But there was that other thing that Old Rock-Head did, that he had been doing for some time. The statue laughed, openly and loudly now. He chuckled, rooted in the chuckling earth.
“Well, how can he laugh?” Condillac asked. “We haven't made such a connection. Indeed, we couldn't have. We couldn't have influenced him in this unknowingly?”
“Impossible,” said Jouhandeau. “Neither of us has ever laughed.”
Well, Statue stood and saw with his eyes for a month. Perhaps it was not wonderful (wonderful is an innate concept, and therefore cannot be), but it was a new dimension. The bumpkin eyes twinkled and stared by turns, and the stone grin became even wider.
Condillac and Jouhandeau came by night to their monthly appointment, opened the head of the statue, made a fourth connection, and sat talking about it till the late moon rose.
“The Rock-Head can talk now,” the kids told the people. “Oh, we know that,” the people said. “He talks to us too, but what is so wonderful about talking if it is no more than his talk? Big as he is, he talks like a half-grown kid. The fellow must be retarded.”
Yes, he was, a little; but he began to catch up.
But the first person that Statue had talked to was his maker, Condillac himself.
“Statue, you are a tabula rasa,” Condillac said to him.
“I don't know what that is,” said Rock-Head. “Talk honest French, or I cannot understand you. Such is the only talk I have heard in the month I have stood here with loosened ears.”
“Your brain was a tablet shaved smooth,” said Condillac, “and we have let sensations into it one sense at a time, from the most simple to the most complex. This is to show that you may be functional without innate ideas. I will have to give you a name, Statue.”
“Rock-Head is my name,” said Statue. “The kids named me. They are friendly most of the time, but sometimes they are rock-throwing rogues.”
“But you can have no idea of friendly or unfriendly,” Condillac said. “These are only empty words that people use. You can have no idea of good or bad, of beauty or ugliness, of form or deformity, of pleasure or pain. Yours was mature brain matter, though swept clean, and none of the childish entrances could have been made, as with others. We have not yet hooked up your sense of touch, and we may not; it would mean running tendons all through you. Contamination may enter by the sense of touch. But now you can have no idea of justice or injustice, of elegance or inelegance, of wealth or of poverty. In fact, all these opposites are meaningless, as I will prove through you. They are only the babbling of blind philosophers.”
“But I do have these ideas, Condillac,” Rock-Head insisted. “I have them strongly. I learned right smells and wrong smells; right tones and wrong tones; right shapes and forms and colors, and wrong, Oh, may I always choose the right things, Condillac!”
“Statue, you sound like an idiot preacher-man. There are no right things or wrong things, there are no innate ideas. There are no things in-place or out-of-place. I prove this all through you.”
“Condillac, you are the Abbé of Mureaux, and you draw pay for such,” Rock-Head said. “You would be in-place there. You are out-of-place on your estate Flux.”
“What is the matter with you, Statue?” Condillac demanded. “You are flighty and wan-witted.”
“Wrens in my head, they say of me. It's a country expression, Condillac. Besides, I have them literally, quite a pleasant family of them inside my stone head. Learn from the wren wisdom!”
Condillac angrily beat on the lower part of the statue with his leaded cane, breaking off toes. “I will not be lectured by a rock!” he crackled. “You have not these ideas originally, and mature brain matter will reject such. Therefore, you have them not! Reason is the thing, Statue, rationality. We promulgate it. It spreads. It prevails. The tomorrow world will be the world of total reason.”
“No, it will be the Revolution,” said Rock-Head. “A world condemned to such short fare as bleak reason will howl and cry out for blood.”
A long-tongued woman came to Rock-Head. “My confessor told me that, whenever I feel impelled to repeat gossip, I should whisper it to a statue, and then forget it,” she said. So she whispered it to Rock-Head for an hour and a half. In the cool of the evening, Rock-Head repeated it, loudly and stonily, to the quite a few people who were enjoying the evening there, and he found himself the center of interest. But he was uneasy about it; he didn't understand why the confessor had instructed the woman to tell him such things.
One evening the revolutionaries gathered and talked at the foot of Statue. “It should have happened in our fathers' time,” one of them said. “Let it now be in our own time. We may not rightly push this thing off on our sons. The poor become poorer and the corrupt become more corrupt. How many does it take to upheave a world? There are five of us here. Up! Up! Five for the Revolution!”
“Six,” cried Rock-Head. “I am for the Revolution too. Up, up, arise!”
“Statue, Statue,” one of them asked, “how long have you been able to hear?”
“I'm in my third month of it, fellows.”
“Then you have heard us before. You know what we stand for. We will have to destroy you.”
“It is only a statue, Fustel,” said another of them. “It would be superstition to destroy it. And we are enlightened.”
“But what if he blurts out our slogans which he has heard, Hippolyte?”
“A good thing. Let the statue cry slogans, and the people will be amazed.”
“Up with the Revolution!” Rock-Head cried again. “But I am not sure that you fellows provide a sufficient base for it. I visualize creatures with a narrower and more singular bent. I will string along with you, but meanwhile I will see what I can do about having real revolutionaries made.”
“Have you noticed the new carp in the horse trough, Rock-Head?” the occult doctor Jouhandeau asked as he came by to visit one day. “Yes, the kid seems to be in some kind of trouble. I'd comfort him if I could get down to him. But how do you know he's a new carp? People don't notice such things.”
“I put him there, Rock-Head,” said Jouhandeau. “And I put a human child's brain into him, shaved smooth, of course, and trimmed to fit. He can smell and hear and see, but he could do as much when he had a fish's brain.”
“Jouhandeau, that kid's scared to death.”
“Couldn't be, Rock-Head. Where could he have the idea of scared? Are you contradicting the wise Condillac?”
“Jouhandeau, I am friend to revolutionaries, but all the revolutionaries sound deficient to me. Make me revolutionaries who will do the thing!”
“Anything to oblige a stone-headed friend. I have already done some thinking along this line. I will not even have to transfer brains, or flop like vultures over the dying to rob them of these things. I can take sturdy farmers and townsmen and intellectuals as they stand, destroy certain small nodules in their heads, and we will have them ready to go. I treat them for the escarbilles, a disease of which I have never heard, and they even less. But I stop them in the roadways and tell them that they are afflicted and that I can cure them in a moment. And I do cure them in a moment, of something, but not of the escarbilles.”
“Will they have a narrower and more singular bent?”
“They will, Rock-Head, so narrow and singular that you could hardly believe it.”
A young fellow was smooching his girl and loving her up in the park. “I want to do that too,” Rock-Head called out loudly.
“All right, come down and do it,” said the girl. “It's fun.”
“But I can't come down,” Rock-Head complained.
“Then you can't do it,” the girl said, and they laughed at him.
“I wish that guy would get his truffle-grubbing hands off my girl,” Rock-Head grumbled. “But how do I know it would be fun? Is not fun an innate idea? And there are none such.”
A thief rode up one cloudy afternoon, opened Rock-Head's head, stuffed a large bag of gold inside, closed the head
again, and rode off furiously once more. How did the thief know that Rock-Head's head would open? Why, the gentlemen of the trade can sense a good hiding place every time. The thief was caught by pursuing horsemen. He was beaten, crying his innocence all the time; but he was not hanged. You cannot hang a thief without boodle.
But the bag full of gold weighed heavily on Rock-Head's brain. Moreover, it crowded the wrens in his head. He had great affection for the wrens, though they did sometimes pick his brains. This gold did have effect.
“This gold, at least, is not an innate idea,” Rock-Head mused “In its particular, it is a thing intruded directly into my head. It is a heavy thing, and I cannot ignore it. There is a new idea and a new attitude in me. I am a man of means now, and my thinking can never be quite what it was before.”
Rock-Head began thinking in a new way.
“Jouhandeau,” he said when that doctor came to visit him again, “tell Condillac that I want to talk to him. There is something wrong with that man, I believe.”
“Condillac is dead now, Rock-Head,” Jouhandeau told him. “That is the most recent thing wrong with him.”
“How did he accept it? I've been afraid there would be some trouble there.”
“He didn't accept it. He believes that life and death are both innate concepts, and that there are no innate concepts. Naturally, he will not believe that he is dead.”
“How are you coming along with the revolutionaries, Jouhandeau?”
“Quite well. There are a hundred of them now, and I will leave them to themselves. They will propagate their own kind, and in two hundred years they will take over the world. I will not hurry it. I am two hundred years before my time in so many ways already.”
There was blood on the bread. There was blood on the land, and on every thing. It would bubble and speckle. Then it would flow.
Rock-Head had become an orator. He had the fire, he had the sparkle, he had the quick deep thunder of a true rouser. He had the freshness of morning rain and the resonance of the groaning earth. So naturally he became something of a leader among the old-fashioned revolutionaries of the neighborhood, and they came for him one night.
“Time for talking is over with, Rock-Head,” they told him. “Now is the time for action.” They ripped his brains out of the rock case, they ripped out all the sensory appendages that went with them. They loaded these in two hampers on a mule.
“Lead us, Rock-Head,” they said. “We begin to burn the world down tonight. We start with the estate house Flux and the town of Beaugency. We burn and we slay.”
“What will become of my wrens when I am not in my head with them?” Rock-Head asked.
“We care nothing for wrens, we care nothing for people,” they cried. “We only care that the burning may begin.”
“What will become of my sack of gold when I am not in my own head to guard it?” Rock-Head worried.
“We care nothing for gold,” they cried, “we care less for bread. The burning is the thing.” And they had come to the estate house of Flux. They began to butcher the gentlepeople and servants fluttering around and set fire to the place.
“Wait, wait,” Rock-Head cried. “Have some respect for property. Wait.”
“How can we have respect for property?” they asked as they killed and burned. “A revolutionary cares nothing for property.”
“This one does,” said Rock-Head. “We must have a revolution with full respect for property. I am a man of property now. I own a bag of gold. Up the revolution! Up respect for property!”
“This cannot be,” the revolutionaries held council. “A person who owns one bag of gold cannot be a true revolutionary; though a person who owns one thousand bags may sometimes be.”
They began to kill Rock-Head there, in brain and sensories.
“Tell Jouhandeau to call off his thing,” Rock-Head gasped out of his dying cerebrum; but these old-fashioned revolutionaries didn't understand him. They knew nothing of the creatures of Jouhandeau which would so soon obsolete them.
They killed Rock-Head in all his parts. They sold his remains for cat meat to a basketwoman there, and they went on with their burning.
Oh, the statue is still there, and there are still wrens in his head. There have now been more than one hundred generations of wrens there. These are the rich wrens and they have a good thing. They pay tribute to the shrikes in small gold coins, so they will not kill them. And the wrens are left alone. The old-fashioned revolutionaries failed, but the new revolutionaries made by Jouhandeau could not fail. Failure is an innate concept, and there are no innate concepts. A hundred of them, with the few young boys they had pupped in the meanwhile, would overturn that land nineteen years later, that land with blood on the bread.
And later, a thousand of them would —, and ten thousand of them would —, and ten million of them would —, for they propagated their own kind. They were people so narrow and singular that you would hardly believe it.
Doctor Jouhandeau was two hundred years before his time in so many ways, but he estimated the time of it nicely.
This Grand Carcass Yet
Mord had a hopeless look when he came to Juniper Tell with the device. He offered it for quite a small figure. He said he hadn't the time to haggle. Mord had produced some unusual-looking devices in the past, but this was not of that sort. By now he had learned, apparently, to give a conventional styling to his machines, however unusual their function.
“Tell, with this device you can own the worlds,” Mord swore. “And I set it cheap. Give me the small sum I ask for it. It's the last thing I'll ever ask from anyone.”
“With this one I could own the worlds, Mord? Why do you not own the worlds? Why are you selling out of desperation now? I had heard that you were doing well lately.”
“So I was. And so I am not now. I'm a dying man, Tell. I ask only enough to defray the expense of my burial.”
“Well then, not to torture you, I will give you the sum you ask,” Tell said. “But is there no cure for you, now that medicine has reached its ultimate?”
“They tell me that they could resuscitate a dead man easier, Tell. They're having some success along that line now. But I'm finished. The spirit and the juice are sucked out of me.”
“You spent far too lavishly. You make the machines, but you never learned to let the machines assume the worry. What does the thing do, Mord?”
“The device? Oh, everything. This is Gahn (Generalized Agenda Harmonizer Nucleus). I won't introduce you, since every little machine nowadays can shake hands and indulge in vapid conversation. You two will have plenty to talk about after you've come into accord, and Gahn isn't one to waste words.”
“That's an advantage. But does it do anything special?”
“The ‘special’ is only that which hasn't been properly fit in, and this device makes everything fit in. It resolves all details and difficulties. It can run your business. It can run the worlds.”
“Then again, why do you sell it to me for such a pittance?”
“You've done me a number of good turns, Tell. And one bad one. I am closing my affairs before I die. I want to pay you back.”
“For the number of good turns, or for the one bad one?”
“That is for you to wonder. The little marvel won't be an unmixed blessing, though it will seem so for a while.”
“I test it. Produce and draw the check for the amount, Gahn.”
Gahn did it — no great marvel. You could probably do it yourself, whether you be general purpose machine or general purpose person. Nearly any general machine could do such on command, and most humans are also able to carry out minor chores. Juniper Tell signed the check and gave it to Mord.
And Mord took the check and left, to arrange for his own burial, and then to die: a sucked-out man.
Tell assigned a quota to Gahn and stabled him with the rest of the g.p. devices. In a few seconds, however, it was apparent that Gahn did not fit into the pattern with them. The gong of the Suggestion Accumulator
began to strike with regularity, and the yellow, orange, and red lights to flash. It sounded like a dozen times a minute, and ordinarily it was no more than two or three times a day. And the red lights, almost every second on prime suggestions. It's unusual to get more than one red-light suggestion a week from the g.p. machines. Someone was loading the Accumulator, and the only new element was Gahn. “My God, a smart one!” Tell grumbled. “I hate a smart alec machine. Yet all new departures now come from such, since humans lack the corpus of information to discern what has already been done. Whatever he's got will have to be approved through channels. It's bad practice to let a novice pass on his own work.”
Tell gave Gahn a triple quota, since his original quota was done in minutes instead of hours. And Gahn began to fit in with the other g.p. machines — violently.
A new cow or calf introduced into a herd will quickly find its proper place there. It will give hattie to every individual of its class. It will take its place above those it can whip, and below those it cannot. The same thing happens in a herd of general purpose machines. Gahn, as the newest calf in the herd, had been given position at the bottom of the line. Now the positions began to change and shuffle, and Gahn moved silently along, displacing the entities above him one by one. How it is that g.p. machines do battle is not understood by men, but on some level a struggle is maintained till one defeats the other. Gahn defeated them all and moved to his rightful place at the head of the line. He was king of the herd, and that within an hour.
A small calf, when he has established supremacy over the other small calves, will sometimes look for more rugged pastures. He will go to the fence and bellow at the big bulls, ten times his size, in the paddock.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 93
