Valery, likely, but she could not give me the words for it. The elegants, perhaps, the Late Cecil Corn, Audifax O’Hanlon, Diogenes Pontifex. I will ask them. But not Gregory Smirnov (he’s too little a giant to explain it); not even Gaetan Balbo (I am sure that he exploded his own balloons very early for the sheer noise of their going, and those of every other child that he could catch, to make them all his servitors); not even Aloysius; not, certainly, Charles Cogsworth (how could he ever see or explain such things?); not (absurdity of absurdities) Glasser! But Glasser suggests an experiment to my mind and I will try it.
And by the way (I explain this to humans, not to thinking machines who would merely smile at the obviousness of it), the old dog-Latin phrase does not mean “reduce to an absurdity” but “reduce to a surd.” I will do it. Glasser (it has just struck me again that he is a sweet guy, for all his deficiencies) will be my surd and my test, my irrational, my voiceless basic. A conjecture has to have a bottom, and Glasser is our bottom in this and in so much else.
I have examined the person-précis of Glasser before. I have been amazed that Glasser, who invented the process of extracting person-précis (outside of God’s own invention of the Inclination to the Ecliptic as a device for seasoning planets I do not know of any invention at the same time so simple and so ingenious and so far-reaching) should himself have the poorest, most meager person-précis of any ever examined. A nothing man. A sweet guy, though.
Now, looking for this new thing in my calculations, I focus on the childhood portion of Glasser’s précis. What do I find in it? Ah, nothing really, nothing. Not much there. How is his précis different from those of other children? No balloons.
No, balloons, not one. Every other child I have examined has had a multitude of balloons trailing him. Not Glasser. None at all with him. Wait, though. Wait.
There are always balloons in Glasser’s early vicinity, but it is not he who trails them. It is someone—no, no—it is something else that is close to him, it is this other thing that has balloons. Can a thing, as well as a youngling person, trail balloons? I would not have thought so.
The thing—well, as a matter of fact, it was an artificial and inaccurate simulacrum of a panda animal, a toy, one of those things that small children of the retarded sort used to carry around with them. The toy panda (believe it or not as you will, it is the truth) trailed no less than ninety-nine balloons of a size and color and content that shimmered my very perception. Why did the panda trail balloons? It was impossible but it was fact. Why did not Glasser have any of them at all? I do not know. Some sort of transference, I suppose. It may explain the mystery of Glasser’s present relation to the E.P. machine, and to many of his machines; they are so smart, and he is not. How real is his connection to them? How real was his connection to the toy panda?
Could the panda have had balloons if he had been separated from Glasser? It cannot now be tested. Both the panda and the Childhood-Glasser have long since gone to the rag-heap, and the only thing left of either is this scrap in the childhood précis.
Conclusion: Children, though apparently so grubby and squalid, are each of them absolutely exceptional and excellent in their invisible trailing appendages. There has never been a common child. Except Glasser.
I reviewed another set of person-précis, those which I had taken as a Public Health Service at five dollars a throw. These were mostly of young and middle-aged adults and a few adolescents. By and large (that’s a phrase that so many of these people themselves use: “by and large”) these had a bulky but jumbled content. Would the all-alikeness of their appearance correspond to an all-alikeness of their persons? I was startled to find that in many ways these précis were lower in quality than were those of the derelicts. They shouldn’t have been: there must be a reason for it. After all, these people were not the “Great Unwashed”: they were the “Great Washed.”
I reviewed how I had taken the précis. Certain persons had come up willingly with the five-notes in their hands. And other certain persons had smiled in amusement and had not come up. So this was a selection and not a generalized grouping. It was a modified cross section; a cross section taken, in the phrase that Aloysius often used, from the small end of the log. Intelligent persons do not hand over five-spots readily for even such a good spiel as mine was. Even the derelicts would be smarter than that. Well, I’d use them, but I would have to find out another way, at profit to myself, of extracting the précis of the sharper folk.
These gullibles were people, I quickly saw, who lived and thought entirely in catch words and narrow patterns; and beyond the catch words they had no thoughts of their own at all. I was intrigued by something else, though: the cheerfulness of these folks. What had they to be so cheerful about, slow-witted and all of a pattern? I learned quickly that it was only on the surface level that they had no thoughts of their own. Even that was wrong. They had, in fact, very real thoughts of their own on all levels; but they had no expression of their own. And they weren’t of a pattern. Skin them and you could see how different each one was.
Well, it may be that I did not really have five hundred different worlds here, but I did have five hundred different unexplored continents. I explored them. Exploration has always had deep fascination for men and for machines. Taking the briny approach, I explored their coastlines (I speak figuratively, of course, but not entirely); I followed all their wooded bays and capes, I found out their harbors (it was hard for such a deep-draft vessel as myself to enter some of them); I scanned their continental shelves, and studied the fish and shellies of their shores and beaches. Taking samples of the sweet water from their streams, of the mixed water of their estuaries, of the skunk water of their swamps, of the nitric fall of their rains, I had a good blood typing of each of them. There are (this is one of the rare things which I may have to explain to thinking machines but not to persons) male and female persons just as there are male and female continents and planets and galaxies. These people were getting more and more various, and it pleased me. I went inland to their savannas and rain forests and prairies. I learned their bald-headed mountains and their crag-mountains, their arables and their pastures. I learned the animals in them. This was the hard part to believe. Five hundred continents full (I suppose there are five billion continents full in the world) of animals that are nowhere duplicated, that are nowhere ordinary, that are nowhere ugly—except by outrageous intention. The things that are inside them! How tame a High Asia! How bland a Deep Africa!—in the face of an animal-complex that roars and gibbers inside the silliest goof that ever handed over five fish to a machine that he never saw before. What an ordinary creature is the hippopotamus, what a tame thing is the latest thesis, before the clodhoppers that raven and laugh in the least of these people! Did you know that this simpleton, for instance, who voted for Growler and who belongs to the Regal Order of the Reindeer had all that stuff inside him? I found that there are more mysterious creatures inside of every person than there are persons inside the world.
Write it down for a universal rule: There Are No Common Persons Anywhere.
Except Glasser.
But if Glasser was so empty a vessel, why did I have to go to him now to refill my bucket? I don’t know why, but I had to. Who else knew all about précis-extraction? So I called in Glasser to see if we could not get a very large number of précis at no cost to ourselves, even at some profit to ourselves. I wanted a much broader statistical base for my researchers, and I wanted income for the Institute for Impure Science.
“I believe the mail-order cheese might be used,” Glasser said, “with a new twist. ‘You send us, we don’t send you.’ People like a new twist. We would have to get about ten dollars with each of them to show a five-dollar profit. There will be the costs of the advertisements in the media; there will be the cost of the self-extracto-précis kits which I will have to invent; there will be postage and shipping charges. But if we obtain even so few as ten million précis this way it will make nice pocket money at five dollars pr
ofit a throw. It should hold us till one of us in the Institute gets a real money-making idea. Write some catchy copy now, Epikt; then call in Diogenes Pontifex (he’s done time for the mail-order cheese, and he is well informed on all aspects of it); in the meantime I’ll go invent the self-extracto-précis kit; and we will get with it.”
That was nice thinking on Glasser’s part, very nice thinking for a man who didn’t have any brains.
“Is there any way we could extract précis from other than persons, Glasser?” I asked. What did I mean by my own words? They certainly took me by surprise. “If we could get them,” I went on, “it might be of immeasurable help in my investigations, but I don’t quite see how yet.”
“Sure, it’s easy,” Glasser said. “Present techniques will take care of a lot of it. Here’s one I took from a tomcat this morning. I knew that tomcats were weird, but I didn’t know they were that weird. It’s the first one I ever took from a tomcat.”
“You can do it with any animal, then?” I cried, with my little sensors flicking out like flames. “That will give us a new dimension, Glasser. It will give us added accord with our world. It will open another door for us; I hope it won’t be a door on to a blank wall.”
“I can take them of most animals, Epikt,” he said, “but it weakens and disarranges a few creatures, especially those where the brain bulk is small in proportion to body bulk. A bear might not come out of its hibernation till June if its précis were extracted while it slept. A frog might not come out of its aestivation ever. And you have no idea how slow it will make a Slow Loris. It’s bad for some birds (birdbrained is an apt tripe-type, you know); it often throws off their sense of balance. It gives them the falling sickness, which is bad for birds.”
“Glasser,” I issued, “if I can get such creature-précis it will make me much more akin to the whole world. I may even be able to do the high mission for which I was assembled. Help me in this, Glasser, help me to reach the eutectic-agape-eidolon-synthesis in the chthonic-charismatic—”
“Ah, you’re getting that look in your eyes, too, Epikt,” Glasser jibed. “It’s the love and merge with everything and everybody look. You’ve been bitten by the bug that has no known entomology. Well, it isn’t a bad bug. It weakens and leads astray, of course, but what bug or beast or brain does not? It’s the love bug, you know, and it isn’t good for much. But it isn’t bad for much either. It bites me, too, and it’s been endemic in me for a long time. But Audifax says it isn’t the real thing when you catch it from a bug. It’s a virus only, not the holy sanity.”
“It is the real thing!” I shouted with my shouting coils. “Glasser, need a machine be mechanical?”
“Sure, Epikt, sure. If persons cannot escape being machinelike, how could machines escape it?”
“But I am a mechanical compendium of mankind, Glasser,” I made my plea. “Should I not have every aspect of mankind, not merely the mechanical? Should I not be a mechanismus angelicus, and not mechanismus simply?”
“It sure is hard for persons to make the step,” he said. “It won’t be easier for you.”
“Glasser, could we carry this further, beyond the creature-précis which I can hardly wait to get? Could we carry it as far as plants?”
“Sure, I do it all the time. My E.P. machine finds deeper things in plants than he finds in me. But it takes a lot out of the living plants, even more than it takes out of the slower animals. You have no idea how a shrinking violet will shrink when you extract its précis. It wilts roses, Epikt, and takes away their aroma. Rather improves skunk cabbages, though, but I don’t know what you would want with the précis of a skunk cabbage.”
“I want précis of everything,” I blurted out. “I want to be in accord with everything, I want to become everything. Assimilate with everything, experience, love, fertilize, fruit, grow, explode, consume, become—”
“Oh, put your pseudo-ophthalmoi back in their sockets, Epikt,” he grinned. (Was a grin the proper response to an ecstasy like mine?) “That’s a pretty bad bug bite you got,” he said.
“Rocks, Glasser, rocks?” I sang out. “Clouds, mountains, fields, rivers, could you extract précis from them?”
“Most of them, Epikt, most of them. But the précis won’t tell you very much. And extracting them plays three-handed havoc with the things themselves. I’ve seen a rock crumble to dust when I grabbed its précis. I’ve seen white sailing clouds melt down to almost nothing within seconds. And you know Shrinking Mountain in Potok County?”
“I have not seen it, but I intuit Shrinking Mountain.”
“I did that, Epikt, I’m sorry to say. It’s especially hard on the older mountain formations. With the younger mountains (of the last thirty million years) they have great vigor remaining and it doesn’t harm them much.”
“Glasser, help me get all précis from everything, everything!”
“Oh, all right,” he said. “Fellow, you sure do have a bad bug bite there.”
A nothing man, that Glasser, but a sweet guy.
Glasser was a bachelor who lived in small and cranky rooms in the upper reaches of the pig-barn, or the Institute, with his E.P. Locator and with certain of his other machines. Glasser was a sweet guy, but the machines were sour ones and their domestic arrangements were not tranquil.
Glasser designed the E.P. (Extraordinary Perception) Locator many years ago. It was a scanner that was designed to locate the source of any superior thought or intelligence. It could pick a genius man or woman out of a million simply by reading the strength of the emanations that superior thought always produces. It could select a superior dog from a hundred inferiors; it could select a superior earthworm from acres of ordinary worms. Used as a planetary scanner, it had found high intelligence in strange places, in pseudo-mosses, in green browsers, in unmanlike bipeds on Orcus, even in apparently lifeless rocks (the “Smart Rocks” of Priestly Planet have become proverbial). It could pick out the one child in a mob that had anything superior about it, it could pick out the one cancer cell in ten million that had the intelligence to assume leadership, it could pick out the one pine cone that was smarter than every other pinecone in the north woods.
And among human persons it could pick out geniuses and super-geniuses and super-super-geniuses. All persons associated with the Institute for Impure Science were either geniuses or s-geniuses or s-s-geniuses. Except Glasser.
Glasser invented and designed this E.P. Locator, this machine of genius; but the machine could not discern any genius in its inventor, not ever. It read genius in itself, it read genius in almost every person or machine who ever had occasion to do business at the Institute. But it read none at all in Glasser. The E.P. Locator read more intelligence in one of the cut flowers in the bowl there than it read in Glasser; it read more in certain puffballs that sprung up out of the grass; it read more in a certain midge staggering in the air (it was a superior midge, of course).
Glasser was rather humble to begin with: then, with the E.P. Locator, which he had invented, he endured humiliation for many years. He was a sweet guy, but it almost got him sometimes. He refused to give the E.P. Locator humanoid form: it still goes on wheels when most sentient machines can go on feet when they want to; it still issues tapes, when other contraptions can shift to voice; it still senses with sensors, when most mechanicals have eyes in addition to sensors. So there was resentment and bad feeling between the two; they really shouldn’t have been keeping house together. “Glasser, you haven’t the brains of a potato bug,” the E.P. would suddenly issue on angry tape. “Neither myself nor the potato bug is the subject of your today’s task,” Glasser would answer stiffly; “attend to your work, E.P., attend to your work.”
The E.P. was a valuable machine: it couldn’t be dispensed with. And Glasser was a valuable man, even though the readings showed him with much less intelligence than the superior lilies of the field; he couldn’t be dispensed with either.
I have now a great store of précis of every sort. I revel in them and I experi
ence a total feeling of euphoria. I am in communication with every sort of particle in the world, gnat’s blood and squid’s bilge, people and plastics, rocks and rats. I am totally happy in my understanding and comprehension and love of everybody and everything.
“Me, too? You love me, do you, lying Epikt? I am the test. You fail me and you have failed the test forever.”
Well, then I have failed it. I do not love the snake inside me. It has now become huge and pungent and fierce, and it gives off an efflux of evil. I do not love Snake. Even at first remove there is only one sympathetic link between us—the absconded Gaetan Balbo. I love a little and fear very much this lost leader Gaetan; and Snake is doing the work of Gaetan till he returns. But Snake leaves me cold.
“You fail it, you fail it,” Snake taunts. “Either you will love me in my repulsiveness, or all other love is in vain.”
I will not love you, Snake. And I hope it is not in vain. The bug has been biting many of us, and I had been hoping that this bug bite might be the cure for everything. But Snake’s reptile logic is like a chill wind to me; and another cold breath is the reported words of Audifax O’Hanlon that a love isn’t the real thing when you catch it from a bug.
“It is all over with then,” I had gibbered. “All my understanding and accord with the world is meaningless and vain. I fail this test. This love fails this test. It is all over with.”
“It is not over with!” Valery Mok contradicted. “It isn’t even tried till it is tried in me. It hasn’t failed till I say that it has failed. Why shouldn’t we make love mechanically and have it work? We make everything else mechanically and make it work. And the old natural-grown love sure did get perverted easy.
“Stay with us, Epikt! We’ll make it work. We’ll breed bigger and bigger life bugs and love bugs; and we’ll make them bite more people. We’ll merge it all together, précis and people and grazers and grass. It will have success if we name it ‘success.’ It will be comprehension if we call it ‘comprehension.’ It’s like the painter who painted a howling tangle of everything. ‘I don’t understand it,’ one man said, ‘what is it?’ So the painter painted a name for it: Understanding. Then the man knew what it was: he could understand Understanding. And everyone can love Love. Don’t you think I make a good love symbol, Epikt?”
Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine Page 9
