Past Master

by R. A. Lafferty

  It was a staggering thought, one of the culminations of the Astrobe dream. And it had been a little difficult for Thomas More, coming from a bleak period of Old Earth, to accept all of this immediately. But did he not adjust to it rapidly and neatly?

  In another speech, Thomas coined a happy phrase, or perhaps somebody else thought it in his mind and spoke it out of his mouth. “I desire to be all things to all men.” It was sheer magic. Of such things are kings made.

  Thomas had won, and he knew it. Everything was going wonderfully for him and for his. He was at home in the heart of Golden Astrobe. He had become the eloquent spokesman for the great thing, for the only thing. And he had thrown down the glove in challenge to the one serious sickness of Astrobe.

  “Repent or be destroyed” may have been his greatest speech. He left no doubt in the stubborn men of Cathead and the Barrio what he meant. Millions of them still maintained their way stubbornly in their error, but some thousands of them reentered the golden life of Civilized Astrobe. It was a trend, though a weak one. But the resolution to solve the problem was not a weak one. Civilized Astrobe had the science to destroy Cathead and the Barrio utterly. And Cathead and the Barrio did not have the science to fight back. All it took was a strong leader, and Thomas had announced himself as such. Compassion would be misplaced.

  He thrilled the whole world when he spoke to them, still invisible, on Replica. “It is no longer the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number. It now becomes the Total Good for the Merging Singularity. And when we are all One, then comes the Great Inversion. We become a thing that is beyond Number and without a Name.”

  After this, the Programmed Killers still followed Thomas, but with a difference. They watched him still, but they smiled at him quizzically, and they did not threaten him.

  So Thomas would be King, which is to say president of Astrobe.

  And it is as easy to make a king as all that? Sure it is. It’s all in the tune you whistle. It has to be just right, right for its time, and with the special lilt to mark it off. But it’s the tune that takes the people. Hit it right, and you can make a king every time.

  BUT THERE was something in Thomas that did not lie down and play dead as easily as all that. He was the revenant with the double mark upon him, and the old part of it surged up in him now and almost tore him apart. He was off in a walking afternoon nightmare, not knowing what he did or where he was. He was riven in his own self, but he had not lost the way forever.

  That was the odd thing about this: that Thomas did have afterthoughts on the matter. And afterthoughts were supposed to be banished from his brain. They had taken him over completely and were sure of him. But they shouldn’t have been.

  He could revolt yet: shrewdly sometimes, blindly sometimes. He could almost become aware that he had been taken over.

  There were hidden areas in which, for all his strong profession of faith, he did not yet fully accept the Astrobe dream. There were even areas in which he remained a private person though feeling in his taken-over brain that it was wrong so to hold onto a piece of himself. And now he found a lucid moment when he could stand back and study the behavior of his curious self.

  “It is still odder that I should be taken in my own trap,” he said. “Look, Thomas, myself, my me, what was it that I did in my other life for a bitter joke? I invented the damned thing! Was it not myself who coined the Utopia? Did I not know that I used fools’-gold instead of real gold for the coining? What has happened now? How am I taken in by it? What am I, God, that I make a sour joke and in so doing I create a golden world in the future and then stumble into that ridiculous future? Was other writer ever damned to live in a sly tale that he had made himself? Was other lawyer ever cursed to find the legality for his own joke? Was other chancellor ever required to administer a world that he had made in derision? So help me God!—if I live beyond my second death I will pay more attention to what I do.

  “‘It is not real gold,’ I tell myself. It is bogus stuff that I picked up out of a ditch and molded for a jibe. And it has turned into a whole world, my sick daydream? Why, I find that it is real gold after all, and I have made a world out of it, and I stand a fool from every direction.”

  Somebody had dialed Thomas, perhaps at random, perhaps to monitor him, and was trying to come into his mind.

  “Be gone,” Thomas said loudly. “Be gone I say! Yes, I know that it is wrong to bar anyone from my mind. I know that you, whoever you are, have as much business in my mind as I have. Bear with me! Bear with me! This is a writhing thing and I must wrestle it by myself. I’m an unperfected man, and I must still have a private moment now and then. Be gone. I shut you out!”

  The prober left the mind of Thomas angrily, and Thomas felt bad about it. “It will look ill,” he said, “if the incoming president of Astrobe is haled into common court on a complaint under the Open Mind Act,” he said.

  There was a rustle and noises behind him, and it began to worry him. But he had other worries as various things fought in his mind.

  “It is beyond belief that this world should be true,” he said again to himself. “It seemed so grotesque and sourly comic when I invented it. I wish I hadn’t read so much, particularly after my first death. It addles my brains to think that there were some who really advocated the sick thing. Well, it’s come onto me so I will live in it. Let the things in my brain tell me again how wonderful it is! All glory to Ouden the everything-in-nothing!

  “No, no, it’s all wrong!” Thomas broke away from the thoughts that tried to pull him under, and went running and stumbling along and crying to himself.

  “It is snakes writhing in my head! It is not valid thought! How have I been taken in? Me, a man who could always see a low trick so far a way off! How have the snakes gotten into my head anyhow? Did I stand like a scared sheep and let them enter? How have I become unmanned? When I was a boy I believed in God. When I was a man I still half believed. How have I been hooked by the Big O, the gawking Omega, the vile Ouden-Nothingness? Who would imagine that as a mature man I would worship so empty a god?

  “Dangerous thoughts, these! For now my heel-hounds have turned dangerous again.”

  Thomas More, all but declared president of Astrobe, had been walking in and out of a daze in a place he hated and despised. What had drawn him there? Now he was in a weird settlement between big Cathead and Wu Town, the least golden, the least committed of the great cities of Astrobe. He was conscious of the stench of Cathead when he heard again the hair-raising rustle and clatter behind him. He ran.

  The Programmed Killers had sensed the change in Thomas. They no longer smiled quizzically at him while they watched and waited. They had never ceased trailing him, and now they remembered why. He had changed again, whether temporarily or permanently was not their affair. Now they moved after him to kill him.

  “I’m lost,” Thomas howled. “Mind, do a flop-over! Return my trust in the thing. Snakes in my brain! Chime out your glad tidings again. Tell the world that Thomas is again faithful to the Vision. Tell the clanking things that I am no threat to anything, and that they be a mortal threat to me.”

  Thomas slipped and fell, and was barely up in time. He was running hard, and they were hard behind them. A sturdy runner can outspeed them for a very little while, but the programmed are tireless. It was unnecessary to lose them. Thomas tried to fathom out or remember streets and alleys that he had never seen before. He was lost, and his pursuers were not. He knew that some of them had peeled off from the group and were circling around somewhere. No matter where he doubled back they were likely to have him in a narrow passage.

  Then suddenly he was defiant, and his craven fear had become repulsive to him.

  “Snakes in my brain, out, out!” he bawled. “I’ll nest you no longer. I’ll die a man if I do die here. And I’ll know I was right the first time. Damn, it was always fools’-gold, and I knew it. Fools’-gold and brimstone it was. I�
�d rather be a Cathead lunger coughing up my life’s blood than be king of their folly.”

  But he would be nothing if he did not shake the Killers. He’d cough up his life’s blood quicker than the sickest lunger in Cathead. There was a clear way ahead, and the vision of a region he knew, and there was a dead-end alley, a trap, to his left. Thomas lunged for the clear way, but he turned into the blind alley.

  “No, no!” he swore. “I do not want to enter this alley. It is a dead-end, a death-trap. Why do I enter? The other day someone else was thinking with my brain and talking with my mouth. This evening someone else is running with my legs.”

  But he sprinted mightily for the end of the dead lane. There was a broken gap in the brick wall through which a determined man might force himself, if his life depended on it. He came almost to the gap, and a Programmed Killer was forcing its own way back through that gap. And another followed him through.

  They were stalking him from both ends of the alley. It was all sheer brick and stone walls, slimy and green with old rain and old age, and no man could climb them. And there was no door or opening of any sort in the short length of the alley.

  No door? Are you sure? Thomas felt that he was a puppet played on strings. He also felt that it might be the cleanest thing to let the Killers have him there. Someone had drawn him into this sack. Had he taken the other turning he’d have had a live chance of escaping the Killers. He’d escaped them before. But had he been drawn here to his death, or to something dirtier?

  For there was a door there. It hadn’t been there before, and it shouldn’t be there now.

  “What are the odds?” Thomas asked himself loudly. He surged through the door (snakes crawling back into his mind), knowing that he went from the world into a dream, knowing that he went from life to something queerer even than death. He slammed the door heavily and bolted it behind him. And he stood in total darkness.

  “Sit at the table with us,” said a voice, a wrong-side voice, either inside Thomas’ head or without. “Now we talk.”

  “Set a light,” Thomas said. “It’s blind dark.”

  “We don’t need a light,” the voice said. “Stop fighting the things in your head! They can see for you. Is it not so? Do you not see now, and not by light?”

  Thomas saw now, and not by light. He looked at Things through somebody else’s eyes, perhaps through the eyes of the Things. He was seeing in total darkness through the eyes of the eerie snakes in his head, and he was looking at Things that he would rather not have seen.

  There were nine of the Things there. Thomas had learned to think of them as Things in his last defiant surge back to reason. What were they? What was their form?

  Men. Men seen from the other side. From the back side? Yes, in the sense that a tapestry may be seen from its back side, the same picture but rough and deformed. These things were the deformation of mankind.

  Nine of the things there, and they were drawn up in groups of three around a large conference table. Like men, but with all the wrong things emphasized—ears, man ears, and yet somehow swinish; noses that were snouts, and yet not large, not malformed, simply wrongly emphasized; eyes that were made like human eyes, and yet these were not humans looking out of them.

  They were not men, though Thomas was sure that he had known at least one of them as a man. They were Programmed Persons all—Things.

  “Good evening, gentle contrivances,” Thomas said as he took a bold seat at the head of the table. It was not where they had motioned him to sit.

  “Not there!” sharply cried one of those that Thomas had known as a man. “That is reserved for the Holy Ouden.”

  “I sit here!” And Thomas sat. “Ah, I once told the Paul that I would have to discover for myself the name of the real King of Astrobe. It is the Ouden Himself! Let Old Nothingness find his own seat. I do not sit below the salt for any tin-horn things. Are the stilted killers outside belonging to your party? Do you control them? Was it you who drew me into this blind sack?”

  “Of course,” said one of them, speaking with a voice too smooth to be human. “I am Boggle, and these other two who form a creative trinity with me are Skybol and Swampers. Our specialty is retrogression.”

  “Jackals you be,” said Thomas, and the three were very like jackals. The jackal in human form may be told by the lay of the hair and the set of the ears. Yet they were of good human appearance, though more alienated from the human than even the real jackal animal.

  Three snakes stirred in Thomas’ brain. The snakes were in accord with these three Things. They must have been their extensions.

  “Retrogression, then,” Thomas said. “Go find your dens and runs in another head.”

  “I am Northprophet,” said the leader of the second group. “My fellows here are Knobnoster and Beebonnet, and our specialty is rechabitism.”

  “Dogs you be,” Thomas swore, and the three had all a touch of the dog in them. It was most weird that these creatures should seem on three levels, the human, the animal, and the machine. Then Thomas knew there was still another level in them all—the ghost.

  Ah, this Northprophet had himself once been candidate for president of Astrobe. He had passed as a man; and then there had come the moment when he could not quite pass. It had made more of a difference then. The Programmed had built him especially for the job of World President. He was deftly contrived. He would have made the perfect World President, from the Programmed view.

  Three more snakes stirred in Thomas’ brain, one of them a great one. This Northprophet was great among his kind.

  “Rattle along Things,” Thomas said sharply. “My time is limited. So is my life. And I do not enjoy the company overmuch.”

  “I am Pottscamp,” said the leader of the third group. And of course it was the old acquaintance whom Thomas had known as a man, the fourth member of the Big Three. But he looked greatly different now, as things do look different in a nightmare. And Thomas was forced to think of him differently, now that he was no longer a friend, now that he was a Programmed and not a human, now that he was known to have a Brain Snake as a familiar and an extension of himself.

  “My companions here are Holygee and Gandy,” Pottscamp said, “and our specialty is extrapolation.”

  “Wilderness Wolves you be,” Thomas said. “You howl higher than the ear on a bleaker moor than any on this world. All right, the nine of you, extrapolate, damn it! Retrogress! Rechabitize! Nine of you, and are your extensions not the nine snakes nesting in my mind?”

  “Of course, Thomas,” said Pottscamp. “You are our assignment. No other man ever rated so many important, ah, snakes. This is the talk that I promised you, Thomas. I told you that I held the Big Three Ones in the middle of my maw. They argue which of them are the puppets and which the puppeteer, but I am the theater in which their little show is played out. And I promised that you would be shown the back of the tapestry. Now it is that we will show you that picture of the reverse side, of the true side. It is a more meaningful world than the one you are accustomed to.”

  “Odd design, the back of that tapestry, Pottscamp,” Thomas said. “Full of snakes, is it not?”

  “Not at all, Thomas. From the true side they are not snakes but royal curiles twisted in mystic curves. Thomas, it is only for our old companionship that you are here at all. And I will say that yours is one of the most interesting minds I ever nested in. The others wanted to kill you offhand and to substitute a replica of you that would be of our kind.”

  “I don’t come through on Replica, Pottscamp. I’m invisible there.”

  “The replica we’d make of you would come through. We’d make it better and more like you than you are yourself. And it would behave as you have behaved, but without these moments of rebellion.”

  “On with it, Pottscamp! Show me the backward-picture, since I am here in a trap and must listen. You extrapolate, do you? Do it, then.”

>   “It is that ourselves are the extrapolation of mankind,” Northprophet cut in. He seemed to outrank Pottscamp himself in this hierarchy. “We will tell you the facts, Thomas, since you will not be able to stand against them. We confess that we have a little bit of the show-boat attitude programmed into us, and we love to gloat. You will not be able to do anything about what we tell you here. But, conversely, we are not able to extinguish you yet. That is really why we have not done it. We know that you have a warded life and that it is impossible to kill you till your time shall come. However, we could easily hide you and substitute for you. And it would be possible to cut you up terribly, to come very near to killing you. We could turn you into no more than a vegetable that suffers, but you will not die till you are so fated.”

  “Are the Programmed as foolish as humans, to believe in Fate?” Thomas asked. This seeing without light through other eyes was a little bit like seeing under water, seeing under something much deeper. One saw in both surface and depth. One saw, but did not comprehend, the interior mechanism as well as the surface weirdness of these entities, saw the jumbled essence that made one call Northprophet howling dog and Pottscamp Wilderness Wolf. There were animal-like ghosts inside them, and seeing with extensions of their own eyes one saw this ghostliness. “I thought you Programmed were merely interesting toys. Now I find that you are deformed toys, but Things still. Get back in your boxes, you Jack-Jumps!”

  “Thomas, we’ve taken over the box,” said Pottscamp. “The box is Astrobe. We take over all the boxes. Now we call it! You jump! You are the toys now, and we play with you till we throw you away.”

  “Who are you, clockwork things that grow too grand?”

  “Who are we, and how did we begin, Thomas? The texts that you yourself are permitted to study are only the shadow of the story. A century ago certain men of science made the first of us as a means of studying themselves. They wished to see if they could make men better than men were made naturally. We turn aside for a moment in the explanation, Thomas. Hear one thing, and then forget it: