Past Master

by R. A. Lafferty

  Slider was a slight, pale, moody young man. He was very serious, and felt that everybody was laughing at him. Usually they were. Thomas was doing so silently as he heard this screed. He had known such young men before. Slider himself, knowing who Thomas was, expected something more of him. He was shocked by his lack of depth. Slider, out of his own deep insufficiency, intended to supply that lack.

  Hear Scrivener speak:

  “I would declare myself enthusiastically for all things of Astrobe, were enthusiasm an element of the true Astrobe character. It isn’t, and it should not be. We are the first mature beings ever, and enthusiasm is no part of us. In Astrobe we had built the perfect world. Perhaps it should have ended in its state of perfection, but it did not end. Instead, our world has become infected with a cancerous growth. ‘Cut it out,’ we say, but for some reason we hesitate.

  “Slider is part of that cancer. He has doubts, and doubt is the essence of this enemy. Of course we are not the nations or the world! We are beyond such. Of course no promise was ever given to us! We make the promise to ourselves; there is none above us to make it. How deep does the Astrobe mutation go? It goes from the bottom to the top, as it should. Of course we are no longer in the shape of men. Mankind was the awkward childhood of our species; we do well to forget it. We will excise our last flaw, and then we will achieve realization and annihilation.

  “The killers do not trail me. Why should they? I am of their own species. And Walter Copperhead reads this future wrong. Slider and myself can never change places. He has no place.”

  Scrivener was a bigger man than Slider, but was softer and fatter both in speech and person. He had had a programmed father and a human mother. Though young, he did have a sort of Astrobian maturity. Slider and Scrivener thought of themselves as deep opposites, and yet Thomas and others tended to confuse them. They were so alike in their fuming differences!

  Hear Maxwell speak:

  “I take myself as an example that Astrobe is not perfect, even excepting the cancerous growth of Cathead and the Barrio. I am an aberration. A perfect world would be made up of perfectly integrated persons, and I am not one. There are no words for my particular wandering from the normal. Only Copperhead knows me well enough to have any idea what they are. I will only say that I have a very loose attachment to my own body. I have not always been in the same form. I do not always recognize my previous forms. The great Astrobean Advance was bound to throw off such reactions as myself.

  “And yet I am enthusiastically for Astrobe, in a way that Scrivener cannot be. Enthusiasm may not be a part of finest Astrobe, but it is a part of me. I likewise believe that we must kill the Cathead mutation, though it will be killing part of myself to do it. No mind; I have had parts of me killed before. I have had whole bodies killed. I am a spook, and Astrobe does not believe in such. But, for all that, I believe in her.

  “I burn myself up for this thing! I mean it literally. I have burnt myself up and died several times, though I do not understand it. I will still be the burning brand for this thing!”

  This Maxwell was a most curious-looking man, if he was a man. When he said that he had a very loose attachment to his own body, he apparently meant that he did not always inhabit his same body in the usual sense. But his appearance was that he had a very loose attachment to his own body in that his body was too big for him and fitted him loosely. There are animals who have this looseness in their hides—the Earth tiger and the Astrobe lazarus lion—and in them it is a sign of strength and swiftness. In Maxwell it was a sign of weakness and slowness, almost of witlessness. It was a good-sized, swarthy, almost sinister body that he wore, and it was a sepulchral voice he spoke with. But one had the impression that he had to stand on tiptoes to see out of his own eyes; and that he was piping a small voice into the resounding thing as though it were an independent instrument.

  He wasn’t a particular ornament to the retinue, either personally or mentally. Yet he had a real seriousness that made that of Slider and Scrivener seem brittle.

  Hear Copperhead speak:

  Now a part of that speaking had been with certain rough men of Cathead. “Will he?” Battersea had asked Copperhead sharply. “He will,” said Copperhead. “I don’t see how,” said George the syrian. “He doesn’t look like much. I’ll bet the forces of Astrobe will smash him like a rotten egg.” “Oh, they’ll smash him, all right,” Copperhead explained. “The new man is a dead man; his time runs out almost before it begins. So, he’s been dead before, it won’t help him now. He will fumble it all, our new man; he’ll do only one small thing right.” “But you say he’ll maintain his ways in this present,” Shanty growled. “He will, and in the damnest left-handed way anybody ever saw,” Copperhead maintained. “What instruments they do work with!—whoever they are. Men, this ferret-eyed stubby man from the doubtful past will save our world! That is what matters. That he won’t save himself doesn’t matter to me, to none of us, I believe.” “It will matter to me,” Paul said. But the thing about this Copperhead was that he really could predict futures.

  “I do have powers. I’m a new thing. Why should you suppose that a new thing would be one of the elite, an acceptable, a sensitive? No new thing has ever appeared as such. Always it comes tainted, with dirty hands. If a doctorate professor of the psychical should announce a new thing in a sensitive individual, one might be tempted to consider it. But to believe that it comes out of Cathead, in the form of a fortune-teller on fortune-tellers row, boggles the imagination and sets up shouts of disbelief. It’s true, though. I may be the least sensitive man who ever lived. I’m crude. I live by fraud. But I can see the future.”

  Copperhead had something goatish in his appearance. He was a good-humored satyr, and he was crude. Rimrock understood from the beginning, and Maxwell had learned accidentally, that Copperhead did have depths of sensitivity and intelligence and compassion; but he chose to hide these things.

  People, they were a funny-looking party! Rimrock the ansel, tall Paul and stubby Thomas, Slider and Scrivener, Maxwell and Copperhead, and the bewildering Evita. Had she gray eyes or blue or green? Had she smoky-blonde, or golden, or dark hair? Was she slight or was she buxom? The fact is that all saw her differently, and all heard her voice differently. It sounded now, but did it ring out or bubble up, or purr or croon, or lilt or laugh or intone; was it a flute or a trumpet or a nine-stringed lyra? Was it a silver cymbal or a bronze concentus?

  “Be quiet, everyone!” Evita sounded (for words cannot give an idea of the harmonies in her). “Holy Thomas is hatching an idea! See him sparkle when a whim settles on him! He has sampled all the great things of Astrobe and has told himself how wonderful they are. Then why is he looking at the mountain?”

  It was a sharp shock to all of them, the thing that had taken hold of Thomas now. That most practical of all men was in a trance. Rimrock remembered the great day when he himself had splintered holes in the sky and broken through. Maxwell recalled an ecstasy in an earlier body. Copperhead relived the moment when the new power came to a man with dirty hands. Paul remembered what he had almost been, and Evita relived aspects of her own legend. Slider and Scrivener may not have been capable of such flights.

  “Why do I look at the mountain?” Thomas asked as he came out of his daze. “An Astrobe psychologist has told me that only people crippled in their personalities will look at such things as mountains. He says that this was much more common in former centuries. Well, I have sampled Golden Astrobe and it is wonderful. But I am still hungry. What if we do go in that direction?”

  “If we go in that direction, we walk,” Scrivener said. “There are no transportation booths in the feral regions, only in the civilized. That region is all beyond the pale. It is for beasts, if they still live, but not for men. The mountains are retained; they are somehow a key to the weather control. But they are no concern of rational people.”

  “I believe that we will walk for a day or two and see
the mountain,” Thomas said.

  “The Programmed Killers aren’t inhibited at all there,” Maxwell told him. “They will follow and kill us.”

  “They aren’t invincible. Let’s go to the mountain,” Thomas repeated. “What if we climb and cross the mountain at that saddle, and go thence? And what if we follow around that circle thereby?” Thomas asked, pointing.

  “Around that circuit of the feral country, a hard foot way, and in seven or nine days you will come to big Cathead from its back side,” Copperhead said. “Some of us will die of it, but not all. There’s an old proverb: ‘I haven’t lost anything on the mountain.’ But I believe that I may have, and I’d like to find it again. I’ll go willingly with you.”

  “It’s stark madness to go there,” Scrivener insisted.

  “Not at all,” Thomas said. “A soft sort of madness it may be. We hadn’t such mountains in England, and I saw them only at a distance in Spain and Savoy. In the stated problem of Astrobe everyone has been overlooking something. Were it not odd if the high mountains were the one thing that people could not see? Let the Programmed Killers trail us! I always liked either end of a hunt. Come along now. I’ll not be done out of this.”

  THERE WAS no close Earth equivalent to those Feral Lands of Astrobe, though certain Earth rain-forests had some of the characteristics. The difficulty for an Earthman, or for a man from Astrobe either since the civilized people of Astrobe were not acquainted with these regions, was in knowing just where the ground itself was. And in plain fact there was no ground itself, nothing that could be called the surface, the fundament. Were you now working through the surface of a rough meadow? Or were you working through the tops and middle heights of trees?

  And another plain fact was that there were no trees themselves. One could not say that this was one tree and that one was another. They were not individuals; they were one creature. As well say that this is a grass, and that is a grass. They were entangled. In the thick going if you climbed down far enough into the sleek darkness you still would not find firm ground. Water rather. And even in this fundamental bottom water it was possible to go down still more hundreds of feet through the growing plants and roots, never finding any bottom except a growth too dense to permit further descent.

  And yet the party walked and scrambled and stumbled along pretty well, going up and down; now on a good matted surface, now along a sparse skeleton of green girders; sometimes skirting large aereal ponds that had been built by the kas­troides. Some of these ponds were more than a hectare in area, quite deep, and of a lively surface both from creatures and from the effect of the swaying support.

  “I will make my own way now,” said Rimrock the ansel, “but I will see you again this night. And later I will see you on the mountain.”

  And the ansel disappeared as though into a deep well; and perhaps he traveled entirely under water through the deep roots of the complex. Nobody doubted that he could make better time than could the party.

  “And I will make my own way,” said Walter Copperhead the necromancer. “I have certain riddles to ask the woods and the mountain, and they do not speak when others are present. And I also will see you several times before you stand up in the high lightning. When you have killed the Devil I will be there. I have laid out his entrails and examined them before, but I haven’t unriddled all their riddles. I’ll have another go at it.”

  Walter Copperhead left them with great leaps. He was a goat of the tree-tops.

  “He is an odd one,” Thomas said. “I’m not sure that a Christian man is permitted congress with such.”

  “I’m not sure that you still consider yourself a Christian man,” Paul said.

  “What are the hoppers?” Thomas cried, himself hopping away from Paul’s question. He was asking about the leaping creatures that were now all about them. “They’re from the size of a rat to the size of a sheep, but they all seem of one species.”

  “I don’t know about things like that,” Scrivener said.

  “And I sure do not,” said Slider. “The things in the feral regions are an obscenity to all civilized persons. We class them with excrement.”

  “There is no love of wild nature among the civilized people of Astrobe,” Maxwell said. “These things are less real than creatures in dreams. I doubt if they have a name.”

  “They’re good to eat,” Evita said. “People still ate them when I was a kid, and I have eaten them quite recently.”

  “It’s the jerusalem coney,” Paul said.

  “Thank you,” Thomas acknowledged. “It’s as refreshing as it is unexpected to get an answer to a question on Astrobe.”

  The coney was a curious hopping creature, most of them the size of big rabbits, some smaller, some very much larger. They went indiscriminately into the ponds and under the water, and up into the higher reaches of the trees with great accurate hops; and through brush so thick that it would seem a snake could not traverse there. They were quick, and neither Thomas nor Paul could catch one.

  “Along with the dutch-fish and the rambler’s-ox, the coney is the food basis of the feral lands,” Paul said. “Everything lives on them, or on that which lives on them. The dire-wolves live on them, as does porche’s-panther, and the hydra. The birds live on them, and all the predators.”

  “The animals sound very like those of Earth,” Thomas said.

  “No, Thomas, only the names are like those of Earth,” Paul said, almost in awe. “On Earth there are no animals at all like those around us. We are fools, you know, to be here. Scri­v­ener and his like are correct. A rational man has no business here. I know a cliff not a half day from here where there are a thousand human skeletons hung up on thorn bushes. The rouks fly down and kill people for fun. They carry them up and hang them there for a warning. Most of those bones have old black meat still clinging to them. You told me that in your time on Earth men killed wolves and hung them on fence rails as warning to other wolves. This is the same. There is even the tale that the King Rouk pays a bounty to each rouk who so kills and hangs up a man.”

  “I’d pit a bow-necked Middlesex ox against any animal on this scurvy bowl,” Thomas challenged.

  “Thomas, the dire-wolf could take the head and horns of an Earth ox in one bite, and the whole body in two more,” Paul assured him. “The lazarus-lion can take the much larger rambler’s-ox in the same manner. And the lazarus likes to eat people, not merely crucify them on the cliffs as the rouks do. The hydra can gobble anything in water, in one bite or several; and it can snap ten meters out of water. It has been known to take, in one bite, six men standing together some distance from the water’s edge.

  “And, Thomas, porche’s-panther kills and eats the dire-wolf and the lazarus-lion and the rouk and the hydra itself. But all around us there are twenty other species of creatures capable of slicing a man up and eating him.”

  “I would bet that a good hunting man could live well here,” Thomas said. “You tell me of a plenitude of game. It might be an intense and rewarding life.”

  “I’ve lived here myself as a hunting man,” Paul said. “There’s a few thousand hunters still on Astrobe. I lived with them a few months in my own time of hiding. Yes, the life is intense. The rewards are intangible, but for some they are deep. But those who follow the trade do not live to a great age. But those men have a certain flavor to them. I suppose the lazarus-lion thinks so too.”

  “Oh Astrobe, a salt that has not lost its savor!” Thomas cried. “The wonder of it. I had felt, for all its marvelous things, that civilized Astrobe was a little insipid. But it need not be. Here is salt for its salting. Here is leaven enough for the lump. We’ll but see to a better blending.”

  “You cannot mean that Astrobe must be still more exposed to its back-lands!” Scrivener exclaimed. “These things are worse than any death. They must be hidden away forever.”

  “But are we armed?” Thomas asked. “Someon
e was not thinking very hard, and I suspect ’twas I who was supposed to be doing the thinking.”

  “I’m always armed,” Paul said, “with the short knife, the only tool that a feral-land hunter will use. And I believe that Maxwell is. He’s been a hunter in at least one of his life-aspects.”

  “And I am,” said Evita. “This woman-child was a hunter more years ago than you would believe. It isn’t for my own defense—I can witch the animals as far as I am concerned—it’s for the defense of Holy Thomas here.”

  They went down through some levels of the tree-complex. They came onto what was almost solid land, its presence being given away only by fitful breaks that showed still deeper worlds of deep roots and green darkness.

  “There should be a being to fit this green darkness,” Thomas said. “Sextus Empiricus wrote that every environ must have its own sprite. It would be a weird one to fit the green underworld here, however.”

  “Call me not weird, good Thomas,” spoke a green-colored voice. “And yet I’m sure that Sextus Empiricus wrote of me, and of you. You’re also a sprite, but one never sees himself as such. One believes himself to be a man if he is raised by the humans.”

  The green-colored voice came from a green-robed monk of the order of Saint Klingensmith. He was a blackish man (and yet there was a touch of deep green in his black) who winked at them and grinned. And they all stared at him, coming on him unexpectedly as they did.

  “Preserve us this morning from dire-wolves and panthers and programmed things,” he blessed them. “The latter are following you, you know. They’re the hardest to evade and the hardest to rouse to; they have no scent.”

  “Whatever is a good monk doing in the salty woods of Astrobe?” Thomas asked him.

  “Holy Cathead, I’m fishing, of course! But what are fine people like yourselves doing here? There was an Old Earth Epic named Babes in the Woods. That is yourselves. I am Father Oddopter of the Green-Robes, and now I see that you are not ordinary fine folks. There is Maxwell, the avatar who burns up his bodies, and we pray for him. There is Evita-child, who has become something of an archetype in the salacious dreams of the men of the orders, and she prays for us. She is a character in the folklore of the feral lands. There is the Paul, whom we know. He will suffer stark death in following out a mission and will never be told its purpose. And you, sir, the doubtful Thomas, are a revenant with a double sign on you. The Holy Ghost certainly chooses strange instruments. Sometimes I think He is out of his mind. And the two others, the nothing man, and the less than nothing man.”