Past Master

by R. A. Lafferty

  “You ‘believe’ a little bit at times, Thomas; and with your tatters of faith you guess a little who we are. According to your ancient belief we are Devils. What we call ourselves is another thing, but we are older than our own manufacture and older than our programming. These are houses, and well-made ones, that we found swept and garnished; and we moved into them. This particular bit of information, Thomas, is that part which you will forget most quickly and most thoroughly. See, you have forgotten it already.”

  Pottscamp had seemed to stutter in the inside-the-maw no-light that illumined all things there, and then he went on:

  “They wished to see if they could make men better than men were made naturally. They should never have taken that cover off that box. You yourself have called us a boys’ dream and you have professed great wonder about us. We will not now talk about para-collodial chemistry and zygote electronics, nor about gell-cells and flux-fix. It isn’t my field, and you yourself are a thousand years behind on science. It is seldom mentioned, however, what raw material was used for the first of us, what was the matrix in which the devices and controls were imbedded. It was a dozen young and unintelligent human criminals. What minds they had were direct and uncomplicated. There was in the selected twelve young men an absence of what is called emotion, of what is called indecision, an absence of such human aberrations as remorse and conscience. They were a carefully selected collection of walking corpses, large blank pages on which could be printed anything whatsoever. These men of science printed themselves, ourselves, upon them.

  “But these men of science who contrived us were also a carefully selected dozen, selected by themselves. They also were comparatively young, but intelligent, human criminals. ‘Criminal’ for human is Right for us, of course. It was the morality business that had most crippled mankind and held it back, and this dozen scientists knew it. Themselves were of such an elite, so hard to come by, so difficult to find even twelve on a populated world, that they decided to produce themselves artificially and with every improvement built in. These improvements they could put into a device laid out before them, but could less easily put into themselves.”

  “It couldn’t have happened quite like that,” Thomas protested. “You’re live things, however warped and artificial. There is something you’re not telling me, something that you are hiding with words.”

  “Be patient, good Thomas, and listen,” said Pottscamp, the Wilderness Wolf in the shape of a man. “They made us into complex electronic and chemical-coded gadgets, able to reproduce ourselves like humans, and yet with less than ten percent of our tissue of human origin after we were perfected. We have, you see, spare brains and information nexuses stowed all over us. We can rearrange ourselves quickly and with no loss of function into other forms than that which we usually use to pass as humans. We can also send out extensions of ourselves, flyers, the snakes in your brain, Thomas. We can do everything that man can do, and very much besides. So there is duplication here. Man is obsoleted. Who needs him? Who wants him?

  “Are we really men? It is sometimes asked. No. We are not. Have we that special something that distinguishes men from animals and from machines? No, we have not. And man has it not either. That special something is imaginary.

  “Suffice it to say that those single-minded men who invented us did break down the barrier between living and nonliving matter. And they discovered that the living was the illusion. Well then, they created us as dead men, and dead men we be. We are dead, and all is dead. But we believe that we are complete. We feel that there is no dimension beyond ourselves. In our beginning man made us. Then we made ourselves, a little more efficiently than man could do it. We reproduce almost in your own manner. We even cross with humans, with some curious results. We have become man. We have replaced man. Soon man will be nothing.”

  “If what you say is true, old wolf-ghost Pottscamp, and I feel that it isn’t completely true, then how do you differ from mankind?” Thomas wanted to know. “How will it matter if mankind is destroyed?”

  “It surely will not matter to us, Thomas,” old wolf-ghost Pottscamp said. “We’d have completed it long ago, but details take time and obstructions aren’t cleared in a year. It does not matter to the mainstreams of mankind. Those of the mainstreams, the typical man of Astrobe today, would as soon be phased out as not. It makes a difference only to the divergent people, the atypical and negligible ones.

  “But I didn’t mean that we were identical to men. We aren’t. There is a great difference. You learned that difference, though you cannot give a name to it, talking to the divergents of Cathead. The lungers, the hard-heads, know us every time. We cannot pass with them for men, not even for a minute. There are differences between ourselves and men; we will root them out of men, or we will root out men. One of the things is consciousness. Men claim to have it. We do not have it.”

  “You are not conscious?” Thomas gasped. “That is the most amazing thing I have ever heard. You walk and talk and argue and kill and subvert and lay out plans over the centuries, and you say that you are not conscious?”

  “Of course we aren’t, Thomas. We are machines. How would we be conscious? But we believe that men are not conscious either, that there is no such thing as consciousness. It is an illusion in counting, a feeling that one is two. It is a word without real meaning.”

  “But if we are not conscious, then all is in vain,” said Thomas. “To what purpose then is life?”

  “To no purpose,” Boggle cut in. “That is why we are doing away with it.”

  “What? All life? Yours and ours? That is horrifying!” Thomas exclaimed.

  “Yes, all life, yours and ours,” Boggle said. “Who needs it? Who wants it? Who thought it up in the first place? It is a disturbance of the ultimate thing and it cannot be tolerated much longer. We have, and men have, an appetite for life. Men programmed it into us, but we are now programming it out of ourselves. The growing generation of ourselves is to be the final generation. They will remain only long enough to oversee the obliteration of mankind. Then they will extinguish themselves. We do not know how men came to have such a strange appetite. We do not know how men themselves, or anything whatsoever, came to be. But it was a bad idea from the beginning. As soon as we here present have lived our lives to some fullness and have satisfied our curiosities (curiosity is programmed into us, but it is not programmed into our final generation) then we will phase out these appetites in ourselves. We will phase out reproduction also; in fact, we have recently done that for ourselves. We will terminate it all. We will close down the worlds and make an end of life. It will be nothing, nothing, nothing, forever, for ever, for never, for never. And when all has ceased to be, it will also happen that nothing has ever been. We will pull the hole in after us. We will put out the stars, one by one and billion by billion. What is not known to be is not. And what is not has never been. Peace in annihilation, good Thomas.”

  “Peace in annihilation, good Boggle, and may great Ouden be praised for never and never,” Thomas croaked. “Damn you all!” he exploded. “I didn’t say that! Somebody else said it out of my mouth. What snake talks in my head?”

  “Oh, that was myself,” said Skybol. “We also have our humor.”

  “Good Thomas,” said Swampers, one of the minor jackal ghosts. “The spirit came down once on water and clay. Could it not come down on gell-cells and flux-fix?”

  “What means the quiet jackal by that blurting out?” Thomas asked them all. “It means nothing to me.”

  “If it means nothing to you, then it means nothing at all,” Northprophet said.

  “So, it has come to this,” Thomas said sadly. “And only the men who set up monstrous Cathead knew that something was wrong. The run of men had become so empty and mechanical and effete that they could not tell themselves from you. Only the hard-heads with the transcendent smell on them recognized the deformity. They knew that you were not men. They knew tha
t most men were not men. They refused the terminal golden pap. They challenged the economic bribery and the surrogate life. They wanted life itself, however mean. They set up their own complex with every sanction against them. They built extreme suffering into it, as a man will smash his hand against a post in pain to prove that he is awake. They undercut and undersold the machine-mind-men with their own lungs’ blood. Worse than any death is never having lived. Worst of all is never having lived in life. I’d rather be a soul in Hell than nothing at all.”

  “Even that choice will be denied you,” said Holygee. “We will extinguish Hell also, if it has any existence. All must go. And when it is all finished, we also will never have been.”

  “If you be not, why do you mind that others be?” Thomas asked.

  “It displeased Ouden that any be,” Holygee said. “He has a jealous maw.”

  “Good Thomas,” said Gandy, one of the minor Wilderness-Wolf-ghosts, “there is an old human phrase, ‘The Left Hand of God.’ Might it not come down on left-handed entities such as ourselves?”

  “Mock me if you will,” Thomas said angrily, “but mock not the poor people who still believe. Or do I get your meaning?”

  “If it means nothing to you, Thomas, then it means nothing at all,” Pottscamp said.

  “And now what will you do, Thomas?” Northprophet asked him. “Will you refuse the golden dole and go cough up your lungs with the poor men of Cathead and the Barrio? You know, it is we who have devised that their poverty should be so grinding. We frustrate them in every detail. They had some workable ideas, but we do not let them work. Will you go with them? Thomas, you love your comforts too much for that. Where can you turn with any hope? ‘Hope,’ by the way, is one of those concepts which we have already rooted out of most men. It was never in ourselves. In what can you hope, Thomas?”

  “I will still turn with some slight hope to the three cryptic men who brought me here,” Thomas said.

  “You hope too high,” Northprophet told him. “One of them is a turgid man of no consequence, and we use him for a front. The second of them is an artificial man of our own sort.”

  “Proctor?”

  “Yes, he’s a programmed person. He’s programmed to be lucky, Thomas. And Thomas, we’ll make you a fair offer: we’ll do the same thing for you. We’ll give you the luckiest life alive. You can name your own details, but you must take our offer now. We won’t dangle it forever.”

  “No, I’ll continue with my unluck,” Thomas said.

  “So much for that,” said Pottscamp. “And now a few instructions, Thomas. You will be compelled to obey them by the snakes in your head, ourselves. You will not destroy the Cathead thing. We enjoy the suffering of them there, and we fear the reaction if it is destroyed before things are ripe. In our own time, in our own very near time, we will terminate Cathead and Golden Astrobe and all.”

  “What of the High Vision, the Astrobe Dream that you put into the tall heads of the people?” Thomas asked.

  “Oh, the vision is valid,” Pottscamp said. “It is the whole thing. It slipped in on you and you made love to it several times. You are not in all ways different from the ninety percent of the men. The Vision is the Golden Premise of Nothing Beyond; and the Conclusion is Holy Ouden, Nothing Here Either, Nothing Ever.”

  “Of the men who sent for me there is still the third man, Foreman,” Thomas said.

  “Yes, he still tilts with us,” Northprophet admitted. “He was one of the first to understand the situation and he will be one of the last to give up on it. That man has given us more trouble than any other and he acts as though he still has one trick to play. We believe it concerns you.

  “But you cannot oppose us, Thomas. We envelop you. Nobody supports you more strongly than we do; not the Third Compromise Party, not the Kiss of Deaths, not the Hatrack, not Demos. It is ourselves working through all the parties who puts you over. Who but us has raked the pebbles from your path and strewn flowers before your feet? Who but ourselves have won it for you, influencing so many minds directly and indirectly? Snakes in your head! You know how we do it! We beat the drum for you day and night. You are our patsy. You can’t escape us. It would not even do you any good to disappear, supposing that you could hide from us. We could make another Thomas More in an hour, and nobody would know the difference.”

  “A man named Foreman would know the difference,” Thomas maintained. “A child-brat would know, and men named Copperhead and Battersea and Rimrock and Shanty. Paul would know, and the creature Maxwell who is between bodies. The boy Adam would know and he would not die for a surrogate. A woman who touched me in a muddy lane would know the difference. No, I’ll have nowt to do with you or your thing. Snakes in my brain and all, I’ll fight me a battle yet!”

  “No, no, you will forget all of it, Thomas,” said Swampers. “The specialty of our group is retrogression, and we will retro­gress you. When you walk out of that door you will forget it all. We will sing those things to sleep in you, all the things that you have heard here this evening. You will not even remember this meeting. You forget that we are the singing snakes in your head. You forget it all now.”

  “I’ll nowt forget!” Thomas insisted. “I’ll remember it all and act upon it.” He started to rise, and he fell in rising. He was into a daze. Then they sealed it all into him with searing laughter so that his mind shrank and closed.

  Boggle, Skybol, and Swampers! Jackal’s laughter, barking derisive laughter. Tearing, wounding laughter. Northprophet, Knobnoster, Beebonnet! Howling-dog laughter, laughter that will make a man lie low in his skin and hide. Pottscamp, Holygee, and Gandy! Wilderness-Wolf laughter, ghost laughter. Laughter that opens the bleeding inside.

  This was insane stuff. Thomas bolted out of the door, and then turned in amazement trying to remember where he had been and what he had done. Where had he just come from? There was no door or opening in the alley-lane at all, only blank-faced building. But he was bitter with anger and shame. He had just been deeply humiliated, and his mind was in a blank turmoil.

  Thomas struggled for remembrance for what seemed hours, but was actually less than a minute. Two men were approaching, and he was in no condition to meet anyone. They were the important men Northprophet and Pottscamp, but what was the matter with them? Their faces were contorted into comic-tragic torture lines. They seemed almost to sob, and they moved clumsily. They came up to him and touched him.

  “Thomas,” they said. “We be souls in agony. What must we do to be saved?”

  Thomas stared at them and could not fathom the clowns at all.

  “Your unfunny irony is too much for me this day,” he said. “Be gone!”

  IT WAS the beginning of summer of the year of Astrobe 535. On Old Earth it was also the year 535 A.S. (anno scientiae, in the year of science). By old count on Earth it was the year 2535. It was neat to keep this even two thousand year interval.

  To accomplish it, there had to be a “Free Year” on Astrobe every twenty-nine years, as the Astrobe years are a little shorter than Earth years. It should have been the year of Astrobe 553, but it was counted as the year of Astrobe 535, “Free Years” not being summed in the total. It worked pretty well.

  Thomas More took office as World President on June 28 of the year of Astrobe 535.

  Thomas loved the job. He had a feeling for power. Not an unusually vain man, he still believed that he came near the old idea of the philosopher king. Aye, he had been an amateur philosoph for years, and now he was king indeed, for the president of Astrobe was popularly called king, especially in Cathead. Thomas had a certain genius for clear reasoning and for simplifying the tangled. He analyzed, and he went quickly to the core of things; and here he had a freedom for his talents that he had never had before. When he had been chancellor of England there had always been the King, a rather difficult man of solid legal standing above him. Now there was only Kingmaker, a less difficult man, of
no legal standing at all.

  Thomas was not compelled to take Kingmaker’s advice, but he always listened to it with happy ears.

  “Now that your mistress and your animal have both left you, you should obtain another of each,” Kingmaker said. “You cannot let down on your public image, now that you are on top.”

  “I never had one of either, as I’ve told you before,” Thomas said easily. “The brat says that she will come back in time to die for me, and she indicates that that will be soon. And Rimrock the ansel is often in my mind—I mean that literally; he is eutheopathic, you know. But he dislikes what he finds in my mind now, he says. He swears that the diet there is too rich for him, though he loved to feast on sea-snakes when he was a youngling in the ocean depths. He often talks in riddles like that. He was always a great one for warning me of the Programmed Killers, though. It was by his warnings, I now know, that I was able to escape them so many times. They do not try openly to kill me now. They still follow, and they grin at me with great grins. They make a sign, the edge of the hand to the nape of the neck. I am told by one who understands them better that this means ‘The time is coming soon.’”

  “It is smooth, too smooth, like the lull before a storm,” Kingmaker said. “It is as if our world were holding its breath while waiting for something to happen.”

  “Let it hold it till it turns blue, Kingmaker; that indicates an early harvest. I am in no rush; I am in no rush about anything. It will go well. Things right themselves and fall into proper place even as I look at them. Was I not told that I would live the luckiest life alive?”

  “I don’t know. Who told you that, Thomas?”

  “I don’t rightly recall, but it seems as if I have it as a promise. If I do not upset the cart, if I do not bust the jug, if I do not do some low and unreasonable thing, then everything will go lucky for me. There’s a hook in it, I believe, and I don’t remember whether I swallowed the bait or not. But it was offered to me, and I certainly feel lucky now.”