Past Master

by R. A. Lafferty

  “They are hundreds only, or less, out of billions. We break it,” said Northprophet.

  “Do you feel that way, Kingmaker?” Thomas asked.

  “Absolutely,” said regal Kingmaker. “I don’t believe any diversity should be allowed, not even over such a minor aberration as this.”

  “Chezem, Pottscamp, Proctor, Wottle, Northprophet, do you all feel that way?”

  They all felt that way, and they nodded gravely, grimly, almost in unison.

  “Foreman, do you feel that way?” Thomas demanded.

  Foreman didn’t say anything. He had that deep look in his eyes, and an ironic smile.

  “Foreman, you’re the historian,” Thomas said. “It’s the same damned thing they killed me for the first time, isn’t it?”

  “Same damned thing, Thomas.”

  “Sign it,” ordered Proctor.

  “Oh all right. I’m tired of playing. I’ll sign it,” Thomas said.

  “You know the penalty for not signing,” Proctor added. “It’s death, you know.”

  (Foreman had to hide his delight. It was so much better that it was Proctor who had said that, who had blundered, who had pushed it too far.)

  “For a World President to veto a bill three times means his death,” Proctor said, pressing, blundering still deeper into it; and Thomas was turning angry red in the face. “That had to be enacted. We cannot have an obstructionist as World President. —Why do you hesitate now, when you were ready to sign a moment ago?”

  “Aye, a man’d be a fool to lose his head twice over the same thing,” Thomas mused, still looking more than half stubborn. “Of course I’ll sign.”

  “He’d have to feel himself a little better than those around him to take up a challenge like that,” Foreman put in hurriedly as Thomas had already touched magnetic stylus to the form. “He’d have to be a man of some pride.”

  “I am a man of some pride,” Thomas said. “I do feel myself a little better than those around me, now that I really look at them.”

  “He’d have to be a man who couldn’t be pushed and couldn’t be scared,” said Foreman.

  “I say I’m such a man, even if it’s a lie. But I scare a little,” Thomas said.

  “He’d have to be a man who’d stand his ground even if he were scared,” Foreman needled. “He’d have to be quite a man to die for a point, even if he understood it only at the last minute, and then dimly. He’d have to be such a man—”

  “Foreman, you fool, what are you up to?” Proctor demanded.

  “Who pushed me into the corner the other time, Fabian?” Thomas asked softly. “Who required my head of me for his point?”

  “If you’re granted another life, Thomas, you try to figure it out. Will he be writ as friend or enemy of you, do you think? On which side did he seem?”

  “Sign that bill,” Proctor ordered. “We force you to.”

  “You will just play Johnny Hell forcing me to do anything,” Thomas said. He took the bill and scribbled in Latin “I forbid, ‘Veto’” across the face of it.

  They constituted themselves a hasty assembly then.

  And they sentenced him to death.

  THE EAGLES were gathering now. The phrase was Shanty’s. Shanty had gone off and left his affairs, a monstrously big affair in monstrous Cathead, and had come to Cosmopolis. He looked like the eternal pilgrim with his hat on his head and his staff in his hand.

  Battersea came from his waterfront hold. The scow-master from Cathead rubbed his hands together like a general before battle, which is what he was. They met in a back room of the shop of George the syrian, who was in aromatics. We do not mean the Cathead shop; we mean George’s shop right in the middle of Cosmopolis right off Centrality square.

  Paul came there, using the little side door. He had never noticed the shop before and he had no idea why he entered that door. He saw the others and wondered how they had come together and how they had known where to come. Then they were joined by Walter Copperhead the necromancer, and he ceased to wonder. Copperhead had himself been a prisoner the day before, under sentence of death on suspicion of starting a cult. He had come through walls to escape and to come to them.

  “It isn’t difficult,” he said. “I believe that it has been insufficiently tried. There are many who could go through walls if it ever occurred to them to try it. Someone is coming, and I have one of my premonitions.”

  Copperhead bolted the door. Then a shabby old lady came in through the wall.

  “It’s no test,” Copperhead said. “She has only a contingent body.”

  “A little snuff for the love of God,” the old lady said to George. “I have no money for it. I had a coin, but it melted in my hand.”

  “So will the snuff,” said George the syrian. “And when did the Programmed begin to use snuff?”

  “I, sir?” the old lady asked. “Do I look like a Programmed?”

  “No, but you are,” George told her. “Your body is too contrived to be human.”

  “It’s just an old body I found,” she said. “It isn’t my own. I don’t really understand it at all. But, if I’m not a poor old lady, what am I?”

  “Have you been my customer before?” George asked. “I seem to remember you.”

  He gave her snuff, poor-people snuff such as he put out in his shop in Cathead, not the aromatic dilettante snuff that he usually sold here.

  “I don’t remember you or your shop,” the old lady said. “But I remember Paul a little bit. And now I remember you all, more and more. Yes, I have been of the company of all of you before, in one group or another.”

  “Maxwell, where in Hell or broken Astrobe did you get that body?” Copperhead asked.

  “Yes, Maxwell, that’s the name I couldn’t think of. Yes, I’m Maxwell, and I begin to recover my wits a little. I believe I found the old lady dead in an alley. It is an embarrassing situation I find myself in, gentlemen, but do not think any the less of me for it. Now, I will be with you till the end of the affair.”

  Somebody tried the barred door, then tried it harder. Then tried it most impatiently.

  “This is the test,” said Walter Copperhead. “We will see if she comes through the wall.”

  “Be you certain it’s a she?” Shanty asked. “It’s a strong hand there.”

  She didn’t come through the wall, she came through the door, smashing and splintering it with a sudden shock of force. She was the most beautiful woman on Astrobe, and she came where she wished.

  It had fallen to dusk outside. It would be inconvenient to leave the door standing shattered if they showed a light; and a high meeting cannot be held in the dark. There had been a hammering and ruckus outside for some time and they had hardly noticed it.

  “Who’s a-building, Evita?” Paul asked. “What are they making out there? Did you notice what was going on before you broke in on us?”

  “Oh, they’re building the scaffold,” she said. “Out of old ritual wood, it has to be. It’s the pediment for the beheading tomorrow noon.”

  “I’ll just borrow a bit of tools and boards,” Shanty said. “They owe us that.”

  Evita had been battling principalities and powers for a long time, and it showed on her. And yet she didn’t appear more than seventeen. She was indeed the most beautiful woman on Astrobe, with soft hair that seemed to have smoke on it, roiling black and now quieting to brown or gold. And were her eyes green or gray or blue?

  “Will it be to the death?” she asked. “Tell us, Copperhead, will it be?”

  “Oh, yes, it will be to his death.”

  “It will not be,” Battersea swore. “Did you not know that I was a military general on frontier settlement reserve worlds before I joined the Cathead movement? I understand strategy and the quick strike. I have men, and the most sophisticated of weapons, no matter where I got them. We will have surprise
working for us. It is to be at high noon tomorrow. We have it all times to the second. We snatch the Thomas. We set him up in a strong place between Wu Town and Cathead. He is King till he dies, and he will not die tomorrow. We have support in places you would never guess. Millions are secretly sick of the golden Thing, and I mean here and in the other golden towns. We capture the whole machinery of administration. I am only the finger man, but we have men lined up who are capable of carrying it through. Cathead has not been the only opposition. There is a much larger thing just ready to smash through this thin crust. We’ll combine the several things and make us a decent world yet. Did you ever suppose that the shrill chorus represented the preponderance of opinion? This world has been led astray and put into bondage by a minority of a minority of a minority. We’ll splinter that frail thing like the child-woman splintered the door, as beautifully and as powerfully.”

  “It may happen almost like that,” said Copperhead. “Nevertheless, Thomas will lose his head tomorrow.”

  “He will not,” said Battersea. “You’re a fool and no necromancer. Here comes the pup. How did he know to come? Be you an eagle, pup?”

  It was Rimrock the ansel who sidled in.

  “I be an eagle,” he said. “I soar. It’s the last night of the world, and we are not sure what the new world will be like. I’ve brought old rum, and brandy for those of a more barbarous taste.”

  Shanty had the door about fixed. He worked deftly and beautifully.

  “It’s better than new,” he said. “It’d keep out a Programmed Patrol, but it might not keep out an Evita. Strike a low light now, George. Conspirators must always have a low light.”

  “The conspiring has long since been done,” Battersea said. “I go now. We march tomorrow, like a gaggle of poor lungers in from Cathead to goggle at the sight, but we will be the deftest commandos in the world. Can one of you get to the Thomas to tell him not to worry, that it is all taken care of?”

  “Oh, I’ll get to him,” Evita said. “A wink to the Programmed guards, who have minds like adolescents, and I’m in. They think I’m his doxie, and they have a leering love of such things.”

  Battersea strode out and back towards Cathead. There was a shriller sound outside now that cut through the hammering. It was the honing of the big old ritual blade that would soon be set in place.

  “I’d hoped that it would be a nice day for it,” Shanty said, “but it might rain before morning. Did it rain the first time, does anybody know?”

  “A little the night before and in the early morning,” Copperhead said. “But it cleared by the time of the beheading, and the sun was out.”

  The whine of steel on stone rose higher in the square outside. This was all by ancient formula, and the blade must be very sharp. The workers in the square had even lighted bonfires, though the night was warm. This is the only time that bonfires were ever lighted in golden Cosmopolis, on the eve of a beheading, and it had been twenty years since one. This was one of the last rituals.

  The boy Adam came in, through the wall, but this also was no test. In many ways Adam was not real.

  “My brother, you know these things also. Will it be his death?” Evita asked.

  “Yes, it will be his death. And my final one,” Adam said.

  “Then Battersea is wrong and he won’t be able to bring it off?”

  “No, he isn’t wrong. He will come and he will strike. And the new world may be made out of it. But many of the details will have to be changed.”

  “What is it in me that survives?” Maxwell asked. He had the shabby old lady’s form and her voice, but they all knew him as Maxwell now. “I’m myself part programmed, as was Scrivener, in my origin. And this body I’ve picked up is a programmed body. It’s badly made; it’s hardly workable. I believe it was a hasty thing, used somehow as a disguise for a moment, and then cast off. How can they destroy me in one machine and I survive in another machine? They couldn’t even destroy one personality, one that had no right to be in the first place. Well, what is it of Astrobe that will survive them? You’ll never know how I fought against oblivion. They sure took my old apparatus apart in the potting shed.”

  After that they broke out the homesick old rum and held a wake for Thomas More the man who would die the next day. They became very droll and mellow over it. The worst of their black mood had gone by, and they believed that they would yet survive as people. This is one thing that the Programmed cannot do. They do not become droll and mellow, nor do they hold wakes. Programmed people had no gallows humor at all.

  They would not have understood Paul’s joke about the corpse who stuttered. They would have been puzzled by Shanty’s tale of the boar hog and the lightning rod salesman and the deal they made; and how what the sows didn’t know very nearly killed them. And Maxwell’s story of the new-dead lady whose soul was still wandering in the waste places when it became entangled in a drove of laden donkeys and was saddled and ridden by the donkey-drover would have left them cold.

  And yet there was very sharp Programmed attention paid to it. The monitors in depth come on every time eight or more people are met together anywhere in civilized Astrobe. They had picked up the group when Rimrock came in, dropped it when Battersea left, and picked it up again when the boy Adam entered. These monitors are automatic, and they record and interpret everything they pick up on these forays. That was the difficulty.

  They couldn’t make anything out of the tales. They tied into Code-Crackers, and then into Code-Crackers-Supreme. And neither of these great programmed bureaus could crack the code. They couldn’t at all figure what cryptic information was concealed in the tales.

  The boy Adam told the story of the first human people ever to come to Astrobe; and it had been fifteen hundred years before the date that you will find given by the history precis. By the holies, it had been Saint Brandon himself in a coracle boat that was round as a tub. He sloshed and bounded in over the Stoimenof Sea, with a great deal of drenching and bailing; but he had started his voyage in the North Atlantic Ocean on Old Earth; and he supposed that he was still sailing the same water, since he had never left it.

  He piled out of the coracle when it ran onto land, and nineteen Irish monks with twinkling pates followed him out of the boat and onto shore. On first arrival they found no living things on the shore except jerusalem conies, which would not answer their questions. But Saint Brandon and his nineteen monks set themselves to record whatever they might find in this new land.

  Say, they mapped it all out and wrote it down on the scrolls with exact description of the plants and animals and the new land itself. They got down every bay and inlet where the Stoi­menof Sea shatters into a dozen estuaries and slips, between what is Wu Town and Cathead now. It was a beautiful map and a comprehensive description.

  Then they got back into the coracle boat and put up their sail that was no bigger than a shield. And in ninety-nine days they were back in Dingle Bay where they had started from.

  But later explorers, going out into the North Atlantic Ocean of Old Earth, didn’t find any such land as that; and they said that Saint Brandon had lied. He had not. Those later explorers had gone in prow-ships that will hold a course, not in round coracle boats that can only be steered by prayer and fasting and are likely to wander clear off the Earth.

  That was the story of the boy Adam; and Code-Crackers-Supreme labored mightily to break the code and arrive at the cryptic meaning behind it, and they couldn’t do it. This wasn’t code like you meet every night.

  “Blessed be this rum,” said Rimrock the ansel.

  George the syrian told just how things are every time the world ends. The only thing ever left over when the world ends, he said, is one syrian and one sand dune, all other features of the world being blotted out by the terminal catastrophes. There is that terrible second or million years when nothing moves—for a second and a million years are the same when there is no movement
in anything. Then the syrian goes over behind the sand dune and finds a dromedary; and together they start the world going again.

  “That is the way it was in the earliest version of Genesis,” George said. “That is the way the world begins every time. You will hear stories about a man and a woman, or about a turtle raising the sky up from off the earth. Do not believe them! Every time the world begins it begins with a syrian and a dromedary. Now, I don’t know what a dromedary is, I don’t know what a sand dune is, and I sure don’t know what a syrian is. The name was hung onto me, I believe, because I have a beak instead of a nose. The world will end again tomorrow. Watch then for a syrian and a sand dune. If the syrian goes behind the dune, there is hope; if he does not, or if there is neither syrian or sand dune, then the world is done forever.”

  Code-Crackers-Supreme suffered a breakdown about the time that George the syrian recounted this. It was not, perhaps, a serious breakdown; but it would take several hours to get code-crackers to functioning again. So the monitoring was dropped. No point in setting down what even the code-crackers cannot crack.

  “Blessed be this rum,” said Evita.

  Foreman? Fabian Foreman? What was he doing there? He was one of the big men. How long had he been sitting in the midst of them?

  “It’s no great wonder,” Foreman said. “I do not come through the walls, as Copperhead does. I have no strange powers, except a few that are beginning to appear in many on Astrobe lately. I own this building, as I own every building that opens onto Centrality Square. I have my ways of coming into all of them. So I ducked in here to get away from the mobs outside—for there has been a great loosening up of the people of Cosmopolis just within the last hour, and perhaps of the other great Cities of Astrobe. They are having a fools’ holiday such as they have not had for a hundred years. Everyone thought they were too far gone in their golden lethargy for that, and here they are alive again. And yet now that I’m inside, I find I miss the clamor. It grows on you. Let’s go out in the square and join with them. Then Evita can go to the Thomas and reassure him that all is well, that Battersea’s swift-striking commandos will rescue him from the high gibbet at noon tomorrow. And he will still be King. And later, along about dawn, I will go in to him and talk a final talk with him.”