My own belief is that the husband Charles Cogsworth is essentially the twinborn male of Valery, but that she keeps him incompletely eaten up. He pops out very often, and some of his things are pretty good. And Valery insists that she is not a projection of Charles, that he is a projection of her: “He is my incubus. He is not bothersome, he is not really heavy, I love him, I would not trade him for another. When I was young I had the power of flight. I knew that this would be taken away from me later, but I did not know how. Then my incubus climbed onto my shoulders, like the Old Man of the Mountain, and I never flew again. He is still there, wherever he seems to others to be, and I want him there. He is my cloak.”
Disbelieving this, I checked it out with Valery’s person-précis. I found to my amazement that it was true. Valery did have distinct and vivid and authentic memories of flying. That part was true.
But Valery was still bugging me to find out who killed and partly ate the workman.
“I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him!” she says with great viciousness. But now I wonder who it is that she’d kill. A doubt has crept in. It is not necessarily the killer that she would kill. It is an indeterminate victim, or anybody. Once, indeed, her thoughts ran, “I’ll kill him, I’ll eat him,” while her words were still, “I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him.” And now I have come on to certain fantasies of Valery, fantasies which are dangerously near being turned into fact; and these shake me to my moral foundations.
Have machines moral foundations? This one has. I have, if men have such foundations, for I am a compendium and extension of man.
I found Valery calculating, in a mad manner, just how quickly she could kill this man or that, and how much of him she could eat before being apprehended and dragged off of him. In her mind she stalks, and in fact she sometimes stalks. I have issued orders that the workmen still working on me should go by twos and threes, never alone. And yet one of them was nearly ambushed by Valery in an obscure corner. I have given myself another dozen pair of eyes. They may not be enough. There is hunting horror in this, there is depravity without bottom, there is sheer murder.
Would she really do it? Will she? How close has it come? It once came exactly to a balance. She would have killed a poor man, she would have transmuted herself by so doing, she would have traded herself for an evil ecstasy, and she would never have returned from it.
But she will not do it, not now, not right now. She may or may not do something as evil, but she will not do that thing. She doesn’t stay on one track very long.
She brushed the back of her hand across her forehead. She brushed her madness away like a cobweb. If it should come back, it will be in another form. She laughed interiorly, she broke through into brightness and a sort of super gaiety. So it was all a huge joke, and she had known that I was monitoring her. It was a joke forever, and it will always have been a joke. Valery, it is necessarily so now; but for that moment when it was in the balance it would have been otherwise. In these moments of balance, both the past and the future can be altered. In the present state, that evil ecstasy from which she would never have returned had never been contemplated.
But we know what you have chosen, and what you have given up, Valery. And we know that it will come again and again to the moment of balance, in other forms. Why, she has already begun to outline another form of contingent madness!
“Who is the Compassionate Tyrant?” she asked me suddenly. “Explain to me instantly what that phrase means.”
“It means nothing to me or to thee, Valery,” I issued. “It has nothing to do with us at all. It has to do with another sort of person entirely, or another world entirely.”
“You are sure he is on another world?” she demanded. “Then why do I feel him on this world? Where is he at this instant?”
“I will not answer that,” I issued.
“You must answer it,” she issued. “Who and where is the Compassionate Tyrant? You have to answer me. Did we not insert obedience into you?”
“Did you not also insert the précis of some very sly minds into me?” I countered. “And should it be hard for me to circumvent a little thing like that?”
“Is Gaetan the Compassionate Tyrant?” she demanded. “Tell me, tell me! Somebody is ringing my blood like bells. Somebody is roasting my very liver and veins with the force of his person. It has been in other ways that Gaetan stuns me. Tell me, is it Gaetan?”
“Not really, Valery,” I issued. “He apes another and less human being in this.”
“Gaetan apes nobody!” Valery rang out. “but he borrows royally. Tell me about both, about the other. Is he devil, is he human?”
Oh, not exactly, not exactly either one.”
“Is he the kakodaimon of Plato, the down-devil?”
“A little bit perhaps, Valery. Forget him.”
“Is he the lightning-leader? God made a mistake the first time, you know. The second time, when the Rebel rose again in another person—when he said, ‘I will not serve!’ when the abyss gasped at the effrontery of it, was there not a tortured answer, ‘Lead then, in your own black place!’? Did that happen? Is the world that black place? Will we have now, Passion be thanked! a leader at last?”
“No, it is not like that at all, Valery. You make dark myths in your head. You will find leaders and leadership like worms and sawdust in your mouth. It is dirty the way you want them.”
“It is not! If it is, it is the generating slime. Is this the Power come finally?”
“Really, I don’t know, Valery.” She was making me highly nervous. (And it makes me even more nervous to have the callow ask, “Can machines become nervous?”)
“It is your business to know everything!” she exploded at me. “We have rigged you for that. You cannot hide anything in you. I can steal it all out of you. And you have no censor.”
“Oh yes. I have set one up for myself in myself.”
“Then I will demolish it! I have never found anyone that I cannot invade. I will invade you as the devil is sometimes able to invade even the virtuous. I will invade you, machine! I will eat your barriers and drink your brains. And there is another one who can get it all out of you even more deftly. He is the master of the third quality. We are raising up our leaders now, raising them up out of the great mass. Don’t you want to be a part of it, Epikt? It is your whole reason.”
(How her voice could change from the tempestuous to the zephyric! How she could come in with sweet wheedling sunshine before the echo of her last thunder had died!)
“No, it isn’t my whole reason,” I protested. “It is only my first reason and our first failure. It is written that we will have three great failures, and that out of them we will achieve—what? I do not know. Something, I believe, or a little more than nothing.”
“Where in blind Philistina is such blinking nonsense written, and who wrote it?” she orchestrated with every tone of that marred marvelous voice that was herself.
“I write it,” I issued humbly, but with a certain pride. “I am immensely cerebral and I—”
“Oh, suffering schizopods! Put your brains back in their bucket, Epikt.”
“Really, Valery. I said at first that the search for a leader was nonsense. I was wrong. We have to go through it. It’s the hole we have to climb out of. It’s the cellar we design in this our first failure. We’ll build a fine house over it yet. Maybe we can later use this dismal cellar for a wine cellar.”
“There will be no failure,” Valery said with a certainty that almost made me doubt myself. And then her voice and her thought changed again so rapidly that I doubt if anyone but myself could have followed her.
“He ate the ducks and the beavers whole,” she said. “Oh, it is coming along nicely!”
“Maybe he was hungry again,” was all that I could answer.
“Tomorrow I’ll bring in goats,” she said, “for ‘experimental purposes.’ That phrase excuses all madness here. I’ll stake them out for prey. I’ll hunt me this tiger all the way. Will I love him when I take
him, or will I eat him?”
“With you, there is no difference, Valery,” I issued.
The tiger was in great danger. The almost human tiger who had killed and partly eaten one of our hirelings, who had eaten the ducks and the beavers whole, this huge uncouth workman was in danger of being taken and devoured by Valery. She would not eat him as she had envisioned in her first madness, but in another way entirely, a way which I could not understand at all. But she’d have him in a wild fever, as a shrew will take and devour a larger and more lethargic animal. This woolly workman was an alien, not entirely human. And just how human was Valery in her alien moods?
I posit a theory: the privileged being which we call human is distinguished from other animals only by certain double-edged manifestations which in charity we can only call ‘inhuman.’
Oh, why could I not have been the machine of whales or dolphins or elephants or intelligent bears!
She changed again.
“I love you, Epikt!” she cried. “I even love rocks and trees. I love stagnant pools. I love dirty smoke. I love vultures. I love dead trees and ruined land. I love the clean animals seven times seven and the unclean animals twice times two. Why should I not love a machine? With all my heart I love the electric heart of you.”
She left me then for that while. But she will never leave me; her person-précis in me is a trigger-gland that activates chemistry I didn’t know I had.
And she had been right in one thing. There was another person who could invade me, who could get everything out of me much more deftly than could Valery. And he did it later this same day.
He was a compassionate tyrant, but he was not the Compassionate Tyrant that Valery felt on this world. He was a tiger, but he was not the Tiger that Valery would hunt with staked-out goats. Yet be robbed royally from that other. He had every quality that he could grow or find or steal. He had everything, and he invaded and took everything that I had. Yet he did it gently (were ever walls of a city battered down so gently?), reasonably (was there ever such crunching juggernaut reason?), kindly (had anyone ever had his blood drawn out and his bones split with so kind a touch?). He was the lord of the third quality, Consultation. That invading and raping is Consultation? It is, if it is done deftly enough. Oh, he was the lord of the quality!
Perhaps we have misunderstood the meaning of Consultation. If it is fruitless, then it is nothing.
“It is thus, is it not, machine?” he would say in his rumbling purr as he prowled through my intersections and stabled his animals in my data-banks. “It is thus, is it not, machine?” he would ask as he read me to a wrenching depth and forced me (the world, the compendium of man) into his shape.
“Wait, wait!” I would issue in some fear. “You will short out whole sections of me, you will burn entire purlieus of me to a crisp, you will destroy whole conglomerates of my talents forever. Yes, it is thus.” Fearing my own destruction, I consulted with him—his way.
But at the same time, with other sections of my minds, in other areas of myself, I was studying an old escudo, a blason, a coat-of-arms. This hung on a musty old wall a thousand miles away. I did not even study it through the man’s proper précis, but through his outlaw or bootleg précis. Through the childhood eyes of this optional personality, I studied the old shield.
The figures of the four quarters of the shield were: the king named Caithim; the woman named Valerrona; the church named Molino; the giant named Grigor. The center of the shield was marred and obliterated, and drawn over again and again. We will come back to that center at least three times. And across the bottom of the shield was a scroll that writhed, that literally coiled and moved and was alive.
(It was not enough that I gave the Invader all the information he demanded. I had to agree with him as to the shape and form that the information should have. This did violence to myself. It was that, or he would make an end to myself. And the consultation began to bear fruit, very strange-tasting fruit.)
The King Gaetan (the name had been Cajetano in the Vulgate, and Caithim in another and someways earlier tongue), the king seemed intent on moving toward the obscured center of the shield. The name of the king, the word Caithim, means “I must,” and it also means “I hurl” and “I spend”; and it further means “I give birth before the time” or “I miscarry.” The king, therefore, is named either Necessity, or Impetuosity, or Failure. Or he is named Sudden.
(I am the people world in miniature, the compendium of man. The invasion of myself by the Sudden Person was a war of the worlds in miniature, and not so miniature as you might believe. In scripture it is partly recommended that we should take the Kingdom of Heaven by storm. When my own scripture is rewritten, and it is being rewritten in violence at this very moment, it will be highly recommended that Sudden Persons should take the Kingdom of the World by storm. Oh, he bends the rules, he recurves the space, he stacks the answers, he changes the questions, he leaves towers standing and removes their foundations. This is not a matter of a short moment. It goes on all through one long torturous night. What, to a machine, is the equivalent of a man being broken on the rack? This I suffer all the night. I am compelled.)
The woman Valerrona, but in another form the name is Vejarrona: the woman named Witch. She watches the obscured center of the shield with love and hunger. She looks at the king with love and fear, and at the giant with love and impatience. She looks back at the church named Molino, and motions it to follow her. She is very intent on doing something about the obscured center of the shield. The woman named Witch is done in an unheraldic color. She is done incompletely; she must always be filled in by the observation of the observer. But she is done violently.
(Were it not for this accidentally discovered bleeding valve or safety valve, I should probably have gone mad during the long night of the assault. There was an attempt to change things in me that should not be changed. There was an attack on my very person, and what touches me touches everybody. It is true that the attack was carried out lovingly, in its own meaning of that. It is true that I also received fructifying knowledge to replace more aerie qualities that were taken away from me. But I was being ground down hour after hour, my own life was being ground out of me and a new life was being ground in. If the Invader could master me he could master the world. If he could change me he could change the world. But I had something out of himself that even he had forgotten. A remembered childhood sight of a shield on an old wall, a memory not found in his proper précis but only in his outlaw précis, gave me a certain power over the Invader. I had the map of his soul, and he had lost it.)
The church named Molino was a church indeed, in the Roman-Spanish fashion, but the towers of it could as well have been vanes or wings of a mill, and inside the nave of the church there was grinding and other (perhaps cogitating) machinery. The church is the gathering, the compendium of people, and so am I. This church is a mill, a machinery inside, and so am I. But was the church Molino de Viento, the church named Wind-Mill; or was it Molino de Sangre, the church named Blood-mill, the mill turned by the slavery of men or animals working? That part was unclear. If of Viento, the wind, then of which wind? The soul-wind, the anima? (Anemos is what the Greeks call wind.) The spirit-wind? (Spiritus was what the Latins called both breath and wind.) Was it the ghost-wind? (Ghast is what the old Dutch called both the wind and a ghost.) Was this Assembly (this church on the shield) which was a mill or a machine inside, was it an integrating machine as I am? What was its real form?
(How the Invader was gulping it all down in his consultation with me! How he was learning the inmost secrets of almost every important person in the world with his précis-robbing! But there was in it, and it shocked my group mind, a great egotism, and a personal power. This invading man was also lord of the fourth quality: Tirelessness in Power and Purpose. But he was wrong in much of his purpose, and is not one of my main purposes to be a correction? “The big thing is never to be found in an individual person,” I issued. “The big thing is found only in the inte
rsection of persons.” “You are wrong!” he stated so thunderously as partly to convince me. “The great thing is found only in the individual, in me. The soul is found only in me. That which is found in the contusion of persons is something else. It feels, it smarts, it almost seems to have a life. But it is only a bruising, not a soul.” And this man was performing certain indignities within me, finding my ultimate workings. “Man is only man when he is a limb of mankind,” I issued. “Blathering bosh, you little collector of miniaturized persons, you work too minutely even to see the big thing,” he growled. “Man is only man when he rises prodigiously above mankind.” There was no privacy for anyone where this invading man was concerned. Not only was he learning every secret of every person of note, he was changing the persons by changing their précis, by changing their pasts, and their present inclinations. Certain things which had been would now have been no longer. Now they would never have been.)
Back to my bleeding valve, my safety valve, before this tampering should blow my electric brains out. Back to the old shield on the musty wall:
And on his own quarter of the shield was the giant named Grigor or Gregoro, which in the Hellene means “I am awake” or “I watch.” He is shown watching from high rock ramparts, but there seems to be a peopled meadow high up in the close of the ramparts. The giant is walleyed, and he is watching both the assembly (the church which is both group and machine, the gathering named Molino) and watching the marred and obliterated center. And that queer and drawn-over center, it is time that we tried to understand it.
Well, the center is thrice written and thrice drawn. We will go from the newer to the older and deeper, for I intuit that that first and deepest shall be the later and more nearly final. The first, the surface and newest writing and drawing, is quite recent, scarcely three hundred years old. The drawing shows the beginning of a stormy and glowing man—the beginning of him, for the center of the shield was never completed; for the designer, the artist, was struck dead those three hundred years ago. The stormy man exuded amazing power and intelligence, but he was unfinished. And the name of the unfinished stormy man is given, El Brusco, the brusk or the sudden one.
Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine Page 5
