“That’s another thing I’ve been searching for a gentle way to tell you, Thomas: we do not have long hours, we have only short minutes. We have this cycle, Thomas. At the time of the birth of Christ, the clear cruel Roman Republic (under the first Emperor who considered himself a Republican) died in an instant; and an instant afterwards the Late Empire was born full-grown. It was always the Late Empire; it was an afternoon and evening thing. And there was really not much resemblance between those worlds; the simple cruel thing, and the complexly bizarre thing, at the same time cruel and compassionate, that was the Late Empire. Five hundred years later it happened again. The Empire was gone like morning frost, and the Lower Middle Ages, completely different, obtained. In another five hundred years, the High Middle Ages followed on the corpse of the Low, and there was never such difference as between these two worlds. In another five hundred years, the High Middle Ages died (as did you yourself), and another thing was born which you are not able to recognize although it carried names that you knew well. And after another five hundred years, that world died completely. A new world was born instantly, and the first settlement of Astrobe coincided with that rebirth. This new thing became the World of Astrobe, as Old Earth lost importance and meekly followed our world. This is the world that dies this morning, and I am worried about it.
“This is the first time the cycle has been completed on Astrobe, and each time it happens, it seems that the rebirth is less likely to succeed. I don’t know what goes on when a world dies; there must be, I believe, a bit of the transcendent yeast to make it rise again. Something must trigger a reaction. There was building a reaction to the “Ban the Beyond” push, and the blood of the spotted lamb (yourself) will cinch it. The previous yeastings were all such simple things, but they were necessary. There really is this necessity that a small quantity of the immaterial (however it is named in the equation) be added to the mass every five hundred years or so. It may be a simple chemical-psychic requirement which we do not understand. Myself, who have sought and been unable to find personal faith, am inclined to believe that it is no more than this. But the requirement is there that something be added now and then, or the worlds will not live again. Your death and the reaction to it will be the trigger, the mustard seed. We plant it now.”
Battersea, is all well with you? Are you watching the clock? Only a few more hours.
“Ten minute call!” pinged a mechanical voice.
“All right, Thomas,” Foreman said. “We go now to your end. Come, come.”
“Now? Are you out of your mind? It’s not yet eight o’clock. I die at noon. Nothing is ready, nothing—”
“The scaffold is ready, Thomas, and the blade is ready. Here, here, good devices, pinion him! He’s got a streak of the heroic in him. I am sorry, Thomas, but there was no other way to do it.”
“Get your tin talons off me, you devil toys! Eternal damnation! Who changed the time, Foreman?”
“I did, Thomas. You die at eight o’clock. There was no other way to do it.”
“No, no, I die at noon! Foreman, do you understand what you’re doing?”
“Perfectly. I guessed all about the Battersea thing, of course. He was a fine commando general in his way; and I was his commander. I could always read him, and I picked up the details easily.”
“Why do you murder me, Foreman? I counted you a friend. And you have no loyalty to the Astrobe thing.”
“No, I have no loyalty to the Astrobe corpse, Thomas, and I am your friend. I assure you that there was no other way to bring it off. The reaction to your foul murder, joined to many other long-building things, should touch off a terrible reaction: the rediscovery of humanity—don’t you believe a world can be reborn out of that, Thomas? It only takes one shot to signal a charge.”
“I say no man ever before slew his friend for such a silly mouthful of words.”
“And I say it has happened many times before. Consider the Assassinations, Thomas, you who are something of a critic of historical theses. Consider whether the Heroes have not more often been assassinated by friends than by enemies; consider whether some of them have not even been assassinated with their own consent.”
“I don’t consent.”
“If everything else has failed, if a program has fallen to nothing, if the hero would make a better hero when dead, then he was made a dead hero by his friends, for his own sake and the sake of his program. I could name a dozen clear cases of this, but I won’t; strong partisan feelings are still involved in some of them after the centuries. —Thomas, my friend, you’d have throttled me if you’d broken loose then. Tighter with him, guards, and now walk him along. This has to be fast or something might spoil it.”
“It’s a thing to make you doubt your friends, my friend,” Thomas growled to him as he fought with his Programmed guards. “Why me, Fabian? Why did you call me to it?”
“You were the only ultimately honest man I could think of, Thomas, and I considered a lot of them. You’d shown it before, stubborn honesty unto death even for a point which you hardly came to understand at the end. I reasoned that you had done it once and you would do it again in similar circumstances. I reasoned that you had a curious magnetism about you, that you had become a symbol once, and that you would become a symbol again. We had almost run out of symbols on Astrobe.”
“I die for it, and I don’t even know what it’s about,” Thomas moaned as they dragged him out to the scaffold. And dragging him was a battle. He set up a noise.
“People, people!” he shouted in his high and sandy voice. “There’s nowt right about this thing! Smash the high trickery!”
And the people had begun to gather, tame people with a new wild look about them. Like wolves they were, and they snuffed and howled. Panlykonium reigned in Centrality Square, and the air sparked with danger.
Nevertheless, by setting the time early, Foreman had surprised the opposition; and the execution would be brought off if it could be done quickly. Thomas fought the mechanical guards who dragged him out, but they brought him to a standstill before Pottscamp, who had a last official thing to convey.
“Will you reconsider?” Pottscamp asked Thomas as he confronted him in the middle of Centrality Square right at the foot of the scaffold. It was required by ritual that this be asked. “It is so easy to save your life, good Thomas,” the Pottscamp went on. “Sign now, and live happily. Or die meanly. In that case I will succeed as Surrogate President, and I will have signed the bill within five minutes. And you, Thomas, will have died for nothing.”
“Snake-in-my-brain, I will not have died for the Oudennothing! I will not sign! I see now what Thing you are trying to kill, and to me it is the only Thing that matters. So late I have come back to it. I will not reconsider. On with it, guards! Off with my head if only to close my ears to this babble! Out of my way, you damnable jump-jack!”
They took Thomas up the steps of the scaffold. And Pottscamp fled as though stricken. What? What? How would he flee as though stricken?
This was spectacle. The magnetic man with the mystery about him was up on the death tower with the whole world watching, and he was even more in command than at the time of his ovation on his public coming into Cosmopolis.
Kingmaker and Proctor watched it from high windows and justified themselves. It was easy for Proctor; he had justification programmed into him.
Nobody knows what Foreman felt when he watched Thomas taken up the scaffold.
Pottscamp felt nothing; he was, of course, a machine without feeling. He had no conscience or compassion. This would not bother him at all.
It wouldn’t?
Then why did he—?
Then why did he—WHAT?
Sat on the ground and moaned and howled like an old Hebrew. And poured dust and ashes over his head.
You’re crazy. He really did that?
He really did that.
Thomas More
had been World President, King, for nine days. And now he would die.
The early-morning rain had stopped, and now there was a rush to complete the act. The men from Cathead, so rumor went, had received word of the sudden change of time. They were mobbing toward the center of Cosmopolis, but they might well be too late.
Smooth and swift and calculated, the execution, and there was nothing could stop it.
There was one wave of fury, a minute thing as to the bulk of it, but incomparably savage. There is always one such small mad wave, rising to foaming and furious height all out of proportion to its bulk, that rises and strikes a very few moments before a true tidal wave or world-wave strikes. It is called the forerunner wave.
Buff Shanty and Paul with the crooked face were in it, each driving in with an impetus equal to that of many men. Walter Copperhead was in it—though, being a necromancer, he must have known that it was futile, that he would die in it, that they would all die in it. The boy Adam was in it; and possibly thirty other persons, fine people of Cosmopolis and not rowdy outlanders, were in on the rush and died in it.
Its suddenness almost gave it success. The impetuous men bowled over the mechanical guards and gained the scaffold steps. Then the fighting was close, and they gave one life for every step they ascended. The boy Adam was really the crest of the wave, for he got all the way up the scaffold and touched Thomas. And he was flung all the way down with crushing force by the guards with their grapples. And yet he was up again, brokenly going after them. Shanty and Paul and Copperhead and Adam, and the thirty or more other persons, died around the foot of the scaffold and on the steps, making them slippery with their blood. The boy Adam, in particular, died magnificently as he always did.
But the wave had no real bulk, and the guards were too many and strong. The thrust crested and shattered, and then it was over with, ebbing out in its blood.
But Evita, knowing that it would fail, knowing instantly that it would all fail, had surged not towards Thomas on the high platform, but towards Fabian Foreman, who stood on the edge of Centrality Square.
“Zehheeroot, Is-Kerioth,” she howled at him, for they were both of the old people: “Beware, Iscariot.” Then she had him like a lioness taking a frightened ass, swiping half his face red with her claws and biting into his throat to set up a throbbing red fountain.
“Let go me, you witch!” Foreman screamed in sudden terror.
“I be a cold fury and not a witch,” she emitted with a purring rumble. “Woe to him by whom it comes. You told a History to the Thomas, and I tell one to you as you die.” And she was killing him as she growled the words. “Certain primitives were wont to kill a dog to be company to the hero on his death journey. I am such a primitive. You are such a dog.”
And she was practically dismembering him. She had broken his shoulder and possibly his back. She was tearing him apart.
“No, no, woman!” Foreman gasped as the blood pulsed out of his torn throat. “I’m the master of it all. It has to be this way. The furious reaction, the transcendent yeast will set humanity back into its proper place again and let a new world be born.”
“I know it!” Evita sang. “I’m a bunch of that transcendent yeast. I’m the heart of that furious reaction! I revel in it. And we’ve had a dog for puppeteer all this late time. No wonder it’s been a time of trouble.”
She broke his face completely with a lioness blow. It was a sad time for Foreman, who had always rather withdrawn from violence, he had been a desk general and not a field general.
Evita threw him over her shoulder, though he was a shapeless and heavy man, and carried him with that tawny ease with which a lioness carries her prey, carried him to where George the syrian and Maxwell the old crone and Rimrock the ansel were grouped together. She threw him to them, and the four of them tore him to pieces and killed him.
Evita took the biggest piece of Foreman that was left and hanged it on an ornamental tree on the edge of Centrality Square. It was a Carob tree from Old Earth, sometimes called the Judas Tree.
It was unjust. Foreman had done his part well. He had planned it all, except that special little bit by which he lost his life. And everything that he had planned was meant well.
The programmed guards got George and Maxwell and Rimrock and added their blood to the transcendental yeast that was beginning to work. They did not get the Evita. Nobody would get her till the thing was done.
Things went smoothly after those little outbreaks. The crowds were kept back, for the guards were very efficient. There was one man who broke through and nobody was able to stop him. Indeed, the programmed guards did not seem able to see him or sense him. This stranger went right up to Thomas on the scaffold and spoke to him, though only Thomas appeared able to hear his words.
They discussed, the condemned man and the stranger that the guards did not seem able to see. Thomas seemed both excited and pleased.
“Will it work, do you think?” he cried loudly with what was almost delight. “How droll! Can a man have more heads than two? I’ll do it. I’ll go with you.”
But apparently Thomas didn’t go anywhere but to his death. The stranger disappeared down and back into the crowd, or some said that he disappeared into the charged air. There would be guesses as to his identity. There were those who said that something disappeared from Thomas at the same moment—that he left in his essence, and that it was a shadow man who put his head on the block. A weird old woman cried out that she could see through him; but this was illusion.
The rest of it is legend stuff. All of it, the quips and the epigrams and the profound and moving things that Thomas was supposed to have said at the chopping block: well, some of them were pretty good, some of them were almost too cute, and most of them are in the books of quotations. The only thing amiss is that he didn’t say any of them.
He hadn’t said them the first time either.
The only last words that he said on the scaffold were “Pater, in manus tuas—” a scrap of an old prayer.
The big blade trembled in the sky. Then it fell. It was real blood that spurted and a real head that rolled clear from the corpus as though it had a life of its own.
There would be wild stories, the prodigies, the old wives’ tales—such as nine snakes slithering out of the severed head; such as the most beautiful woman of Astrobe going up the scaffold and boldly taking the head in a basket, and being turned into an old woman when she came down with it. But no such things really happened. They could not have.
But one thing did really happen at that moment. At the moment that life flickered out of the beheaded corpus, the worlds came to an end.
All life and heat and pulse went out of the world. It died in every bird and rock and plant and person of it, in every mountain and sea and cloud. It died in its gravity and light and heat, in its germ-life and in its life-code. Everything ceased. And all the stars went out.
Was it for a moment? Or a billion years? Or forever? There is no difference in them, when the world is ended, when there is no time to measure time by.
Remember how it had been at the moment when the worlds ended? A priest renegade for thirty years had just become Metropolitan of Astrobe. A programmed machine had, at the moment of the extinction of the worlds, succeeded to president of Astrobe: an emotionless machine. But he had wailed and poured ashes over his head.
Battersea and his men were mobbing towards Centrality Square to begin their bloody coup, mobbing in furiously under their Hand-of-Vengeance banner. On such notes the worlds ended.
And is a new world born? Is a new world yeasted? The furious reaction, does it bridge the gap? The mustard seed, does it grow? The Judas tree, what fruit did it bear?
Lightning, a billion times as bright as that on Electric Mountain, a billion times as short in duration, does it lace the things together with its instantaneous fire, or sunder them forever? Thunder that flattens worlds with the sh
ock of it, and a tidal wave, a world wave carrying away the golden fungus from the orb! In much less than an instant, in much more than forever, it is over with.
But has it sequence? Does a new world follow the old in that blinding flash? Does it come?
Be quiet. We watch.
The Hand-of-Vengeance banner, is its symbol misunderstood? Northprophet says that that figured hand coming down like a bird is the Left Hand of God.
Remember (and we remember as in a void of time between worlds) the turn of the cycle that gave birth to Rome? The one that gave birth to Europe? The one that gave birth to the Americas? The one that gave birth to Astrobe? Remember the cycles whose effect was internal and electrifying, the one where divinity became humanity? The one where humanity became divinity?
And remember that special one, the first rebirth of Astrobe, the appearance of transcendent humanity?
Remember it? Then it happened?
Be quiet. We wait.
The spirit came down once on water and clay. Could it not come down on gell-cells and flux-fix? The sterile wood, whether of human or programmed tree, shall it fruit after all? The Avid Nothingness, the diabolically empty Point-Big-O, is it cast away again? Is there then room for life? Shall there be return to real life?
Well, does it happen? Does the reaction become the birthing? What does it look like?
Will we see it now, in face and rump, the new-born world?
Be quiet. We hope.
The text of Past Master in the present volume has been taken from the first printing of the first edition, published by Ace Books in New York as an Ace Science Fiction Special on March 6, 1968. The novel had not been previously serialized. Subsequent printings published by Rapp & Whiting (London, 1968) as part of the Science Fiction Book Club, and by Garland (New York, 1975) in the Garland Library of Science Fiction, reproduced the original Ace typesetting in facsimile. Lafferty is not known to have sought revisions to the text of the novel when it was reissued by Ace, newly typeset, in 1977, and then reprinted in 1982; the latter edition was reproduced in facsimile in 1999 in the final printing of the novel to appear during Lafferty’s lifetime, published in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, by Wildside Press.
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