Gippo Sharpface, wearing outsized dark glasses, was facing directly into the bright morning sun, and he was painting it: a brilliant burning orb, which was wearing outsized dark glasses. Gippo was doing absolutely new things with color, burning things, foxfire things. Gippo, at that moment, was the finest artist that the world had seen for at least twenty thousand years.
Doctor George Drakos was sitting on a little stool in the morning sunlight. He was holding a surgeon's bonesaw. He had put a double bend into it, and he was striking it with a bone-chiseler's hammer. And you wouldn't believe the music he was making. George Drakos, at that moment, was the finest musical-saw player that the world had ever seen.
Cris Benedetti was wearing a toga, and he had pieces of laurel looped around his ears. He was declaiming drama. It wasn't old Shakespearian drama or any such thing. It was old-new Cris Benedetti drama. It was ringing and riming and eloquent like real hot-art season drama. It moved one to passion and pleasure. Evoked forms crowded the golden morning, and the fine voice of Cris called out real response. At that moment, Cris Benedetti was the finest dramatic declaimer in the world.
Harry O'Donovan was sculpting something in lucite and chrome. It was primordial form made out of the primordial elements of fire and ice. It was almost the secret of life itself, it was almost the shape of destiny. It was probably good.
And the voice of Mary Mondo the ghost girl was doing cantatas and those other flutey songs. And she was good. She had probably always been in accord with the hot seasons.
Roy Mega was producing some sort of delta-secondary music by manipulation of split-frequency circuits. Ah, well, nobody had ever done quite that thing before, and the first of everything is always good, by definition.
“The hot-art season, huh!” Barnaby Sheen commented, still doing his cigar-butt stomp-out dance. “Did you guys know that it would be the next season? There ought to be a way to make a good thing out of it. Austro, do you know who will be the hottest art property in the world by midmorning?”
“Carrock, I know, I won't tell,” Austro caroled. “Moppity, Loppity, Lippity, Moan. Let it alone, man, let it alone!” Austro sure made the rock dust fly when he was graving his verses on stone and singing his own accompaniment to chisel and graver.
“For the sanctification of your soul, don't squeeze every season, Sheeny,” great artist Gippo Sharpface said. “Ah, what nobility and blaze of color! I frighten myself with my own genius. Let this one go by, Sheen.”
“What? You the Fox say that? But I've the feeling that you're right. I think I'll go write a thundering epic drama. It will begin with the Chorus of May Dancers doing a stunning dance sort of like the one I've been doing. Say, are the seasons inexorable under the revised system? Their returning is a freedom-of-expression thing, of course, but must we follow just one sequence in them? We should have a choice in this matter too.”
“There's another world down under,” Roy Mega said.
“What follows the hot-art season here?” Gippo Sharpface asked. And the sun in his painting was brighter than the sun in the sky. “The hot-rock season will come next,” Austro told us. “That's when the people have the fever for building huge structures out of every material, but rock is the prince of materials. Did you know that the Great Pyramid was built in a single hot-rock season?”
“Does anybody know what is playing down under now?” Harry O'Donovan asked.
“It's the hot-love season just starting there,” Roy Mega said. “Some people believe it was the original oestrus, the first hot wave.”
Gippo Sharpface made a sudden noise. Then he effected one more burning splotch on his splendid painting. “Gad, what genius!” he cried in humble admiration. “But the very greatest things, by their nature, must be left unfinished.” He signed the unfinished painting “Fire Fox.”
“I'm off, fellows,” he said then. “Hot love was always my first love. I can pick up the hot-art season again once or even twice a year. And I'll catch the hot-brain season again, either down there or back here again next spring. But something is calling me down there right now. Anyone for Rio? Austro?”
“No, no, I'm scared of that stuff,” the greatest rock-graving poet in the world refused it. “Maybe next year. I'm at the bashful stage now. Carrock! I'm only a twelve-year-old kid.”
“I'm with you, Gippo,” Harry O'Donovan said, and he left his sculptured lucite and chrome that was almost the secret of life itself.
“In just three more moons it'll be hot-love season here, fellows,” Roy Mega said reasonably. But Gippo and Harry had already gone.
“Gippity, Goppity, Goopity, Gowth! Gippo and Harry are fire-tailing South!” Austro sang and chiseled his great folk poem. It's wonderful to hear the greatest poet of an age in action.
The Hand With One Hundred Fingers
We are the folks esteemed and loved
By nobody any more.
We are the cloaked and veiled and gloved
And we're rotten to the core.
—Rotten Peoples' Rollicks
The Hand with One Hundred Fingers was pretty much in control of things then. It enhanced persons and personalities, or it degraded them, for money, for whim, or for hidden reasons. And what it did to them was done effectively everywhere and forever.
Julius Runnymede had had several afflictions. He had a speech impediment; he was shy, he was inept, he was a bungler. Then, while he was still a young man, he inherited a medium-sized fortune. He decided to invest it in a new personality. He went to one of the leading firms of Person-Projectors, and they cured his disabilities almost immediately. His bungling and ineptitude and shyness and speech afflictions were transmuted into assets. He became one of the finest orators in the Fourth Congressional District, and a bright future lay before him. All thanks to the Hand!
The one hundred fingers of the hand were the one hundred Person-Projector firms in the comprehensive union. They controlled all rulers of all countries, and all parliaments and congresses for the reason that they were able to manufacture presidents and premiers and prime ministers and assemblies (and other power-groups behind the formal assemblies) out of common human material. And they were able to destroy as well as manufacture.
Alice Jacoby was an aspiring young actress, but she had bad acting habits. She popped her eyes and she popped her teeth in the intensity of her theatrical emotions. Her voice was adenoidal, and were it not for its adenoidal element it would have been perfectly flat. She wasn't pretty, and she surely wasn't in any way compelling. She had about as much sex as a green watermelon. But there were at least two people who loved her and who knew that something drastic would have to be done for her. One of these was her father who mortgaged his firm to get money to help her. Another one was her uncle Jake Jacoby who mortgaged his auction and cattle business to get money for her.
Alice paid the money to a firm of Person-Projectors, one of the hundred fingers of the Hand. The people-engineers of this firm enhanced her personality. And immediately Alice was in demand as an actress. She was known. Nearly everyone in the world had at least a subliminal and unconscious recognition of her.
She still popped her eyes and her teeth when she tried to emote, but now these seemed to be enchanting gestures. Her voice was still adenoidal, but now it seemed to be ravishingly adenoidal. She still wasn't pretty, but now she was compelling. And now she was as sexy as a fully ripe watermelon. All hail to the Hand again!
There were three steps. First a person did not have certain advantages. Then the person seemed to have acquired them. And then it was learned that there was no difference between seeming to have special attributes and really having them.
A person's personality was plotted and planned. Then the personal or aura signature was attached to an updated and almost presentable electronic personality. This new electronic personality was let onto world television for only one-fiftieth of a second; but that was time enough to create a consensus and to give a resonance back. The weight of members of participating persons was mo
st important in this. An unchallenged (and unconscious) world consensus of the electronic personality was formed. Oh, there was a bit more to it than that, about a minute and a half more to it than that. If it were too simple then everybody could set up in the Person-Projector business and reap fortunes.
Well, if it worked for Alice Jacoby, why wouldn't it work for everybody? It would, it would. Almost everybody who was able to raise a small or medium-sized fortune had now become a Corrected-Consensus-Projected-Personality. It worked for Wisteria Manford, it worked for Peter Hindman, it worked for Hector Gibbons. It worked for quite a few millions of person, but it would be a distraction to list them all.
The Persons-Projectors brought down as many persons as they elevated (to give a proper balance to things); but the downfallen are hardly noticed at all. And everybody noticed the uplifted.
“The century-long battle over the nature of reality is finished. The ‘Nature of Reality’ lost. Reality is seen to be no more than a mirage, a heat-inversion false appearance. No one has ever really slaked his thirst in the bogus waters of reality. But almost everyone has imagined that he has. And the imagining is just as good. It was once said that subjectivity and objectivity were opposite sides of the same coin. Now we know that they are the same reverse side of the same coin, and the face of the coin is blank.
“Reality is what enough people believe that it is. Reality is a projected conditionality. And a person is exactly what the current, projected consensus of that person shows him to be. There is no more to it than that. It was noticed, more than a hundred years ago, that people in group pictures tend to look alike; that is to say, they became persons of a particular consensus. It was noticed that persons in crowds take on the look of that particular crowd; and that persons in demented or rabid crowds lose all individual characteristics and come to look almost exactly alike.
“Soon after these first realizations, a group of men (they were then believed to be a bunch of fox-faced phonies, but we now know that they were a noble assembly of the media lords themselves) undertook the creation and projection of artificial personalities. It was, they believed, that ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’ were somehow in opposition, which we now know to be untrue. This was a praiseworthy electronic manipulation which paralleled the genetic manipulation which began at about the same time. So, by introducing ‘new-date projection’ to attach to certain persons, by using old-fashioned folk interaction newly directed, by employing feedback from that interaction, by adding the ‘coloration’ technique, people could be stabilized into their true and valid forms. This would work for anything. Inanimate objects, and even the sun and the moon, could likewise be converted into new and clarified forms by these techniques; and they will be.
“We have reality now. We never had it before because of diverse viewpoints. The modern psycho-resolution-projection movement has begun to move with electronic speed and spread, and with exponential growth.”
—Jonathan Fomry Bierce, Notes on the History of the Theory of Projected Persons.
Crispin and Sharon Babcock had once seemed to be in love. What they were in now, with the arrival of reality, was uncertain; but the old ‘in love’ business was shown to have had no reality. Probably they were no more than ‘associated persons with prejudice’ now.
In that earlier time, though, they had both seemed to be quite attractive in all ways, and well fitted to each other. They had even seemed to have a clear physical and mental beauty. Their body measurements and weights would still reveal a fine proportion and beauty; but are you going to believe measurements or are you going to believe your own eyes and other senses? Crispin and Sharon were both clearly substandard now, and that is all there was to it.
It was because of his saying “I don't believe that that is all there is to it” about a number of things that Crispin first got into trouble. By this he showed himself to be an unconforming young man, unfaithful to the holy and historical disestablishment, and it was right that he should have gotten into trouble. And Sharon was tied so deeply into a complex of inanities that she was beyond correction.
“As long as we have each other, it will not matter what the rest of the world does or think,” Sharon said once.
“If we are faithful to ourselves and to each other, then we can survive even the ruination of the world,” Crispin had said. And both of them, for a while at least, had believed these things.
There had been a time when Crispin and Sharon had appeared to be successful in their lives. They had satisfaction and station and money and children and a happy home and fine friends. Or so they thought. They even had the illusion of a cup running over with sheer delight. Self-deception must have been rampant in them. And when they finally had to face up to reality there was never a couple who opposed that facing-up so stubbornly or so unreasonably.
Both of them had refused to have personality-correction projection. They just didn't want it, they said. They didn't believe that they needed it, and they preferred things the way that they were. Refusals like theirs would tear the very fabric of the new society.
On the matter of giving up their children they had even defied the law. And they had refused for a long time to admit that their children were ugly and malodorous and moronic and repulsive.
“They are beautiful children, they are pleasant children, they are intelligent children, and they are good children,” Sharon had insisted to an official in defiance of all reason. “We love them and they love us. Let us alone! We will maintain our own ways. We will walk in beauty and happiness as we have walked. You have no right to interfere!”
But the officials had the ‘right of reality’ to interfere. So the children were projected as officially deficient. And this projection, by definition, was the reality of the case. And Crispin and Sharon became more and more suspect after the termination of their children. Their attitude just wasn't good.
They retained, however, a sense of humor. But unsanctioned humor in bestial persons can be made to project itself badly. Their magic together had been very much weakened when it became the case that they couldn't stand to be too close to each other.
2.
We are the sick, ungallant band
Whose once bright step must lag.
We are the people who live in the land
Where even the buzzards gag.
—Rotten Peoples' Rollicks
Judge Roger Baluster had once been a magistrate, and later he been a manufacturer and business man. Still later he had been a tycoon. And that is where he broke it. Tycoons are so easy to type and tear.
And really had he ever had the nobility of character that a magistrate and a business man and a tycoon should have? What he did have was a long history of non-cooperation with the person-projector firms.
As a young man Roger had been a crusading judge. He had crusaded against a complex of disintegrating things when they had been new and unestablished. And now when they were set and established they crusaded against Baluster to his ruination. But through the years he had become a man of much hidden wealth. He was a full-feathered bird and his plucking would take a long time.
In the beginning of it, he had refused to pay a firm that was in the person-projection business the simple monthly fee for ‘Personality Updating and Maintenance.’ This was petty of him, for he was a rich man.
Roger had had the look of an eagle. He had had pride and judgment and compassion. And humor. He had been (this is hard to believe in the light of his real character as it was later made manifest) adhered and liked and respected by almost everyone.
But he had refused to pay a simple fee. Well then, he would have to pay a complex fee of a much steeper sort. He was handed upward to larger hands. A bigger and more comprehensive firm in the person-projection business decided to take the enhancing of Baluster's personality in hand. And, unaccountably, he refused this offer also. He was placing himself above the law and above the community.
“Well then, Baluster, we will degrade your personality till you are
held in universal contempt,” the men of the first-class person-projector firm told him. “We will reveal a totally shabby person who is the valid ‘you.’ Of the false image which you built for yourself nothing will remain. That is the way that things are, and there is only one side to things.”
“Aw, I think there is another side to this,” Roger Baluster said resolutely. “And I believe that something of what I built will remain. The ‘Inner Me’ will remain.”
“So then it will remain,” said those huckstering men of that firm. “But it will remain as it really is and not as you imagine it. We will give you a certain transparency now. There is nothing like letting the honest light of the day into a dark man like yourself. This transparency will be subliminal, of course, but it will be near universal. Everybody will be able to see into you in those faster-than-a-blink moments. And nobody's ‘Inner Person’ is attractive. People will see you, in those instantaneous intervals that are too short to be recorded, with complete revulsion. They will see you as a dirty complex of entrails and incased organs. Yours will be the sharp and foul smell of blood and viscera and illegally opened persons. Other aspects of you will become other vile things, but the ‘inner you’ will have become a charnel house in its offensiveness.”
“There will be another sort of ‘Inner Me,’ ” Baluster insisted, “and you will not be able to touch that.”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 221
