Thomas asked in bewilderment. “Are those not the instruments described by Dante as played in lowest Hell? Why the whole thing has turned into a dirty burlesque, Paul, played out with unclean puppets. Why, Paul why?”

  “Oh, it had really turned into such a thing before it died, Thomas. This is what the Church and the Mass had become when it was taken over by the government as a curiosity and an antique.”

  Well, the replica mass ran its short course to the jerking and bawling of the ancient ritual guitar. At sermon time was given a straight news-broadcast, so that one should not be out of contact with the world for the entire fifteen minutes.

  At the Consecration, a sign lit up:

  “Brought to you Courtesy of Grailo Grape-Ape, the Finest of the Bogus Wines.”

  The bread was ancient-style hot-dog rolls. The puppets or mechanisms danced up orgasmically and used the old vein-needle before taking the rolls.

  “How do you stop the dirty little thing?” Thomas asked.

  “Push the Stop button,” Paul said. “Here, I’ll do it.” And he stopped it.

  “Why, I wonder how it all came about,” Thomas said. “That snake on a stick, is it meant to be the Christ? Is that leering whore holding the deformed monkey meant to be the Virgin? A dirty little burlesque, a dreary bit of devil worship. But even dirty burlesques are not made out of nothing. Had the mass really fallen so low?”

  “So I have read, Thomas. It fell to just this low estate before it became ritually frozen.”

  “Then the Church was only a thing like other things, Paul? And it died as other things do?”

  “So most say. The Metropolitan of Astrobe still lives, but he is a very old man; and the office will probably not be continued beyond his lifetime. There is a slight revival of the Church in Cathead, as I mentioned.”

  “Acceptance in Cathead is enough to damn a thing in any clean region. Cathead, that cancer growing on the fair planet!”

  “And in the feral strips there are small groups who keep a rite that is not a burlesque.”

  “Well, I never had too much faith, Paul. I believe for a while in the mornings if I wake feeling well. But my belief is almost always gone by noon. Somehow I thought that the Church would continue, but I don’t know why I thought so. It would, after all, be an anomaly on rational Astrobe. Aye, I’m glad to see the old thing gone.”

  “I’m not,” Paul said bitterly. “I came to it when it was a black remnant in my darkest days in Cathead, but it’s more than all the other things. Yes, I’m crazy, Thomas; I have bone splinters in my brain. But it’s curious that you are a saint in the Church in which you don’t believe, which you are glad to see gone.”

  Thomas laughed loudly and clearly, a really cheerful thing, high and fluted. He and Paul went out into the sudden golden daylight.

  “Aye, they were right to push the old fraud into a corner and turn her into a dirty burlesque,” Thomas said. “If the tree does not bear fruit, cut it down.”

  Thomas spent entire days marveling at the wonderful ways of Astrobe. He had been something of a skeptic at first. Now he had swallowed bait, hook, line, rod, and fisherman’s arm. He had become a sudden strong advocate of the Astrobe dream. And yet he wanted to look more deeply into the workings of the thing, to examine its more distant roots and sources.

  “It is hardly to be believed,” he said one day when he had his retinue with him. “Come, people, we will see more of this. We travel again.”

  Against the advice of his mentors, Thomas had decided to take some time to examine Astrobe.

  “There is no point in travel, Thomas,” Kingmaker had told him. “It is all the same everywhere. That is the beauty of Astrobe: it is the same everywhere.”

  “Go where you will and see what you see,” Proctor told him, “but do not believe everything that you think you have seen. When you get back, I will tell you what you have seen. There have been sad cases of men who say things falsely, and I had to take a hand. I do not want to do that. Luck be on thy head, good Thomas.”

  “You will not know how to see, Thomas, you will not know how at all,” Fabian Foreman told him. “You haven’t the eyes for it. You will see it all from the wrong side. You are an awkward man, Thomas.”

  “In that hour it will be given you what you will see,” Pottscamp told him. “And a little later, in a secret place and out of context, you will sit down with nine entities (one of them myself) and you will be told what these things have been. You see now toy things with toy eyes, but in that time you will be given seeing.”

  Thomas had a loose retinue. He had chosen some of the members. And some of them had chosen him. It wasn’t the group that the big men would have picked for him, though there was one spy for the big men in the group.

  There was his old Earth-to-Astrobe pilot Paul; there was Scrivener and Slider; there was Maxwell and Walter Copperhead; there was Evita the girl-woman from the Barrio who was sister to the boy Adam; there was Rimrock the ansel whom Thomas called the Oceanic Man.

  But first, just what is an ansel anyhow? And what was Rimrock, who was a mo
st exceptional ansel? Ansels weren’t understood at all on Astrobe, and that was their only home.

  “Would you tell me of your origin, Rimrock?” Thomas asked him, “of yourself personally, and of your species?”

  “I would, but I’m not sure I can,” Rimrock said. “What little we know of ourselves we have learned from regular people, or have guessed. When we passed through the strangeness and changed our cast, this entailed forgetting much of our beginnings. It is a childhood now shut off from us. You see, there were no ansels to be found on Astrobe when Earthmen first came here.

  “It wasn’t until the second generation of men on Astrobe that any of us were discovered, and we were quite backward. We do not generate rapidly; but none of us die in our present memory, so we do increase in numbers. We have developed from contact with regular people, and we ourselves have more influence on people than they suspect. People children are forbidden to associate with us, but they dream about us, as do the adults. It is nonsense that the happy people of Astrobe do not have night dreams. I have walked through many thousands of those dreams myself. I cannot see that we have any limit, Thomas, though I am not clear as to what our symbiotic relation with regular people should be.”

  “But you must know where you came from, Rimrock!”

  “Well, we do know it, but we have garbled it in legend. Our legend is that we are the people who climbed all the way to the sky, broke holes in it, and climbed out into a strange world that is above the sky. This world that you know, the noon-day world of Astrobe, is the world that is above the sky. You do not feel it, but we do.

  “We were deep ocean creatures, Thomas. I remember, like a thing before birth, the world of the depths; but we didn’t consider it as the depths. We loved to climb, to fly; our epics were all stories of such daring. We loved the pinnacled mountains. Our heroes were those who climbed them the highest. We flew up and ever up, establishing settlements on higher and still higher mountain ledges. We came to the beginning of light, and then to the beginnings of vision. This was the first of the strange zone that we had to cross. When we came out of it on the higher side we would be different creatures with minds formed again.

  “For there had come the exciting rumor that some of the great mountain spires might actually pierce the sky itself. We had, of course, long talked to fish creatures who claimed that they had been all the way to the sky; that they had, indeed, leapt through holes in the sky, and then fallen back. But who believes fish?”

  “You did really talk with fish, Rimrock?”

  “Why not, Thomas? We now talk with men, who are much more intricate creatures. But this fish story was true. I remember it all, as of something from another life, the epic thing we did. I was a member of the first party. We flew and climbed higher and higher to truly dizzy heights. We went up the sheer cliffs of the edge-of-the-world mountain; all the strong stories were that this was the one that surely pierced the sky. We ascended more than ten kilometers, fearful always that we would not be able to live at that height.

  “The sky, we had believed ever since we had received wisdom, was at an infinite distance from us and would always appear at the same distance no matter how high we climbed. We now discovered that this was not so. We came closer to the sky and we were almost hysterical in our excitement. We came all the way up to it and touched it with our members. We did not die, as we had feared. An epic hero had done this aeons before, but he had died from it. So it was no ordinary thing that we did.”

  Rimrock had at first been talking with free movement of his rubbery mouth. But for a while his mouth had not moved, and he was talking in Thomas’ head. He could speak in either manner, and he did not always realize himself when he went from the one to the other.

  “Then we burst through, splintering holes in the sky, and came out gasping into the world that is above the sky,” Rimrock recounted. “To your viewpoint, we came up out of the ocean onto the land. But it is yourselves who do not appreciate the magnitude of it. You did it so long ago that you have forgotten it, both in your minds and your underminds. But how can you forget that you live on the top of the sky? How can you forget that every moment you walk you are walking on a precarious rug higher than a five thousand story high building? Do you know that the highest-flying birds of the air cannot rise one tenth as high as we stand now?

  “Thomas, I was one of the first ones who splintered the sky and came up on the sky-shore,” Rimrock proclaimed. “I was one of the primordial heroes. And we found that sky-shore sprinkled with shells in the form of stars for signature of it. May the sense of wonder never leave me!”

  “I begin to get the feel of you more and more,” Thomas said, “not in words, but in old shapes.”

  “Regular people have sealed off the interior ocean that used to be in every man,” Rimrock said. “They closed the ocean and ground up its monsters for fertilizer. That is why we so often enter into people’s dreams. We take the place of the monsters they have lost.”

  “What occupations do ansels follow?” Thomas asked him.

  “Some are in communication, since each of us is a communications center. But most of us work as commercial divers, underwater welders, pier-builders, that sort of thing. Water is still our first element, but the waters around Cathead where I work have become so foul from the uncontrolled industries that they bother us. The poor lungers of Cathead cough up their lungs from the contaminated air. We suffer in our five bladders from the contaminated water. It is a rare treat for us to get away for a day or two in clean air or in clean ocean.”

  “Are you paid well for your underwater work, Rimrock?”

  “No. A stoimenof d’or a week.” The stoimenof d’or is a small gold coin.

  “Why do you work for money at all? You don’t wear clothes or live in houses or eat food that is sold for money. What do you do with your money?”

  “Play fan-tan,” said the ansel.

  Well, what was Evita? We don’t know, Thomas never knew, she was never sure herself. She was one of those who had chosen Thomas, not been chosen by him.

  “All on Astrobe will think it strange if you do not travel with a mistress,” she said. “Nobody has ever done that before. They will believe that you are not in accord with the Golden Dream of Astrobe. I know that you would not like to seem an awkward and impossible person, and I will not allow another woman to be with you.”

  “I am an awkward and impossible person, and it bothers me nowt at all,” Thomas said. “Leave me, you scrawny young witch. I have seen sparrows, and they still fledglings, with more meat on them.”

  “You know that’s not true. What kind of fat tubs did they like in your day? I am quite well fleshed, and I’ve been called the most beautiful woman on Astrobe. You will also find me intelligent, and in this I’m exceptional. Astrobe, though you may not have noticed it yet, has a high level of mediocrity only.”

  “You are misnamed, Evita; you travel falsely. You are no Eva, but the Lilith who was before her, the witch.”

  “I am both. Did you not know that they were one? And I have a personal reason. When I decided to go to Hell to prove a point, I set myself a goal: the seduction of a saint. But where else can I find one? They have not canonized one for hundreds of years. Big little Thomas, out of time and out of place, you are the only certified saint I’m ever likely to meet.”

  “We are neither of us any longer of the flesh in that way,” Thomas said. He said nayther where you would say neither, one of the oddities of speech that still clung to him; and there was a burr in his talk. “And you yourself are now taken by a much deeper passion, Evita,” he said, “and it precludes the other thing. Come along then, child-witch. If we ever run hungry on the heaths we’ll have you spitted, and break you up haunch and chine, and eat you complete; and be hungry again within an hour.”

  He joked. She was of copious build, and she smiled down on him. The color of her hair? The color of her eyes? The incredible
lines of her? No, no, they won’t be given here. You will not know them till the Last Day, and then only if you are one of the blessed.

  Scrivener? Slider? Maxwell? Copperhead? Who were they? What was the mind and the man of each?

  Hear Slider speak:

  “Are we still dangling on the thread, or has the thread been broken even before the official act (soon to be proposed) to break it? The Ancient Instruction was to go to All Nations. But we are not the Nations. We are something different. The Promise was that the Transcendent Thing would endure till the End of the World. But we are not the World. We are quite a different world, and no promise was ever given to us. We cannot even assume that we are human; how deep does the Astrobe mutation really go? How many of us are Programmed Persons? And how much of the programmed descent is in us who regard ourselves as old-line humans? We have changed in mind and body.

  “The morality of Golden Astrobe is abysmal by any older comparison, but may we use an older comparison? On Old Earth was once a thing named Slavery. We do not name it that here, but we have it. It is now the instinct for finding one’s place in the Golden Hive. Try to break out of it! Try to avail yourself of the total freedom! Meet the overriding regulations.

  “What were once called the unnatural lusts may be natural here; they are universal. It may be that we are not in terrible shape at all. Thomas at first believed that we were, and now he believes we are in wonderful shape. He is a wise man and he studies us; he wonders why we sent for him. But if we are in wonderful shape, is it still the shape of man? When it becomes impossible to distinguish certain artificial things from ourselves, then we must doubt that we are still people.

  “When the killers pursue me, then I feel that I am coming near some truth. But when they let me alone, I know that I am dealing in trivialities.

  “Walter Copperhead, who predicts futures, says that Scri­v­ener and I will change persons and souls in our final day. I say that we will not. How could we trade souls? He has none.”