Past Master

by R. A. Lafferty

  “What a region!” Paul sighed with a broken grin. “I could almost agree with Thomas that it should be more tightly quarantined. There is creative thinking at work in this, though. I’m not sure that I’ve ever met its equal in civilized Astrobe.”

  The angry voice of Thomas had died down to a bitter grumble. And after a bit, Thomas came back into the big room very red in the face.

  “Does anyone here have a stoimenof d’etain?” he asked out of his red stony face.

  Paul gave him one. It was a pewter coin of small value in civilized Astrobe, but apparently the dollar-in-use here in the feral strips. Thomas went out again.

  It is presumed that he paid the coin to the citizen of Goslar, was given access to the pot, and relieved himself. He did, at any rate, return to the big room in somewhat better humor, and yet with a certain reserve, as though defying them all to carry it any further.

  “It all reminds me of something,” Thomas smiled, though his smile was nearly as crooked as that of Paul, and there was still a bitter rasp to his voice. “It reminds me of something for which I cannot find a name. I still believe that the Vision of Golden Astrobe is the perfect thing, and that the extravagances here in the ferals are monstrosities below the human level. But perhaps the Golden Perfection should be suspended for about five minutes a day for the refreshment of the soul. Yes, perhaps it should.”

  Thomas was able to lift the barrel and drink from the bung, and it loosened him a little. Green lightning is fun when the Golden Perfection is not immediately at hand.

  Evita told the story of the Devil and the Wife from Culpepper, of what souvenir she took from him with a sharp knife, and why to say “hung like the Devil” means half-hung.

  The green-robe told about the alien from Gootz who came to that very hotel in Goslar and relaxed in a pile in the middle of the floor. Sure they thought he was a great wheel of cheese lying there! And they sliced him up in a hundred slices, and each citizen of Goslar ate one. That alien from Gootz still raises hell with all of them. He cannot pull himself together, and he refuses to be ejected. All citizens of Goslar have a certain green look on their faces. That is the reason.

  The Emperor Charles the Six Hundred and Twelfth told one. Walter Copperhead told about the fellow who courted the woman to get to examine her entrails. “I’ll put them back,” he said, “I’ll put them back and sew them in again. I just want to go over them once.” “No, no, no,” the lady said. “Boy, I thought I’d had some wooly propositions before.”

  Paul told one. The man who had lost his wife (except her bones) told one. And Thomas told a concatenated drollery with all the obscene parts in Latin. Rimrock told one, an oceanic spoof so outré that it took the breath away and turned the liver green.

  Then the barrel was empty. At that moment the night guard of Goslar blew one blast on his trumpet to indicate that all was well with the night. And after a moment he blew a little scurry to indicate that it was not so well as all that, that things were prowling.

  The Emperor Charles and all the travelers went to sleep in the straw (a sleep broken only by the giggling of Rimrock from time to time: if something tickles one of those ansels he stays tickled quite a while), and the skulls of five hundred and ninety-nine emperors were empty-eyed in their niches on the wall.

  Golden Astrobe was a creature with a fair face for all men to see. But out behind she had a sting in her tail.

  THEY WAKENED to trumpets. Some were made trumpets indeed, blown by the night guard and the day guard changing places and by the special honor guard, and some were trumpeter birds set to going by the instrumental trumpets. The trumpeter birds were of better tone and timbre.

  The Emperor Charles rose grandly to begin the second full day of his reign, if it should prove to be a full day.

  “Not for thirty reigns have there been so many grand people in the court at Goslar at one time,” said he. “Strike a medal for it, man.”

  “I don’t know how to strike a medal for it,” the man said.

  “If you find someone who does, tell him to strike a medal for it,” the Emperor said. “Put my own fine hand on it, and the motto They Come To Me Like Eagles. Why, here is a dead saint from Old Earth, the Devil-kid of Astrobe, a necromancer of unlikely powers, a transcendent ansel, a priest of Saint Kling­ensmith, an avatar who burns up bodies, and pilot Paul who is a broken-faced old warlock. Not for thirty reigns have there been so many grand people at court at one time, and not for thirty reigns has there been so handsome an Emperor at the head of the court.”

  “How long a time has the thirty reigns been?” Thomas asked him.

  “It has been what we call a rapid year,” the Emperor said, “perhaps the most rapid ever.”

  The green-robe Father Oddopter of the order of Saint Kling­ensmith said mass for all the people in Goslar and all the people who came in at the news of it, a little over a hundred people in all. It was a simple and clear mass with a surprisingly intelligent sermon, and the uncanny miracle came shockingly and vividly alive at the consecration. It was as though the Heavens opened on command and the Spirit came down—which is what happened.

  Even the skeptical Thomas felt the stirrings of faith in himself again. It was a miraculous morning, so why not believe in miracles again for a while? As he said, Thomas often rediscovered his belief for a little while in the mornings.

  “What they do here at Goslar,” the green-robe told Thomas after the mass, “is set up a token realm till the real shall be rediscovered. And the reality will be rediscovered, and the golden palsy will pass. Happy death for you, good Thomas.”

  “You are too rapid to wish happy deaths to persons,” the Thomas said. “And the mass this morning was a very old one. ‘For those here present who will die this day.’ ’Twas meant to be addressed to a world, and not to small Goslar of under one hundred people where it is very unlikely that any will die this day.”

  “It was addressed to your party and to myself, of whom several will die this day. Were I not certain of this, I would have said another mass of the day. And the necromancer also says that the most of us who go to the mountain will die this day.”

  “It was a pretty thing, it was a pretty complex of things,” Thomas said as his early-morning faith began to withdraw from him again. “As a child I lived it, and as a young man I still respected it. In my maturity I still call it the Noblest of all Superstitions. The Church of the Saints lived quite a long while, and historically I seem to have an ironic part in it. It died meanly in civilized Astrobe, I understand, but I believe it will die more quietly and harmlessly here in the ferals.”

  “You who are to die this year, know that it will not die at all, Thomas. And know also that nothing dies quietly in the ferals. Whatever is set on here will shriek and shrill if it be killed, and it will return to life again and again. Even the meanest reptile dies hard in the ferals, and should a great thing do less? It will not lie down and die quietly, but why are you so afraid of being associated with superstition? Is it not a superstition of your own to climb the mountain?”

  “Perhaps it is, green monk. It is an inner compulsion of mine, and I must do it. It is on this one thing that I fault the citizens of Golden Astrobe: they have never lifted up their eyes to the mountains. They are like blind men in this, but where are they mistaken? What if all in a world were blind to color except certain small boys? That, I believe, is the case on Astrobe; but it may make the color-gazing a mere boyish thing. What is the good of gazing at a pile of rocks? I will leave off such boyishness after I become world president. But this day I am hooked on the Mountain Bait.”

  “We be on our way, good Thomas,” Rimrock the ansel interrupted. “If I go up the mountain, it will be by a watery way I know on the inside of it, up the mother spring, for it is a mountain-full of water. The Copperhead will be on the mountain top before you, and will perform certain abominations there. And then he will leave. We ride shotgun f
or you this day again.”

  “But it will not help greatly. Most of you will still die on the mountain,” Copperhead the necromancer said. And the two of them were gone.

  “Shall I kill the Scrivener thing in the machine shed?” the Emperor Charles the Six Hundred and Twelfth asked.

  “No, of course not,” Thomas answered sharply. “Release him to me. He is one of my advisors and a member of my party. It was rather a cruel trick to shut him up in the shed last night, and I do often find such royal wit tedious.”

  “But he is a machine and not a man,” the Emperor insisted. “And as a machine he has, though he may not know it, a sender in his head. It works without his knowledge whether he is asleep or awake. It is his code signal, and every Programmed Person (even if he be nine-tenths human and one-tenth Programmed) has it. It is by this code signal that the Programmed Killers so easily trail you. It is suicide for you to climb the mountain; you know that, Thomas. The Programmed Killers will encircle the pinnacle and have you caught in the tall trap.”

  “I worry about them not at all,” Thomas said. “I am a special case and I may not die till my own special time has come.”

  “Ah, but they will kill members of your party. Promise me this, that you will at the appropriate moment kill the Scrivener and cast him into a ravine to mislead the Killers, and then to make your mountain climb quickly in the interval.”

  “No, I will not cast one of my own members to the dogs. We will climb the mountain as though there were no such things as the Killers, and for me there are not.”

  “I repeat, they will kill members of your party, Thomas. And several of these are sometimes citizens of my realm. I will charge you with their blood.”

  “You will charge me with nothing, Charles. You are only a fuzz-faced boy playing in a cluttered back-yard. Yes, I suppose that some members of my party will be murdered by the Killers. So let it be. It will be a winnowing, a cleansing. Those who die will be those who deserve to die. I myself will not be false to the vision. I’ll blazon the motto on my own breast. The Killers strike only those who are a threat to the Golden Life of Astrobe.

  “I’d kill them too if I knew which they were! I welcome the Killers! They seem to be mistaken as to my own role and purpose, but they are inhibited from actually killing me when the time comes. If there are enemies of the Great Thing in my party, let them die!”

  “I expel you from this realm, Thomas More!” the young Emperor cried sharply. “You’re a more mechanical thing than any machine. You’re a string-puppet that’s left off being a man. What vision could anyone be faithful to who would sell his own brothers and partisans to the Killers? I thought you were a man, and you are only a mannikin. Your man’s-parts were left behind when they brought you forward through time. You stink up my woods and swamps! Take your machine things and your cravens and go! We will see if the real people follow you.

  “What? I’m aghast! You go with him, Devil-kid? He’s worthless, you know.”

  “Yes, I go with him, Charles 612, and I can’t make you understand,” Evita said. “He is not entirely worthless, or not forever. He only seems so now. Yes, he’s become a dull lump of metal and will never serve for a knife now. But he will serve for something else. I’ve followed worse to the end, and his end won’t be very long now.”

  “Not in the ferals it sure won’t be, not in Goslar,” the Emperor said. “But you others, wait, wait! How are you so wrong? The Paul and the Oddopter go with him also. Why? Why? You have heard him throw in with the Things, and leave off being a man.”

  “And I have heard distant bells tolling, and seen a world arise in the sign of the Rolling Head, Charles,” the green-robe said easily. “Believe me, there is more here than is apparent. It’s my business to be with this lost sheep this day. He is the wooly ram with the double sign on him. He is in Scripture. And he must be saved, not for himself, but for the double sign on him.”

  “But it’s to your own death, Father Oddopter! As the Emperor I am given insights, and I see your death today because of him. Even in martyrdoms there should be a certain economy. Do not sacrifice the worthy for the worthless.”

  “No man who swells up in such towering anger as the Thomas does now is worthless, Charles. He is a cloud full of lightning, and not at all as facile in this as he seems to be. I will stay with him this day.”

  “I say he’s full of hot wind and nothing else,” said the Emperor Charles. “He cannot lighten and he cannot thunder. He can but fume in his wrongness. I say he is a wether and no wooly ram.”

  “Were I not suddenly caught in my own uncertainty, I’d settle with you, fuzz-face,” Thomas said closely. “I was never one to be certain that I was right for long, and I’m not certain now.”

  “He is an instrument, Charles. Try to understand that,” said Paul. “And I will stay with him also.”

  The Emperor Charles withdrew in blazing silence. He had Scrivener released to them, and his contempt for them scorched the very grass when he did so.

  The members of the party, not very cheerful or much in accord, began the ascent of Electric Mountain. All were ashamed, and they did not know of what.

  Yet it was a stimulating morning and a challenging climb. And the death-threat did call up excitement in most of them. Maxwell and Slider didn’t like it. But there was a curious change in Scrivener, who was, perhaps, a Programmed Person.

  “This is my test, Thomas,” the Scrivener said as they climbed. “I have been rethinking things all the night. Whether I am a Programmed Person or an old-recension human I do not know; nor how much I may be of each. But I have found something out here that tells me that you yourself are wrong to hold the Dream of Astrobe as perfect. It is not. It is only half the thing. It must be conjoined to some other thing that I do not understand yet. Perhaps, after all, we must kill the Devil afresh every day. You are an old-line human, Thomas, yet I accuse you of setting the human thing too low and the mechanical thing too high. So, there are machines that walk like men these several hundred years, and perhaps I am one of them. But there are also men who swing against their own kind and become more partisans of the machine than the machines themselves. Do you not be one of them!

  “So, the Programmed Killers hunt down and kill only those who are a threat to the Astrobe dream? And you all believe that they will discount me as no threat? We will see who they will kill and who they will pass by when they have us in the trap. For you lead us to the trapping, Thomas. I tell you that I have become a boiling threat to one part of the too-easy thing.”

  They climbed. And then they climbed more steeply. The vegetation fell away and became more sparse. Now they were climbing a Devil-tower of magma and iron, rough and sharp and blood-drawing.

  Above them the mountain spire was a pinnacle as a cartoonist might draw one, sharp and needle-like as a burlesque of a spire, and with a clean white doughnut cloud encircling it and settling down a third of the way from the top.

  The green-robe caught a Commer’s Condor in a flung net. They tore it apart and ate it raw. It was past mid-morning, and they had been climbing hard.

  “There is another doughnut-shaped cloud around the spire,” Evita said. “It is a black one, and below us. The Programmed Killers have come in full patrol and have the peak surrounded. They climb not so fast nor so well as we do, but they climb more relentlessly and they do not rest. This isn’t the death I had planned for us all, Holy Thomas.”

  “Never mind,” said Thomas. “We will rest. And then we will ascend again. Electric Mountain, they call it, do they? Aye, it tingles and is full of sparks.”

  There was an excitement entering them all as they rested there.

  “There is a story that one of my grandmothers told me when I was small,” Scrivener broke in with a nervous half-metallic voice. “It is from her; I believe, that I have my mechanical descent. In the early days, she said, the mechanical men, her own people, wished that
they had a mythos as the humans had: a mystique, a god or a founder hero, a sleeping king perhaps. This, of course, was before the humans had given up the old hero tales entirely.

  “Every Old-Earth Nation, my grandmother told me, had its mythos of a sleeping king who would one day awaken and rule again in a new golden age. Of sleeping kings there was Alaric the slayer of Rome, who was buried underneath the Busento River (its course changed for the burial and changed back again to flow over him), and he was to arise from it again one day and lead the Gothic element, that shaggy thing that is the basis of a dozen peoples. There was Arthur of Britain in kingly sleep in an ensorceled room at the bottom of a lake. There was Brian Boru of the Irish buried on horseback in a pit with great stones heaped around him, and when he wakened he would scatter the stones and ride again. There was the Cid of the Spanish, not buried at all but riding forever a horse in death-sleep over dark moors in Estremadura. There was Barbarossa of the Germanies asleep at a table in a cave in a mountain and his beard grown through the table.”

  “There was Henry of the Tudors immured in a room with six wives, and they not in accord,” Thomas laughed.

  “There was Kennedy of the North-Americas riding forever in an open automobile in an obscure place,” Scrivener continued. “There was Roadstorm the early freebooter ‘King’ of Astrobe and all scattered Earths, marooned in unknown orbit in his small spaceboat the Star King. All of them are to return and lead their people once more. How can people form themselves without some such mythos?

  “The early mechanical men of Astrobe wished to find such a legend in their past. They needed a sleeping king for their own solidarity. They sent to Old Earth to see if they could not find some such mechanical sleeping king of their own to build a mythos upon. They went backward and further backward through lands and times to find the first mechanical thing that they could regify.

  “They settled on an old small broken gear train that had been taken from an Egyptian tomb. It had hard-wood cogs and bronze bearings. Its use was not known. It was a clumsy thing, but it was the earliest thing they could find in the true mechanical spirit. They brought it to Astrobe and said that it was their sleeping king. They said that it would awaken one day and lead them. And the human people snickered at them, at us, for it.