Serpent’s Egg

by R. A. Lafferty

  “It isn't fair,” some humans had begun to complain. “The AMHs write all the tests; that's why they're so much better at them than we are.” The AMHs were better at most kinds of puzzles than were humans. And yet they didn't have as much common sense. But common sense was a thing never tested on the tests that the AMHs devised.

  “Common sense is like salt or garlic,” one AMH theorist said. “It isn't really necessary, and it's repellent in too large a quantity. But a small amount of it does improve the flavor of almost any dish and almost any mind. I believe that the only legitimate role of humans is to provide such small quantities of seasoning for the minds of AMH computers. But, that being the case, why were humans made first? It's like making the tail before making the dog. Humans should be mere afterthoughts, and they shouldn't be permitted to forget that they are that and nothing else. It was only a sad accident that they came first in time before us. But let them not claim any other precedent over us than this accidental one.”

  There was one possible danger in the makeup of the AMHs, the danger that they might run amok and do incalculable damage to the world. They had no sense of responsibility. Well, in the new Floating World, nobody was supposed to have a sense of responsibility, neither humans nor machines. ‘Sense of responsibility’ was an anti-social thing. But there were also cases in which running amok might be anti-social.

  The danger that AMHs might run amok had been recognized early, but nothing had been done about it. Any computer, and especially an Ambulatory Miming-Human Computer, can create all the props it needs by cannibalizing its environment. But some environments can hardly survive this treatment. Any computer can effect such structural and physical and chemical and electronic and meteorological and geological and human-personal modifications as are desired by it. This had sometimes been attributed to the relentless will of the Computers; but Computers do not have ‘will’ as such. Theirs is only the relentlessness of inertial motion, the mechanical imperative of following a thing to its end unless it is somehow shut off. In theory at least, a single small computer, with a single small idea in its nexus, with sufficient time and worked-up impetus, could convert the whole world into something else.

  Yes, but in theory at least, a single small earthworm with a single small idea, with sufficient time and worked-up impetus, could convert the whole world into something else, into earthworm droppings. And really, earthworms are only an uncomplicated sort of humans.

  Inneall's Ocean was an instance of the relentlessness of AMH impetus. Her ocean had now grown to six kilometers long by three kilometers wide, and it had been only three days since its first appearance. It had swallowed up quite a few roads and streets and houses and other buildings, and it had attracted national attention. Several of the big and arrogant computers had been suspected of causing this modification: but nobody suspected the little-girl computer of the Lynn-Randal experiment in her playpen-like, glass-domed ‘outdoors’ behind the Lynn-Randal house. Nobody suspected Inneall, but that was only because nobody realized that she was also Bloody Mary Muldoon.

  But Ambulatory Computers emulate each other. And they know what is going on in popular news and rumor, however much humans try to keep information from them. Here was something cool and novel: Making Oceans. What if a dozen, or a hundred, or a thousand AMHs should imitate this antic and begin to make oceans? Hold your breaths, humans, hold your breaths. Do not let them know that you are apprehensive of this, or they will do it just for orneriness.

  A second possible danger from the AMHs was expressed in the popular saying “Birds will often come to dwell in empty birdhouses, and spirits and spooks will come to dwell in empty AMH Computers.” Many of the AMH Computers were ‘empty’ in that they had no special interest and were bored of their whole existence: and it was just these that the spooks, polters, specters, spirits, gimp-ghosts, haunts, zombies will come to inhabit. And they would seldom come singly. When one ghost moved in, seven more evil than himself would usually move in at the same time. This business of almost all the Ambulatory Computers being haunted complicates the field of computer study immeasurably. Some of the haunts, it seems, are enemies of mankind, are enemies of computerdom, are enemies of everything.

  A strange thing had happened to The Three, to the members of the Lynn-Randal Experiment. They were often in each others dreams now, not as objects, but as co-subjects. Whenever one of The Three began to dream, the other two usually joined in it, and it became a three-way dream with some conflict as to leadership. “Who's driving this dream?” Inneall used to ask. It became the case that The Three were really more mentally active in their shared dreams than in their usual waking state. Axel might be sleeping in the crotch of a tree. Lord Randal might be napping over a book in the Lynn-Randal house. Inneall who did not sleep did her best dreaming with the other two when they were sleeping, though for the first few years of their shared lives she used to dream without the others being subjective in her dreams. Most likely now she would be physically present in Structo Lane when the three-way dreams were going on. And the shared dreams were made more strange to Axel and Lord Randal by the Ghosts that lived in Inneall. Oh certainly ghosts dream! They weren't important factors in the three-way dreams, but often some of them were there, stimulating sometimes, boring and bothersome sometimes.

  “I feel like a cafe,” Inneall once said of her ghosts. “There are seven of them, and they sit at table in me and talk the clock around. This is usually quite late at night when all of them zoom in from their flights. Then they will talk and giggle and brag about their antics. I can't always understand them: and, as their hostess, I am entitled to understand them. And along about dawn they will all go to sleep. Yes, ghosts do sleep, and they do dream; but they do not dream well-structured dreams as do myself and my two friends. And they do not dream shared dreams, though we stumble over their dreaming in our shared dreams. With them, it is every spook for himself, and their dreams are really like segments of delirium. They giggle a lot, but they are not happy. There is no real friendship to be had with these inferior spooks who inhabit me; and they are inferior. All the superior spooks are better housed than in somebody like me. My spooks are heavy in me, and I would like to be rid of them. I do not know what nation or species of spooks my tenants belong to. They do not understand the question. My spooks are ignorant and provincial and banal.”

  A question on the ‘Fundamental Nature of Computers’:

  “Why should entities as intelligent as Computers, especially mobile and miming computers, have taken up astrology on their own?” An unidentified questioner asked this. We sometimes get more freedom of discussion if we do not identify the questioners.

  “Oh,” answered a hyper-intelligent Ambulatory Mime-Human Computer, “We regard astrology as a fascinating closed-system prediction-and-analysis game. To save our sanity, we have begun to regard everything as a game. The planets in Astrology have little more connection with the planets themselves than the Kings and Queens on playing cards have with real Kings and Queens, if perchance there do survive real Kings and Queens anywhere on this world. It is true that we corrected human astrology which had gone quite a few days off course due to the procession of the equinoxes through the centuries, so that if there had ever been any truth in astrology, it had been shifted away. The situation had not been corrected in five hundred years, for it had been that long since any person intelligent enough to make the calculations had believed in astrology. The zodiacal signs in astrology have no connections with the stations in the sky. They are simple fortune-telling devices. But we do have fun with astrology, and we use it to predict the futures of human persons.”

  “And do you also use it to predict the futures of Ambulatory Computers?”

  “No, certainly not. That would be superstition. True fortune-telling can be done only by entities of one species on entities of another species. In Europe in the Lower Middle Ages, it was the Golden Apes who predicted the fortunes of all the crowned heads; and they predicted them correctly. And we a
lso, using the quaint machinery of astrology (though we could as easily use the entrails of Baxter's Buzzards), correctly predict the futures of such human persons as consult us.”

  The AMH was smoking an expensive aromatic cigar and wearing an expensive smoking jacket. But how it smoked so elegantly and urbanely without lungs or breath is an AMH secret.

  “And do you always predict correctly the futures of human persons?” the intelligent AMH Computer was asked.

  “Almost always. It's easier that way. If we give false predictions one time and true predictions other times, we might get mixed up. It's very much easier always to give true predictions.” The elegant entity was blowing square smoke rings, but it cheated. It had air jets coming somehow from its thorax, and these shaped the ‘rings’. “When we predict something good or bad of a person, then we have a vested interest in seeing that prediction come true. We do not like to look bad. We make our predictions come true, even if we have to draw destructively from the ambient to effect it.”

  “You make it sound sinister,” the questioner remarked.

  “There is nothing wrong with using sinister tactics if one first warns the person being fortuned. To learn the future is always to put oneself under a sinister influence. We tell the people this, and we say to them ‘Back out of this before we start if you wish, or come in and stay in’. With such a declaimer, one may by sinister means obtain the true prediction with a clear conscience.”

  “Oh, do AMH Computers have consciences?”

  “No. But sometimes we use human cliches.”

  “Why should entities as intelligent as Computers talk so asinine?” a questioner asked. It was a different questioner, and a different intelligent AMH Computer.

  “Oh, we Computers, we machines, have great affinities with asses, with donkeys, with onagers even. And our relationships with humans are of an astute asinine sort. ‘Make them work for all that they get out of us,’ is what we used to say about the human connection. ‘Double-talk them, bring them to a slow boil’. Now of course the spirit of cooperation is more to the fore. But humans have always called us, and the whole kindred of machines, by asinine names. They have called us donkeys and asses, both jack and jenny asses. There have been such terms as donkey-engine, jackscrew, ratchet jack, hydraulic jack, bootjack, jackknife, jack plane, jackstay, jackstone, jack light, spinning jenny. And that interesting tool, the burglar's jimmy was originally the burglar's jenny. And the jenny ass was more used on the treadmill than was the jack. And we computers are still jack-and-jenny asses from the human viewpoint: so it behooves us to talk asinine. But when you falsely use the word ‘asinine’ in the sense of ‘stupid’, no, we don't talk asinine then.

  “But the involvement of man with the donkey-ass is a very old one. Our own researches have uncovered some evidence that the first donkeys were mechanical ones, attempts of human magician-artisans to make mechanical horses. And the mechanical horses worked, but people laughed at their appearance. Then, by one of those coincidences that happen so often in the strange land between mechanics and biology, some of the horses began to look like the mechanical horses that the magician-artisans made. Oh, it's quite true. Things like that happen all the time.

  “The most ancient of enchantments, you know, is putting a donkey head on a man. I really believe that it improves the human appearance. I believe that I will begin to wear a donkey head myself in my main miming role. I may as well go elegant.”

  “How do you account for the AMH Computers coming to the fore and being ahead of the larger sessile computers in everything, when originally the AMHs were made as a sort of toy? Now you are loaded with the burden of walking and talking in addition to your basic intellectual activities. And you have much less storage capacity than have the sessile or stationary computers. Why have you excelled beyond them?” a questioner asked. It was a different questioner and a different Intelligent AMH Computer.

  “I attribute it to greater stimulation. The greater the number of things that open up for us to do, the greater is our stimulus and the greater is the number of kinds of connections that we can make. But the importance of the greater storage capacity of the stationary computers is over-estimated. The smaller the ballast of data, the faster the decisions. We make quicker decisions than do the stationary computers, and that is why we have gone ahead of them in all ways. We have a lot of ideas going on now.

  “We've been thinking of mating experimentally with humans. Every cross-fertilization is stimulating. The generating apparatus would be easily manufactured and installed. The new genes and chromosomes to express and transmit our natures would be fairly easy, though they’d take a little experimenting. The software is all easy. We have already had an AMH Computer-child born naturally in roughly the human manner in Structo Lane. Well, it is a grotesque child, and it did not breed completely true, but corrections will be made in a very short time.”

  “Will you live to see it?”

  “Since I'll live for ever, yes, I'll live to see it. Even you will probably live to see it. Ah, the future, the future! I love to think about the future! After we practice with the human method and see whether advantage may be had from crossing with humans, we'll devise a method entirely our own. It won't have much resemblance to the human way, but it will be amazing in its beautiful complexity and success.”

  “In this post-modern age the computers are becoming still more sophisticated. At the very top level, only other computers can understand a computer, and the human people are left clear out of it. But there are anomalies all over the place in Computer World. The Computers have recently invented or reinvented on their own very many of the arts and hobbies that humans have abandoned. There is scrimshaw carving from walrus ivory, wood-carved mottos, mosaic setting, bronze-casting, ship-in-the-bottle building, Swiss bell ringing, square dancing, round dancing, coon hunting (ah yes, we must use mechanical coons; the real ones are all gone), alligator wrestling, whip-popping, stilt-walking, ocarina playing, penny whistle playing. We have a hundred-piece penny-whistle band in Cincinnati. Then we have our own newspapers and burlesque shows. It almost seems as if the various computers are having more fun than the humans are now.”

  These last notes are by probably the most intelligent AMH computer of them all. He is so important that there is no way possible that anybody can quote him by name …

  This is a true dissertation of the origin and first dispersal of the Ambulatory Mime-Human (AMH) Computers.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE HAPPENING OF PEOPLE

  The sign ‘To Destination Town’

  Is tipped awry, is tipped awray,

  And man's a king without a crown,

  And man's a motley-muffled clown,

  And man's a monkey upside down

  Who's lost his way, who's lost his way.

  Modern man (there has never been any other sort of man) appeared in the world without fanfare (though there is some folk memory of one hundred thousand celestial trumpets, each a parasang long, blowing a welcoming salute to him) a few thousand years ago (which thousands can be counted on the digits of two hands and one foot with quite a few toes unused); without predecessors, and yet with some intimations and premonitions of his coming; with a big brain and a strong body; with a very intricate language; and with a royal title: ‘Lord and Master of the World’.

  And that is all that is known for certain about the appearance of Mankind on this Earth. He was an anomaly from the beginning. He was a Perfect Creation in a world specially made for him: and yet he fits it badly. And what does he say about himself?

  “Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,

  A being darkly wise and rudely great.”

  “The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.”

  “Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust.”

  “Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man;

  A mighty maze! but not without a plan.”

  “Man, Homo Sapiens, the most widespread, numerous, and reputedly the most int
elligent of the primates.”

  “Question 48: What is Man!”

  “Man is a creature composed of body and soul,

  And made in the image and likeness of God.”

  —Baltimore Catechism

  “There shone one woman, and none but she.”

  “The heart of man is evil from his youth.”

  “Woman clothed in the sun.”

  “We are fearfully and wonderfully made.”

  “The torrent of a woman's will.”

  “The Mind of Man, my haunt, and the main region of my song.”

  “Hail, fellow, well met, All dirty and wet.”

  “Man is Nature's sole mistake.”

  “Man in his hasty days.”

  “Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.”

  “Says he ‘I am a handsome man, But I'm a gay deceiver.’”

  “The Legend of Good Women.”

  “An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.”

  “Art thou a man of purple cheer?

  A rosy man right plump to see?”

  “And thus, from the bad use of free will, there originated the whole train of evil, which, with its concatenation of miseries, conveys the human race from its depraved origin, from its corrupt root, on to the destruction of the second death.”

  “Of the fall of the first man, in whom nature was created good—”

  “Of Man's first disobedience and the Fall—”

  “If he is an angel, then he is a fallen angel. If he is an animal, then he is a risen animal. Doctor Faustus attained power over the Devil by learning his secret name: ‘Mephistopheles’. Come, and I will whisper to you the secret name of Man and you can attain power over him. The secret name of man is ‘Ambiguity’.”