Past Master

by R. A. Lafferty

  Evita dropped more than fifty kilos of hydra Devil-meat into the big common pot boiling in the middle of the room. She had carried this lump, more than her own weight of very high meat, along with many other things, for the whole afternoon, and that over very rough country. She was as strong as a podalka pony.

  And then the Emperor Charles began to give orders, as was his obligation and right:

  “The Maxwell, the Slider, the Oddopter Priest, the Paul, the Thomas, and the Devil-girl may use the common room,” the Emperor issued. They had not given him their names; but he was Emperor, and it was given him to know what things people are. Besides, Rimrock had been there before them and had told Charles the names and appearance of the members of the party.

  “The Scrivener may not, however,” the Emperor continued. “He may not use the common room. He must be lodged in the small machinery shed; and he will be fed there. He is not people.”

  “Are you a Programmed Person, Scrivener?” Thomas asked him. “I did not know that.”

  “I don’t know whether I am or not,” Scrivener lamented. “I’ve suspected it, and there’s a family legend that we have some Programmed admixture. But why should it matter? There is really no difference any longer between Programmed and People. I wish I had never come on this miserable expedition, but I will not be treated as an inferior.”

  “I am the Emperor and I know these things,” the boyish Emperor Charles the Six Hundred and Twelfth maintained to the party. “The Scrivener is a machine. And he will lodge in the machine shed. Let us not make a great noise over a little thing. It is only that definitions have lost their precision on Astrobe; and one duty of the Salic Emperor is to clarify and enforce them.”

  “Thomas, assert yourself and overrule this lout,” Scrivener demanded. “You are an important man, and I am a member of your party.”

  “I’ve had my own difficulties with high royalty in another place,” Thomas said. “And the rule is, do not overrule them in small things; it is difficult enough to overrule them in great things. I do not cross royalty on minor matters. You are a minor matter, Scrivener.”

  So Scrivener went angrily to his lodging in the machine shed.

  Charles the Six Hundred and Twelfth had been polishing the skull of Charles the Sixth Hundred and Eleventh, the Emperor who had been murdered on the morning of the previous day by the Programmed Killers. The skull had been partly shattered by the mortal blow, and Charles the Present had to work carefully. He had a sort of white clay that he was using for paste; and he set the larger pieces into the break. Evita came and began to arrange the smaller fragments, cleaning them from day-old gore and handling them deftly.

  “How is it that you are of high blood, Devil-kid?” the young Emperor asked her. They appeared to be about the same age; but if the legends of Evita were only partly true, this was impossible. “The whole wallful of skulls would protest your touching a sliver if you were not of high blood, but they seem happy in their niches. What? What? You were the consort of one of them? And that one is making for you as much song as a dead skull can make.

  “But there is more than one of them crooning at you! You must be very old! So old! There is Charles the One Hundred and Twelfth himself stirring at you. You are Stephanie the green-eyed queen! But Charles the Two Hundred and Fifth is also chiming in and rocking in his niche. So you are Queen Brigid! And Charles the Three Hundred and Fifteenth is happy at sensing your presence. So you are Queen Candy Mae! How could you be all of them? I called you Devil-kid and I was right. But they all love you.”

  “I wish that were true,” Evita said. “But you will notice that Charles the Three Hundred and Thirteenth has turned his face to the wall. Poor Charles! It was all a misunderstanding, Charles, really it was. And the sounds made by two others are not happy ones. I have been as many bad queens as I have been good ones. I come often back to Goslar to renew myself. I’ve been a lot of queens.”

  “Be one more!” Charles cried. “The Oddopter priest will marry us at once.”

  “Oh no, my days of queening it are over. I have committed myself to the Thomas Adventure, and I will follow it the several months till I am released from it by his death. I doubt if you will still be alive then, Charles, but I may come and see.”

  The skulls made an impressive show in their niches on the rude wall. Not all six hundred and eleven were there. There were, in fact, thirteen of them missing, and there were empty niches for them. These were the Emperors who had been murdered by being knocked from high peaks into deep ravines, or had been burned beyond recovery in fire traps, or who had died in some other demolishing adventure at the hands of the Programmed Killers. But most were here, and they provided the mnemonic for the great remembered oral history of the dynasty.

  “More than one of you here is a Taibhse,” Charles said. “I am Emperor so I am given intuition about such things. The Maxwell leaves bodies behind him, and the Thomas leaves heads behind. The Evita has lived too long to be so young, and I understand this less than the other cases. How do you do it, black-hearted kid?”

  “Do you not learn anything at the university, Charley-boy?” she asked him. “Very long life has been possible on Astrobe for two hundred years. They remain on the edge of the breakthrough, they say. But special breakthroughs have been made all through these two hundred years. I am one of them. But who wants it? they ask. Nine out of ten persons on Astrobe ask for termination long before their normal life term is run. They find life so wearying, the Golden People! Hell, I don’t. Perfection is all the more cloying the more it is perfected. I tell Holy Thomas that this thing, and not the Cathead and Barrio and Feral Strip revolts, is the sickness of Astrobe. The people are so weary of perfection that they ask termination at earlier and earlier ages. Many now ask it as small children. What is so perfect about a life that more and more people refuse to live?”

  “I forget your legend, Devil-kid,” the Emperor Charles said, “though I am certain that I knew it when I had to study the Legends of Astrobe in school. Is there not somewhere in it the phrase ‘to go to Hell in a hand-basket’?”

  “Yes, there is, Charley-boy. I was naïve in my methods and in my direction of revolt,” Evita said. “The teachers said that there was no Hell and no Devil, and this angered me; I knew that they were wrong; I had had some personal contact with both. They said that there was no sin. In particular, they said that children were not able to commit serious sins; and in this I knew that the teachers were sinfully wrong.

  “I decided to go to Hell to prove them wrong. I decided to find the Devil. What I found first was the old Evil Scientist of Legend, so contrived a man that he was a burlesque of himself. Yet he was a true scientist and a truly evil man. I consorted with him, and he did give me long life and an introduction into certain aspects of evil. I was one of the first successful experiments in longevity. It takes a deep well of bodily and psychic energy to make it work, and I had it. At that time I thought that he was the Devil himself, and that I was Faustina and had made a Devil’s bargain.

  “Well, he was sound in the biology of the thing, and he gave me what I wanted. There isn’t much demand for it now. ‘Eternal youth, who wants it?’ is the sneer. I did and do want it. For several centuries I have had it. Ah, the Holy Thomas and others smile. They do not believe my legend. They will not believe a legend even when they see it in the flesh.”

  “Quick-sparrow, you are not yet twenty years,” Thomas said.

  “Good Thomas, I am more than two hundred,” the Evita answered. “Well, I committed all the old-fashioned abominations in my search for Hell. I indulged in fornication and pride and unkindness and intellectual contempt. But I didn’t find Hell immediately.

  “There is another legend about the boy who had to go clear around his planet to come to his own house. Then he recognized it for the first time. I am the girl who did it; and I did find Hell. Golden Astrobe of the Dream is that Hell. I don’t like it, and I ne
ver will; but Hell exists.”

  “But Golden Astrobe is perfect, child-woman,” Thomas insisted. “It is all perfections rolled into one.”

  “Sure it is, good Thomas, all rolled into one package and tied with a golden ribbon. I had been tricked by false teachers who use words to mean their opposites. So have you been tricked, Thomas, and you should be too intelligent for that. Well, let them so misuse terms! Let them call things what they will. If the Cathead thing and the Barrio thing are Hell, then I am for Hell till a better Hell comes along. But I will not accept so extreme a Hell as the Vision of Golden Astrobe. It stifles! It blows out souls like rows of candles!”

  There were rows of candles there in the big shanty room, or tallow tapers at least, there in the place that was royal palace and public house and skinners’ center, there in the big room that could sleep perhaps twenty people. And the rows of candles were blown out now and then, for the room was badly calked and the wind had risen outside.

  A man came in.

  “The ghosts are bad tonight, Emperor,” the man said. “They have just eaten all the flesh of my wife and left only her bones.”

  “Well, I’m working on a king’s charm against them, but I don’t have it in shape yet,” said Emperor Charles the Six Hundred and Twelfth. “The skulls of the old emperors are supposed to inspire me to it, but so far I get nothing but gibberish. I guess the ghosts will just have to be bad tonight.”

  “I’m kind of glad she’s gone,” the man said, as he took hydra Devil-meat out of the common pot with one of the big wooden forks, “but I’ll miss her sometimes. We fought a lot, but there was never anyone so much fun to fight with. Now I don’t have anybody.”

  “What is the ghost bit?” Thomas asked as he also began to dip Devil-meat out of the pot with a wooden fork. Then they all began to dip it out and to eat.

  “The ghosts are the same, or almost the same, as the Taibhse,” the green-robe Father Oddopter said. “You being one, Thomas, should know a little what they are. They are animals or creatures or beings ripped out of their context and set to wandering. They are most often invisible, and at their most solid manifestation they are still transparent or at least slightly translucent, as are you by candlelight.”

  “There are such indeed?” Thomas asked. “Or are they mere country tales?”

  “They are real, and many of them are angry at their misplacement. Will a country tale eat all the flesh off a person and leave only the bones?” the green-robe asked. “Well, I guess that is possible too. All things are. Of these ghosts, however named, we can only say that they be. In the early Natural Histories of Astrobe they were given space. Now they are not. But they are creatures with minds superior to those of animals, and of the order of men. They have bodies, however fragile and changing. They have been seen and heard and felt. They have killed, and they have been killed. Their flesh has been in that very pot there, but it steamed away to nothing, leaving only an aroma. They have cities and settlements. Most often they are reluctant to approach human settlements (it may be true that they are kept off by spells), but sometimes they do come and eat flesh, all the flesh of a person, cleanly and rapidly.”

  “Is superstition completely rampant in the boondocks of Astrobe?” Thomas demanded.

  “Why yes, I suppose it is,” the green-robe said. “The psychic force, the libido, is completely rampant here, that I know. Once, I believe, that was true on Old Earth, and it lingered long in the Africas and Haitis of Old Earth. You forget that the taming of the nature of this world has been of a very short time. The feral strips are the power-house of Astrobe. They are the key to the weather, and to the fertility of the land; to the water and to the water power; also to the power from the grian-sun. They are also, I believe, the psychic power-house of Astrobe, though their human persons are fewer in their thousands than is civilized Astrobe in its billions. Yes, superstition is very strong here, Thomas.

  “If three persons of the feral strips imagine a thing strongly enough (however monstrous it may be), they can bring it into being. They can create a contingent body for any thing they imagine, and it will be inhabited by certain unbodied spirits here. I have seen it done. I have helped do it. When children of the feral strips play ‘monsters,’ they make monsters that can be seen and smelled, and which on occasion have eaten them up.

  “Yes, here are all improbable persons and animals, spirits and half-spirits, clean and unclean; the archetypes of folk dreams; they are here alive, and often fleshed. Here there is superstition (the beyond-belief or over-belief) as a shaggy and pungent thing that leaves footprints and fang-marks. Every thought or inkling, suppressed as irrational in rational Astrobe, comes out here and assumes flesh. Why, there is a stock-breeder here who breeds, improves, and slaughters for profit a creature that had its origin in the nightmares of Golden Astrobe. It was banned there by group therapy. It came out here and became physical fact.”

  “Father, father, there are no brains in your head,” Thomas chided. “I see that I will have to quarantine these regions much more tightly if I do become president of Astrobe.”

  “And I tell you, Thomas, that the civilized world of Astrobe is really of no consequence,” the green-robe said. “It is but a thin yellow fungus growing on a part of the hide of the planet. Should this shaggy old orb shiver its hide uncommonly but once, the Golden Astrobe civilization would be destroyed instantly. Bless this meat! It’s good.”

  “It would be an act of charity to exterminate all the poor benighted persons in this area, and I will have to have it done,” Thomas said. “Aye, the meat is good.”

  “You’ll run into trouble with the ecologists if you go to exterminating all the feral people,” the Emperor Charles pointed out. “The several thousand humans in the feral strips are part of the balanced ecology of Astrobe. Destroy them, and the balanced plant and animal life will go out of balance; this great cistern for civilized Astrobe would be changed, and perhaps ruined. The scientists do not want that. We must be left here in such numbers as we maintain, they say. But we are not considered as humans. We are rather animals to them, animals among animals; we are under the wildlife department.”

  “Fox-firk, I cast better lumps in the stool than the pack of you can say in a night’s talk,” Thomas said angrily, “and I’m called to do it now. Begging your pardons but I must go to the henry. Or is it called the charles in this realm, Emperor?”

  “Call it what you wish, Thomas,” the young Emperor said. And then he winked at Evita a wink that was like lightning between them, and Thomas caught it.

  “What is the levity here?” he demanded still more angrily. “Cannot an honest man go to the henry without being mocked?”

  “It is only that there is a citizen of Goslar with an unusual means of livelihood,” the Emperor said. “It is a trade that has been passed down from father to son. We will be listening for the lilt of your voice, good Thomas.”

  And Thomas went out puzzled to the henry.

  The man who had lost his wife (all except her bones) now brought in a little barrel of green lightning.

  “She did so love to get foxy on it,” the man said, “and she will not be using it now. We will drink this night to my lost wife (except her bones), and praise her if we can find any words of praise for her. I cannot, but some of you are better with words than I am. I liked her, but I can’t think of a thing to praise her for.”

  “To your wife, except for her bones!” sang Evita, and lifted the little barrel in very strong hands to drink from the bung.

  The Emperor Charles did the same thing, and the green-robe Father Oddopter, and Paul. But neither Maxwell nor Slider was able to raise the barrel to drinking height, and so were barred from participating.

  Any others? Bang! Bang! You broach a bung and there’re two who will be there immediately if they’re anywhere to be found. Walter Copperhead the necromancer and Rimrock the ansel were in the shanty room. Copperhe
ad raised the barrel high and drank deeply. Rimrock, who had a peculiar physique, did it in a way that might seem awkward to a man, but he did it competently and gurglingly.

  “Where have you fellows been?” Paul asked.

  “Killing Killers,” Copperhead whooped. “You’d none of you be alive this night if we hadn’t. You’re careless in your wanderings.”

  “That is a barbarous way to drink it anyhow,” Slider bemoaned, badly hurt that he was barred from the festivity by his bodily weakness. “In civilized Astrobe, the mere touch of the electrode or electric needle will give a much finer effect, the golden glow. What are you, pigs, that you swig intoxicant in physical form?”

  “Hush, half-man,” the Emperor Charles commanded, and he raised his hand. “We listen.”

  And then came the high angry lilt of the voice of Thomas from the little henry out back of the royal shack. All the frustration of the ages was in that furious denunciation that Thomas was loosening on someone.

  Evita and the Emperor Charles and the green-robe and the man who had lost his wife except her bones all went into spasms of laughter. Copperhead’s goat-guffaw was one of the great things, and the primordial giggle of the oceanic Rimrock was something beyond the comprehension of common ears.

  “What is it?” Paul chuckled. “I hate to be left out of a thing.”

  “Why, Paul, there is that citizen of Goslar with the unusual livelihood,” the green-robe chortled, hardly able to contain himself as the Thomas-voice rose even higher. “He sits on the pot day and night, and there is but one public pot in the City of Goslar. He will not move to give place till he is paid a coin. Threats and beatings will not move him. Only a coin. Hear good Thomas! What a fine angry voice he does have! But the citizen of Goslar has him where it hurts.”

  “Oh stop it. Rimrock!” Evita laughed. “You’ll rupture yourself with that giggling.”