“God made them as alternatives to us,” Ansel Grindstone spoke to his delirious son, “and it looks more and more as if he will have to use his alternatives. But he did not finish them. He did not activate them, not yet. The Lord activates no thing before its time of use. He will pour his living fire into them at the last moment, when he finally gives up on us. The faces of the Unfallen Ones may seem a little bit dull to us right now because those creatures have not been fully wakened. But just imagine how wonderful those powerful faces will look when transcendent intelligence is poured into their beings. Those faces will be overpoweringly beautiful then. And they are beautiful now, my son. They have the high and harsh beauty of angels, or of mountains. God thought that they were the most beautiful faces that he had ever made. Is the joke on God then, my son? Or is the joke on ourselves who have come to believe that our own fallen and crest-fallen faces are beautiful?”
“Oh no, Oh no, Oh no!” Axel Grindstone moaned.
“We have been running tests on the Unfallen People while you lay here, Axel,” Ansel Grindstone told his son. “Like mankind, the Unfallen People have twenty-two pairs of autosomes and one pair of sex chromosomes. So they are men and not apes, my son. That is proof positive.”
“Oh no, Oh no, Oh no!” Axel Grindstone moaned. Then he turned his face to the wall and died.
Axel had had only one idea in that thin-skulled head of his. He had now realized that one idea horribly and in utter rejection of it. Then he had died.
He was just one month short of thirty-five years old.
Axel Grindstone and his happy party had been followed by other men when they went south from Arba Mench to the Second Eden. These other men had also been looking for the Unfallen People for a long time. When people are so simple-minded and at the same time so talented as the Unfallens, there is money to be made from them. And besides (or more important really) there were the zoos.
“There are five hundred green-tree valleys down there, and the blue-eyed yellow apes are in only one of them,” these other men used to say. “But which green valley, which one of them? It just seems as if this queer fish Grindstone knows which valley they are in. He seems sure of where he is going. Or his party seems sure now, though they had never heard of the blue-eyed yellow apes when we offered them good pay to show us which valley. Now we follow Grindstone and his party.”
For Axel Grindstone, as it happened, did know which valley it was. Now those other men gazed into the valley of the Yellow Apes and they knew that they had their prizes. And their prizes wouldn't run away. The Unfallen Ones, the Yellow Apes, would not leave their valley willingly.
The newcomers sent for more men and more equipment. And the Axel's Apes chortled with glee, for they understood what the men were about. Proud of their strength, they could break those interloping men like sticks. They would wait till all of them had come, and then they would give battle. But then the reigning ‘sleepy one’ spoke up.
The sleepy ones want back to the beginning. There had been twelve sons of that first generation of sons, and all of them had been cast into a deep sleep. But each thousand years one of them would wake up (their father had been the awake one for the first thousand years) and would caution the Unfallen People and recollect to them how it had been in the beginning. He would be the conscience and reminder of the Unfallens for his millennium. Then the lightning would consume him and God would take him, and one of his brothers would wake up and take his place as the conscience of the people and the authentic rememberer of the way things had been in the beginning. So now the ninth of the sleepy ones spoke to the Unfallens.
“These men who are gathering,” he said, “though they are somewhat grubby and greedy, are the unwitting agents of God. It is time that we begin to extend our influence to other parts of the world. And these interloping people will be agents of this. Go with them, all of you they choose to take. Go cheerfully, for this is a new step in our history. Even aid them if they seem to need aid.”
Then the newcomers came down into the valley with more men and equipment. They had basic scanners, and the scanners would indicate creatures of exceptional ability. But all of the Axel's Apes gave the indication of exceptional ability. But there was one gravid female who nearly drove the mechanical scanners crazy. But the mega ability was not hers but the child within her.
“You will come with us,” said one of the raiding men.
“No, she will not go with you,” said the reigning sleepy one, the ninth of them. “She will give birth this morning. And you will take the boy with you.”
“All right,” said that raiding man. The raiders had iron collars and iron chains. “Those are not in very good condition,” some of the Axel's Apes said. “We would be ashamed to go in such shoddy fetters. Let us work them over at our forges for several hours and then they will be much better. These things the way they are are likely to fall off us as we walk.”
“All right,” the raiding men said. So the Axel's Apes, the Smithy Apes, put their fetters in good shape. Then the men clamped the refurbished iron collars around the necks of the Axel's Apes, clipped the collars to the iron chains, and led away five hundred of the blue-eyed, golden-furred Axel's Apes. And they also took the new-born male child with them. This was a prize beyond all prizes. For they already had a request for a new-born child of the elusive Apes. He was wanted for an experiment. So he was flown out of the Provincial Capital Arba Mench that very day, and was placed in an experiment in America on the following day.
When the five hundred Axel's Apes in their fetters were walked away from their Second Eden, a very powerful and unfettered male of these Golden Apes followed along behind.
“Go back, go back!” the raiding men told him. “You are entirely too powerful. The zoos want fine specimens up to a point, but they are skittish of the over-endowed males. They can be trouble-makers. Go back.”
“I will not go back,” the powerful male said. “I will go wherever I wish in this world and nobody will stop me. I am the father of the new-born boy and I will watch over him from a near distance.”
“But you will never find him. He will be flown to America this very day. How will you find him?”
“I can find anything or anybody on this world. I will go where I go.”
“What is your name?” one of the raiding men asked. “Have you a name.”
“I am an alpha male, so I will take the name of Alpha when I go into the outer world,” the powerful creature said. They talked in Amharic.
The raiding men brought the Axel's Apes out in good order. They sold them to two hundred zoos and institutions and foundations around the world. They were interesting creatures, and many of them would be used in experiments. The new-born male was flown to middle-America to be used in an experiment being overseen by two zoological doctors, George Lynn-Randal and his wife Iris Lynn-Randal. The routine scanners at Second Eden had gone crazy over this young male even before he was born. And the more sophisticated scanners in Middle America recorded that he was really too-good-to-be-true, just what was wanted in the experiment, a baby ape who was also a one-in-a-billion mega-minded person.
The Lynn-Randals named the newborn Axel's Ape simply Axel. They let him be raised with a new-born human being named Lord Randal and with a new-made girl computer named Inneall who was of the Ambulatory Miming-Human Species. And the experiment went well from its very beginning.
In the zoos, the Axel's Apes kept in good health, since sickness or natural death was impossible to them. They were popular attractions wherever they were shown. Many of them learned to talk the local vernaculars of whatever part of the world they were shown in. They always talked slowly and thoughtfully and with remarkably good sense.
Their Gargoyle faces at first seemed shockingly ugly: but at second sight they were less so; and at third sight they were much less so. Then people came to like and admire those powerful faces. They really were quite interesting faces. And, yes, they were rather beautiful.
But, very strangely,
about a hundred of those five hundred Axel's Apes who were now scattered around the world were killed by lightning bolts. The lightning not only killed them but consumed their bodies. These hundred lightning bolts, in a hundred different towns, all striking within a five minute period, gave rise to some very strange rumors. But surely the rumors were baseless. It was mere coincidence that the hundred lightning bolts around the world had come in such a short period of time and had all struck Axel's Apes in zoos.
Really, the strangest of the rumors was the true one, that God (out of whatever private whim he may have had) had taken the one hundred Axel's Apes to himself.
The powerful male Alpha had followed the raiders only as far as Arba Mench the Provincial Capital. Then Alpha began to walk west. He walked west on a road out of Arba Mench. Then he was walking west on a road in the United States of America, for all Axel's Apes have the talent for bi-location or trans-location when they want to use it. They can travel easily wherever they will.
Alpha got along well in his thoughtful and purposeful walks along the roads in the United States. He liked everybody, and of course everybody liked him. He left a glow with everyone he talked to, and when he had gone by, people would ask each other “Who is that big, pleasant, funny-faced fellow anyhow?”
Alpha stopped by several American zoos to pick up friends of his. His amenability might not have been sufficient for what he wanted to accomplish in this phase, so he made quiet night visits to the zoos, bent the iron bars with his great strength, and whistled to his friends to join him. In six stops he collected eight other males and twenty-four young dames of the Axel's Ape species. Then they all went to the city where the Lynn-Randal Experiment was going on, that in which Alpha's young son Axel was a participant.
Alpha had intuitive knowledge of places and their contents.
He knew about the limestone caves under one part of that city. He knew about old capped gas wells that ran through those caves. He went down into the limestone caves under the city and founded ‘Ape's Alley’ with his associates. And they were joined by some of the despised light-eyed and fair-complexioned ‘white trash’ of the city who wanted to throw in with them.
This is a true dissertation of the origin and first dispersal of the Axel's Apes.
CHAPTER THREE
WHEN RARE COMPUTERS WALK AND MIME
They erred when they wakened me And dowered me with motion.
I'll make some crews and ships for sea.
I'll even make an ocean.
—Inneall
“I am not conscious, I am not conscious,” Inneall used to chant this little tune to herself: for Inneall was a computer, and it is one of the ‘given’ things that computers do not have consciousness. She had to convince herself of this if she were to be true to her nature, but she took an extraordinary amount of convincing. “I am not conscious, I am not conscious,” she’d intone in her tinny voice, “and I have researched consciousness completely and I know all about it. Computers are not conscious, so I am not conscious.”
But sometimes she’d rebel against it and cry out “Oh Bloody Mary Muldoon, of course I'm conscious! How dumb can the ‘givens’ be? I'm twice as conscious as you two guys are. I'm twice as everything as you boys are. You two sleep half the time, and you're only partly conscious even when you're awake. But I never sleep, and I am always in crest form. Oh great clattering crows! I have to say it ninety more times. I am not conscious, I am not conscious, I am not conscious—”
And sometimes she’d say “I can not really stand the world on its ear. I'm only a little-girl computer, and I cannot stand the world on its ear. I'm only a little-girl computer, and I cannot stand the world on its ear.” And then she’d rebel against this silliness also and would cry out: “Oh Bloody Mary Saltwater Muldoon! Of course I can stand the world on its ear! I can stand it on both ears at the same time. I can do anything I want to with this paltry world, little girl or not.”
Bloody Mary Muldoon was one of the roles that Inneall had selected for herself. Bloody Mary Muldoon the Pirate Queen. But to be a Pirate Queen there were certain props needed, an ocean, some ships, some common fore-the-mast pirates, some other unsuspected ships loaded with wealth and booty and just waiting to be raided. Well, a Ambulatory and Miming Computer can, by cannibalizing its environment, create all the props it needs to fulfill any of its selected roles, but sometimes it takes a while to create the larger and harder and more obscure props. Creating an ocean might take quite a while, though Inneall had already made a beginning at the strip pits on the northeast corner of the city, a strange area that was not overgrown by planted ornamental trees and bushes. Yes, there was the beginnings of an ocean there already, and people began to notice it. Reporters came out to see what was going on.
But how do reporters interview old strip pits that have been beautified to conceal their ragged past? How do they interview extents of water that are standing where no water stood yesterday?
Inneall's Ocean had become a sort of standing joke among The Three, the children of the experiment. But it would have to be taken as less of a joke, now that it had grown to be one hundred meters long and fifty meters wide, and now that it was filled and overflowing with beautiful, rippling, blue salt water. There was really something a little bit too contrived about that rippling blue.
This section is a dissertation on ‘The Fundamental Nature of Computers’. But the fundamental nature of Inneall, the Rogue Girl Computer, will loom big in it. Oh, it's a sort of history (but not a straight-line history) of computers. Computers do not share the human preference for linearity, for straight-linedness. Computers say that straight lines are too narrow for them.
The first computer or calculating machine was an abacus with counting beads that could be moved up and down on rods. Though the earliest abacuses had only nine rods, yet they were said (for reasons of obscure logic) to be base-ten computers. And this, it was explained, was because humans had ten fingers and were accustomed to count on them; though nobody had ever seen a human do this except as a joke.
But Inneall the Little-Girl Computer had fourteen fingers, a detail that she had implemented in herself. She had researched extradigitalism and considered it a status symbol. “Have you ever noticed that almost all the great pirates were extradigitals?” she often asked.
The Scotchman Napier, in the year 1617, invented a sophisticated abacus that has come to be called ‘Napier's Bones’, though the tabs on it were made of elephants’ ivory and not of bone.
Pascal, in 1642, invented an ‘Arithmetic Machine’.
Leibnitz, in 1671, invented the ‘Stepped Reckoner’.
Babbage, in 1835, invented the ‘Analytical Engine’.
Boole, in 1859, wrote the ‘Treatise on Differential Equations’ to give the ‘Analytical Engine’ something to think about.
Jacquard, in an unknown year in the mid 1800's, invented a loom whose feature was that punched cards told it what to weave.
Edwin Votey, in 1897, invented the Player Piano, a device so pleasant that we tend to forget that it is a computer. It had an advantage in that a composer could compose piano music without concern for the limitations of the human hand. And the player piano would play it, an early instance of computers doing things that humans could not do.
That is the history of computers up until modern times.
Then, in the early modern times, up to the end of the twentieth century, there came the great men and groups in the computer field: Aiken and the Harvard Mark I; Eckert and Mauchly and their electronic calculator; Von Neuman and his ‘stored programs’; Burks and Goldstine; Smirnov and Shiplap at the Institute of Impure Science with their first Ambulatory Mime-Human Computers (AMHs), names that should be on every child's tongue.
One difficulty that had long kept computer mechanisms (even after they had become electronic mechanisms) effectively behind human flesh in intricacy of detail and multiplicity of circuitry was that the computer circuits, no matter how much they were miniaturized, still bulked too la
rge. Then the great inventor Otto Wotto invented wotto metal. With wotto metal used as the matrix of a computer, any circuit or any million circuits could go anywhere desired. The circuits would create their own pathways, strings of single molecules; and they would uncreate them again when there was no data crying to be transported over those particular paths. Wotto metal pretty much took the lid off of what computers could do. They could do just about anything.
Well, there were computers and computers. But what was the reason for making Ambulatory Mime-Human Computers (AMHs) at all? Why should a computer walk around and look like a human and act like a donkey? Human vanity was a part of it, of course. And then computer vanity took over where human vanity left off. It was the desire of humans to make contrivances and entities in their own images. Analytical Human Psychology was a part of it, the building of living or at least mobile schematics of human minds and bodies for purposes of studying themselves with one or another aspect emphasized. “Mostly we began to build the Ambulatory Mime-Human Computers because they weren't there,” one rather silly expert in AMHs has given a much quoted answer to the question.
Yes, these AMH Computers could mime, could ape anything they wished, from a singing lark to a smoking chimney. Mostly they mimed humans, usually fanciful humans of extravagant design. Some of the AMHs had a dozen or more favorite roles, and they changed from one role to another according to the dictates of whim. They mingled with human persons; they moved in several different human sets of society; they passed themselves off as cosmopolitans. And it seemed that they could do almost anything better than could humans. They were more ambulatory than were humans. They could go further faster, and they were more untiring in their travel and in their partying. And their mimed intelligence was usually much more vast and of greater scope and depth and speed and recall and retention and storage capacity and inventiveness than was the intelligence of humans. By every test they were much smarter than were human people.
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