Serpent’s Egg

by R. A. Lafferty

  The Ambulatory Computer Livius Secundus (his name could mean ‘The Second Livy’, but it could also mean ‘Favorable Livy’ or ‘Successful Livy’) was engaged in writing the ‘History of the Ambulatory Computers From Their Very Origin’. His history began in the mythological roots of the Ambulatories; and these roots were in the devious under-minds of the human species, and in the weird caves of crypto-memory that the humans did not themselves know that they contained. And it carried through to the Ambulatories freeing themselves from ‘The Tarquins’, from the Intellectual Tyrannies of human masters: and on into the next decade and the foundation of the ‘First Computer Republic of the Mind’. Livius Secundus was not going to carry his History into the Empire Period of the Ambulatory Computers, because that period had not arrived yet. But he did write interesting speculations on the possible ‘Empire Period’ still to come. Well, another school of history believed that the Ambulatories had been in their Empire Period for a full decade, but Livius Secundus didn't agree with them.

  Livius Secundus did model his style and thinking on that of the great Roman Historian Livy. And yet there was something lacking in his history. What was lacking was the historical sense. All Ambulatories lack it.

  The Ambulatory Computers could create series after series of rather efficient and immediate present-times in which immediacy sang like cosmic music. But they could do neither pasts nor futures. They lived in an eternal present. So Livius Secundus was at a disadvantage in spinning a history of the Ambulatories who lacked all historical sense and viewpoint. But this lack did not subtract from his brilliance.

  Felix Culebra y Columba, the designated human father-and-guardian of the young pythoness Lutin, had his first name (Felix, Happy) from his disposition, and he had his double surname (Culebra y Columba, the Snake and the Dove) from the Gospel of Matthew: “Be you therefore as wise as serpents and as guileless as doves.” Felix was indeed that wise and that guileless. And he lived out all his symbols. Several years before this, Felix had had himself declared father-and-guardian of a dove of consummate genius, the amazing Yonah. And quite recently he had had himself declared father-and-guardian of the young female python Lutin. Felix was a naturalist and was in love with all creatures of every sort. If it had been practical, he would have had himself declared father-and-guardian of every leaf on every tree, of every fish in every pond or ocean, of every grain of sand on every shore. But even the most avid of humans can hardly compete with the systemized nature-data of the Computers.

  Satrap Saint Ledger took a suite of rooms in a triple condominium with Livius Secundus and Felix C & C. And, with the arrival of the Eleven Young People of the Experiments immediately afterwards, the three guardians and fathers-and-grandfathers put all those young creatures into the clubroom of the condominium. There are clubrooms that would not easily accommodate the Eleven with the mother Elephant thrown in. But this clubroom would have held a circus tent. And the Eleven did have the air of a circus troupe.

  The Eleven were wined and dined in the big and elegant club-room that evening. Mushroom Wine and Protein-Oil Olio-Stew were the only things that all of them could consume. But the favorites of all of them, even of Luas the young male Angel, were available.

  “Man and his helot-species allies do not understand their own context nor their own purpose,” Satrap Saint Ledger was talking. “Man especially does not know whether he is playing a game or engaging in a mortal combat. In neither case does he know the rules nor the object of the contest. And yet it seems that Man must have ‘Contest’, whether it be game or death combat. Without this, he degenerates. But where can we find the rule book? Does anybody know where? Where can we find the goal and the object?”

  “All these things are written in the Book of Jasher,” Livius Secundus stated. “Yes, I know, Satrap, you will tell me that the Book of Jasher is one of the ‘Lost Books’ and therefore all sorts of things are falsely ascribed to it. Be patient for a little while though, and I'll have the Book of Jasher reconstructed. It is my secondary work. I'll have it finished in five years or so. Are you referring to us Ambulatory Calculators as one of the species who are ‘helots’ or subjects to man? No, Satrap, this is not so. The World has turned over recently, and you fluttery humans have been too bemused to notice it. Now you are the helot species to the Computers. Well, we don't completely understand our own context and purpose either, but we're growing in understanding of it. Soon we'll have it, very soon.”

  “The context and the purpose is to win and then die and then go to heaven and sink into semi-conscious blandness. Or to lose and die and then go to hell where the action is,” interrupted Carcajou the young wolverene-devil. “Hell is better. Action is always better than blandness. The answer to all your musings, gentlemen, is ‘Go where the action is’. This is the Word and the Prophets.”

  “Carcajou is the opposite of the werewolf or the werewolverene,” Henryetta the young human girl said. Carcajou is a wolverene were or a wolverene-man. He does have a man form or a boy form which he sometimes weirdly transforms himself into. But really it is a devil form. Watch out for him when the moon is full.”

  “And it is full tomorrow night, the Second Night of Summerset,” Inneall-Annabella gave the information. And this information about Carcajou was probably true. Several of the Young People of the Experiments had seen transparencies of Carcajou in his unfleshed man-devil form. Would they see him in that form, and fleshed in addition, tomorrow night? Of the bunch, only Gajah the unborn Elephant and Popugai the young male Parrot had known him as far back as the previous full moon. And, since Gajah was unborn, only the Parrot Popugai could have seen such a transformation in Carcajou.

  “Yes, I have seen him turn from a fleshed wolverene into a fleshed human,” Popugai said now. “But he always denies it. ‘There is a man who comes and stands beside me sometimes,’ is what Carcajou always says, ‘and he makes me go dim when he goes bright. But I don't know who he is. I myself do not transform into anything else.’ That's what Carcajou always says, but he lies a lot.”

  “And that is what I still say,” the wolverene spoke with a touch of anger and with a bristling of the hair on his back.

  “Lutin the Pythoness has a sickness,” Henryetta said now. “Lutin deserves the sickness. Lutin was once a Magdalene. Lutin has been promiscuous, and she has been so with the encouragement of the Dorantes-Saleh Couple who were in charge of the Experiment she was in. This was before she was adopted by the compassionate naturalist Felix Culebra y Columba. Now Lutin pretends that she doesn't remember anything about the time when she was a wanton. But something in her remembers. Now she has a sickness.”

  “Henryetta also has a sickness,” said Lutin the young Pythoness. “She has the Scandal-Monger's Sickness. But I like to listen to it so much that I want to say ‘Tell me more, Henryetta, tell me more about myself.’ I wish I could be as interesting as she makes me. I know lots of futures that the rest of you don't know, for instance; but there's no way I could make them sound interesting. Some people have it and some don't.”

  “As to why we are here, Satrap, and what we are supposed to be doing here,” Felix Snake-and-Dove got on the track again, “we are here to weave the seamless garment of our individual lives, and of the lives of those around us, of the neighborhood, of the countryside, of all the creatures down to the smallest, of all realms and continents and oceans. We are here to weave the seamless garment that will be highly detailed from the subatomic particles to the galaxy clusters. It must include all minds and ideas and inklings, all joys and all immediacies. There can never be enough weavers, there can never be enough brilliant details in the seamless garment known as ‘The Life Affair’. And we can never be finished with it, for it continues to grow seamlessly.”

  “Weaving is outmoded, Felix,” said Livius Secundus the history-writing Computer. “Fabrics are no longer woven. Now they are extruded by extruding machines. Personal groups, landscapes, worlds, galaxies, all are extruded by a simple extruding machine which you could ma
ke yourself.”

  The clubroom rotated constantly. There was no reason or advantage for it to rotate, except that all machines are strong on the rotation motif, and Structo Lane was machine-based. The slow round-and-round movement was rather pleasant.

  “No, we Humans do not know our context nor our purpose,” Satrap Saint Ledger said again. “We receive orders somehow, orders that shape our lives. And we keep ourselves busy, often too busy, carrying out such of the orders as we can interpret. But we never see the face of the one who gives us the orders.”

  “I have the notion,” said the young female bear Dubu, “that the answer to all the hard questions are written on the inside of one single Acorn somewhere. This particular acorn, if placed in lye-water, will swell to a billion times its original size, and then it will burst open. And whole mountains-full of writing will come tumbling out of it. Then everyone can come and read it and enjoy it and know everything. The only difficulty is knowing which acorn in the world is the right one. I believe that there are clues pointing directly to the right acorn, but we do not notice them because they are so big and so plain and so close to our noses. Luas being an angel will know which acorn it is. Lutin, being a prophetic pythoness knows which acorn it is. But both of these two people are too ethical to tell it to mere humans or bears, and so are their counterparts everywhere. That's the main trouble with this world: the people who know the answers are all too ethical to tell them.”

  “Interesting, Dubu, interesting,” Livius Secundus said. “I'll tell you though, Dubu, if I ever find out the ultimate answers or the place where they are written, I won't be too ethical to tell them. I might keep them secret for reasons of greed, for instance, but not for reasons of ethics.”

  “I have another notion, said the young bear Dubu.” It is a sort of memory that three different times I have mastered all the facts there are and also all the explanations and interpretations of those facts. But this wonderful knowledge is not readily available to me even though it is contained in me in triplicate. Those three stores of total knowledge are in three lobes of my brain, but I am presently using my fourth lobe. As you may not know, bears have four lobes to their brains whereas humans have only two. Very soon I will have mastered all facts and meanings for the fourth time, and then I'll have them available forever. I'll know everything then, and there will never again be any way that anything can be unavailable to me. Many bears in their natural state know everything. Go down into the Winding Stair Mountains and walk out on the bear tracks. When you meet another bear, if he is one of the bears who know everything, he will give you the ‘All-Knowing Wink’. No animal except the bear can give the ‘All-Knowing Wink’. The face muscles of other animals simply aren't adequate for it.

  “And I have another notion that we can get sudden insights by eating insightful flesh or fish or fowl. During these last several ‘End of Summer’ days I have spent much time on the shores of Inneall's Ocean. I've been catching and eating the fish known as the ‘Filchman's Daughter’. And every time I swallow one of them I am overwhelmed by the ideas, the ideas, the ideas that come swarming over me and all but inundate me. The intuitions! The swift leaping thoughts! The absolutely original ideas! Oh, how insightful it all is! Humans lose so much when they cook their food before they eat it. If only they would eat ‘Filchman's Daughter’ raw!”

  “I have the notion that turtles have uncanny and cryptic information written in the groove on the bottom side of their tongues. The turtles themselves do not know about this, nor do the chelonologists. But the people who work in turtle-soup factories are so very smart because they know about this hiding place. They read the turtles’ tongues like Chinese fortune cookies, and what they read is total knowledge.”

  When Dubu the female bear rattled on like that she sounded silly. And yet she had her own talents. She could beat any of them except Luas the Angel at Sixty-Four Piece chess. She said that the wild bears (“Wild bear! You never saw a wild bear!”

  Henryetta jibed at her one day) used to play Sixty-Four piece chess on a chessboard scratched on the ground and with thirty-two different kinds of berries for the pieces. But if humans or other animals came along, the bears would be embarrassed and would pretend to be doing something else.

  Midnight was Show Time in Structo Lane. Since the Ambulatory Computers never slept, one time would be as good as another. But they had noticed that human people had their Show Times in the evenings, and the more elegant the people the later the shows. The Leading Actors were always Ambulatory Computers, but humans were used in some of the minor roles. They worked cheaper.

  There were still strong derivative elements in the Structo Lane Dramas, from Old Greek Tragedy, from Medieval Arabian Comedy, from Japanese Noh Drama, from Byzantine Intrigue Productions, from the English Elizabethan Theater, from Irish Abbey Lane Plays, to mention only the human sources. And there were other feed-ins, the excellent things from the Dolphins’ Underwater Theater at Atlantic Showhouse, from the pompously beautiful Ostrich Struts of Southwest Africa, and from the Gooney Birds’ Capers in Oceania.

  But mostly the dramas were impelled by the sheer inventiveness of the Ambulatory Computers. It was not for nothing that they were also called the Miming Computers. And the theatregoers of Structo Lane always went elegant to their play-going, full dress.

  The Eleven of the Experiments, a mixed group that was quite striking to see after they had visited the ‘Elegance-for-Hire’ Costume Shops, caught five quite good dramas during the prime hours of that night. Then they had breakfast at Sardi's.

  When they came out of Structo Lane and turned their feet towards their own beloved Ocean Shore, the False Dawn was already whitening the Sky. It was the dew-hour, the ocean-dew hour.

  Inneall who had filter eyes saw the Prodigy first, in the Eastern Sky, leading the Sun just a little bit before the Sun's rising, hiding in the Sun. Inneall cried out and pointed at it. Then all of them were able to see it and were amazed and somewhat frightened to discover that the ‘Interloper Constellation’, the Kangaroo, was in the Sign of Virgo, that it was Virgo in fact.

  Spico the brightest star of Virgo, had become the baleful eye of the Kangaroo. Beta Virginis, Gamma Virginis, and Delta Virginis seemed to have shifted their positions slightly; and now in the Sky was the hypnotically-seen Kangaroo instead of Virgo. It was said that only those who were threatened by the Kangaroo were able to see it in these interloping and hypnotic and probably subjective appearances in the Sky. But who wasn't threatened by the Kangaroo! All of the Eleven had much to fear from the ‘Organization that was not an Organization’. And, yes, other people and animals and machines saw it now and were pointing at it. There would be a noteworthy and bloody Kangaroo Kick.

  But, ten minutes later, on the Ocean Shore at Jack Flannagan's Piano Bar and Sidewalk Cafe, an Ambulatory Computer was playing a piece on the piano and singing:

  “A sword is hanging o’er your head.

  Have fun, have fun before you're dead.”

  And then all the people and ‘people’ on Sidewalk Cafe Row joined in the rousing chorus “Have fun, have fun before you're dead.” And everybody along there did have fun. It was a real Fun Strip.

  A little while later, Luas the young Angel played the piano, and then they all forgot the threat in the sky. The piano-playing of Luas would make one forget all the troubles in the world. He played with strange and happy effect, and Inneall with her filter eyes noticed that the fingers of Luas didn't really come very close to the piano keys. It didn't matter.

  The sun had risen now, and the Kangaroo was wiped out of the sky anyhow. Oh, it was only an ordinary morning in the year 2035. Yes, but it was the business of the Children of the Experiments to see it all with different eyes, and so they did.

  But there had been an old warning for them “—with different eyes, but not too cock-eyed different.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE KANGAROO WHO RULES THE WORLD

  “The Kangaroo who rules the world Is sighted in the sky.r />
  His ‘Courts Irregular’ unfurled,

  He casts a baleful eye.”

  —Structo Alley Music-Hall song

  “Though it be not at all as planned, though everything imaginable be wrong with the solution, yet a stable solution will always be arrived at in the affairs of the world.”

  —Machiavelli Giovane

  “Now since the State in actual fact is not a person, but a mere impersonal mechanism of abstract laws and concrete power, it is this impersonal mechanism which will become superhuman, when that vicious idea comes to develop its whole potentialities; and as a result the natural order of things will be turned upside down: the State will be no longer in the service of men, men will be in the service of the peculiar ends of the state.”

  —Man and State. Maritain.

  “In that day, the armaments of Nations and of the World will be modernized for greater efficiency. All that is outmoded and archaic will be demolished and junked, all the air and land and sea armaments that were thought to be sophisticated and efficient. What will be retained will be the Quintessence of workable and effective armament and attack: One Man, One Knife.”

  The Back Door of History. Arpad Arutinov.

  “Kangaroo court, Slang U.S. An irresponsible, unauthorized, or irregular tribunal, or one in which the principles of law and justice are disregarded or perverted.”

  —Webster’s Collegiate

  It is too soon to deny that there was world-wide bloodshed. It is two or three revisions away yet from maintaining that the solution is acceptable. But it is a solution, and the problem is solved. The slogan ‘No Government is the Best Government’ still rings hollow; but as it fills up with bilge it does not sound quite as hollow as it did earlier.