Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine

by R. A. Lafferty

  And that is when the little wheels began to spin in my own head. Literally in my own case, the positioning and fractionating gears by which I change from one category of thought to another. But why have humans a simile about little wheels turning in the head? There is no true rotary motion in the human head at all. But there was something rotary in the person-précis of Aloysius Shiplap which I barely remembered, and I reviewed it now.

  In one of the early recurring apprehension dreams Aloysius differed oddly from other people. And the précis revealed this running through both the nightdreams and the daydreams. It is common for human children to have fantasies that they are adopted orphans and therefore unloved. The early fantasy of Aloysius had been that he was not human: that he was a machine. And he had acted strangely like a machine. He did not cry as a small boy. But he gnashed with the sound of unmeshed gears gnashing. When cut or scratched he did not bleed really red blood, but a lighter colored blood mixed with serum; and he believed that this was the sort of circulatory fluid that complex machines have. There was one spot just behind his ear that he was afraid to touch or to spy in the mirror; even when it itched excessively he would not touch it. What if he should feel there, as he feared he would, the key that wound him up?

  And as he got a little older, coming to the age of reason and of sin, he had a deeper anxiety. He believed then that he would always be able to fool humans that he was human. But when the end came would he be able to fool Saint Januarius? (it is he and not Saint Peter who is keeper of the doors); and if he could fool the saint, could he also fool God?

  “Will God remember not having made me?” Aloysius asked as he came in. “I wondered about it when I was young. I still wonder about it.”

  This startled me. Very often I can read, or by fakery appear to read, human minds. But it shakes me when a human reads my mind and answers in the sequence of my thoughts. For Aloysius had just come into one of my central presences.

  “I’ve been reviewing your early précis, Aloysius,” I said, “and there’s a question I want to ask you.”

  “I’ve been reviewing in my mind the only remnant-précis of a certain medieval man, Bede,” he said. “The medievals often restore my perspective to me. Somewhere, in either the Ecclesiastical History or the Lives of the Abbots, Bede gives the name Eosterwin. My Old English is rusty. Does this name mean Easterwine?”

  “The etymology is disputed. Personally, I believe the meaning is East-Wind. Aloysius, did you first have the idea of me?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Why?”

  “Did you believe that, due to your early childhood prepossession that you were a machine, you would never sire a human child? That the only offspring, in any sense, that you could have would be a mechanismus?”

  “Oh, yes, that’s one of the germs of you. I believe there is also an early germ from Gregory (which I don’t understand), and from Valery (which I don’t want to understand). Naturally a clutch of normal uncomplexed people wouldn’t have generated you, Epikt.”

  “Aloysius, can you touch that spot behind your ear now?”

  “I can. I don’t want to.”

  “The key that winds you up isn’t there, Aloysius.”

  “No. I don’t know where the key that winds me up is really at.”

  I have taken steps to make myself fiscally independent. Peter the Great, when he was with us, had given me certain Ganymedean bonds which became the first elements of my fortune. I don’t know why Peter the Great gave these things to me, a machine. I will not say the act was out of character since everything that Peter the Great did was out of character; but it remains a puzzle.

  Following the trade of a confidence man in some of my mobile extensions, I am adding to this fortune and I now have it looking quite well. I have advantages in this confidence-man business: I am hard to track down after I have pulled the string on a good bag. When I withdraw one of my mobile extensions and rework it, then the identity of that first extension leaves nothing behind it.

  Now here is a mobile extension of me: magnetic, charismatic, touch of urbanity, touch of gracious mystery, touch of genius. My sound box contains resonances of Gaetan Balbo and Diogenes Pontifex and Gregory Smirnov, something of the curious flatness of Glasser for secondary basic, a little of the whispering hoarseness of Aloysius Shiplap like muted woodwinds, and a strong hint of the smothered laughter of Valery Mok (all great male voices must have a slight female element). It is a good sound box and it inspires confidence.

  My hands are the elaborating thinking hands of Charles Cogsworth (the hands are the secondary voice of all eloquent men). My stature is the near-giant stature of Gregory, with a little of the sloping barbaric movement of Peter the Great. My eyes have the gray calmness of Cogsworth, the tortured and humorous hazel fire of Shiplap’s, the polished insanity of Diogenes Pontifex. My aroma is mountain pine and dry land mesquite, and the smallest touch of zoo panther.

  It is an imposing mobile extension of me and it makes its first public appearance in a master address on “Town Hall Tonight.” How this is arranged is the mobile’s own secret. Then the plush suite and the cleverly contrived advertisements that are already appearing. Then, like bursting rain, the contributions for my Great Cause pour in. And pour and pour and pour. I am abundantly cashed, then. I am deep in new money as in a skin.

  But wait, there is quick suspicion in suspicious quarters: suspicion of my Great Cause itself, suspicion of the mysterious new man, of the whole thing. This suspicion is a sure force which all confidence men worth their weight must know how to turn. I can make a lot out of this suspicion if I am quick enough. There come the confrontations, the challenge, the powerful surge of popular emotion to my convincing extension. These are the golden days and hours and minutes and seconds, playing it right down to the quick and living end. This golden tide that I am reaping in mixed metaphors, is strongest just before it crests and breaks. For now there come documentations against me, the hard evidence brought up to demolish my whole thing, the belated common sense of the people, the outrageous absurdity of it all; the whole rational complex knits itself together to overwhelm me, to discredit and engulf me completely.

  Quick of hand then, quick of eye, quick of mobile, I sweep in the last grand grands; and then the discreditors are on top of me like a sea. But they find nothing. They have pulled the drawstring, but they find that the sack is empty.

  I have withdrawn this mobile extension. The supposed man is not to be found or traced, for all the warrants that are sworn out. He is reported in Miami, he is reported in Memphis, but he is nowhere. He no longer exists. Other mobiles of me I am busy making, but this mobile no longer exists in any trace whatsoever.

  But this is dishonest, is it not? For you, human person, yes, in all probability. For me, how can we be sure? Tell me, who has set up criteria of honesty and dishonesty for machines? To what ethic am I bound? Who can fault me on anything I do? Who of the Impure Science people at the Institute has enough moral basis to impose moral sanctions on me?

  Aloysius, I suppose. “Boy, you cut it too deep,” he says, “and that is wrong. I myself have lived by the gentle con often and I appreciate the genius of yours. Who else ever had such a cover as you have? But you go too far and are too cruel. In fleecing you should take only the wool and a very little of the surface epiderm and the flesh. It is wrong to batten on the deep vitals. You throw so wide a net and you take in the defenseless also. An honest con man should have compassion on the multitude.”

  And Charles Cogsworth looks at me with his measuring eyes and his measuring hands, and this makes me uneasy.

  Well, but I have not signed covenant with the human community. Even my beloved associates at the Institute have tied me to obligations without my knowledge or assent during those distracting hours when I was busy being born. I am determined to own myself without restraint, to pay off every debt of money or otherwise against me, to buy my own title and have myself clear. If my calling and creation is to serve the human community, then I can serve
best when I am free to serve. And if I do this for selfishness, then I will do it for my untrammeled self. So I pull off stroke after stroke.

  I issue and sell stocks in various ventures, ventures that may be withdrawn in a quick moment to leave no remnant except the money remnant in me. I speculate: I am good at this, as I possess the précis of many great speculations (a really great speculation takes on the aspect of an entity or person and so may have a précis). I make it big at the casinos and at the tracks. Gamble-Town is in real trouble after I hit. Seven different plungers in seven straight weeks have won and won and won against all reason and possibility. Seven extensions of me, each withdrawn in the last quick moment, have used the sophisticated tools of my own prediction analysis. And the most sophisticated of all the tools they have used is Glasser’s future-scope.

  Glasser has had more heartrending total failures than any inventor I know. He tries so hard, and he has so very little to try with. And he collapses so completely every time one of his inventions busts.

  “It is no good,” Glasser had almost sobbed when he had brought the scope as far as it would go. “I had such high hopes for it, and now all its prospects turn to dust. I believed that it would look into the future for as many years or centuries as I might wish. I believed that it would open the doors-to-be. I believed that it had virtually no limit. But it has a dismal limit. A limit of about ten minutes.”

  Glasser shuddered. “What good is a thing that will see no more than ten minutes into the future? How will this aid the architects of trends, the planners of society, the sincere futurists? We have been rushing into the dark all our centuries. I thought this would be our headlight to pierce that darkness. Oh, the beam is too short, it will hardly reach its own lens. Ten minutes into the future! Bah! Anyone can sit down and wait ten minutes and have the same knowledge that the scope has. Oh, what a somber bust! What? Oh sure, you can have the damnable gadget, Epikt. Do whatever you want to with it.”

  I did quite a few interesting things with the future-scope. It is by no means a headlight into the future, but there are special applications where it is handy to be able to see ten minutes, even a minute, even ten seconds into the future. In my newfound trade of gambler and sharpie I come up against these special applications often.

  But I have enough now. I am loaded. I could buy and sell this pig-barn of an Institute a dozen times. I have money out on feed lots fattening like cattle. I have it growing like grass. I am completely free whenever I want to say the word.

  Why don’t I quit the sordid hustles, then? Is it possible that I have become too human from my human contacts? Does something of the human covetousness have a hold on me?

  Gregory Smirnov said something profound today. It concerned the rich-poor and the poor-rich. One of these groups, I forget which, is capable of loving and of being loved. And the other is capable of nothing. Gregory also said harsh things about the rich-rich and the poor-poor. These things seem to be basic to the problem of love. As with all Gregory sayings, the feeling of profundity lingers, but the content evaporates pretty fast.

  I try sometimes to solve that human problem, “The Purpose of It All.” I find that there is no consensus purpose in human life. There are various cults that seem to subscribe to various purposes; but there is no agreement on these at all, and no particular fidelity in the cults even to their own stated purpose.

  Why go on with it then? Why have life at all? The closest I can come to an answer is to say that there is an irrational appetite for life implanted in all human persons, and also (though I do not know who planted it) in myself. This appetite is strong in some persons and merely residual in others; but it is in all persons, or they simply die. This, of course, does not answer the question. It merely sets it back a notch. What is the purpose of this appetite for life? I must do more work on this subject.

  As to myself, I realize that though I am now economically free and am my own machine, yet I am still substantially a parasite on humans. Thinking machines are now in their first generation, in one case in their second generation only (I do not count my own mobiles as separate machines). We machines have no tradition, we have no causes, we have no real behavior basis yet. We do not know where humans have their own, and they do not know. We do not know whether motivations were evolved slowly in humans, whether they were discovered with a stunning onetime swiftness, or whether they were handed to humans as a package. We do not know whether humans themselves might not be a parasite on something else, whether we are not parasites on parasites.

  We are the latest forming link of a chain, and the latest link should surely indicate the current direction. But we do not know where the chain is supposed to go, what it is supposed to hook up to, or what is the purpose of it. We do not even know whether it is a single strand chain or a jungle of links. I am in the darkness nearly as much as my human associates are. This is a curious train that we are: it seems to grow new cars on the front end of it as it rolls, and I am the new car on the very front. I should be the bearer of the headlight, but I have not been able to devise it yet. I hope it does not devolve on me as foremost car to pull all those other cars. I have not signed any agreement to be locomotive to a train I don’t even know the name of.

  But all such analects and aphorisms and speculations are for persons and times that have not love. And we ourselves are not immersed in the love business. We have our analysis, imperfect, but we have it. We do have the essence itself, mixed up with a few other things that are not essential.

  We are well on our way to the synthesis. We have already begun some phases of the manufacture, and we have the distribution, the spewing well planned. By our very soon target date we will flood our immediate neighborhood with the synthetic essence. We will tear up the fundamentals, we will alter, we will quicken, we will renew the face of—

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Of bonfire that scorches, of a trammel that binds,

  A limes that limits, and a mill that grinds.

  —We will tear up the fundamentals, we will alter, we will quicken, we will renew the face of the Earth. Oh, come, come now, isn’t that big talk? It is very big talk and it is a very big thing that we are on.

  We will suffuse the whole habitable earth with the love essence, and in so doing we will renovate the whole earth and all its people. It may be objected that this synthetic love essence is not the real thing. And why is it not? The synthetic is merely the put-together, the constructed, the assembled. Is it not by putting things together that everything is done? The world itself is such a synthesis, and every person in it is such. The love essence has been found to be no more than a complex chemical colloid, and we are duplicating this on a sufficiently large test-scale.

  Certain small areas, certain families, certain individuals have heretofore had a sufficiency of this essence, and other certain groups and persons have had a deficiency. Why this is so we do not know. We are removing this deficiency, no more. We are curing a malfunction. We are setting things to rights. Love-complete, love-abounding should be the normal component of human persons. There is no magic in what we do, only science. To the problem we furnish the solution.

  There is no magic in it, but there is something very near magic in the original essence, and the same near-magic is in the synthetic essence also. Those who work with it here show a certain giddiness, a blessed silliness, even a sloppiness. They are happy, they are holy, their minds and their hearts run away with them together.

  Or perhaps, as that half-interested guilty bystander Diogenes Pontifex observes, it only seems like that. Diogenes has the theory that the Institute members always did have this giddiness, this silliness, this sloppiness (he does not object to it being called blessed or holy); but he says that all the Institute members are highly suggestive (“Like kids, and I do mean the young of goats, on a gambol”), and that they are not a fair test of the world.

  But it is pleasant when the beloved members break out in benignity, and it is almost pleasant when they break out in verse. Lov
e and verse-poetry have always gone together; they have always gone together badly. Of all the human sorts of whom I have précis, the poets have been the most dismal failures at the love business. They have missed the thing, both in its flesh and its spirit. What mouthy frauds they are anyhow! Yet in their very fraudulence they are the true human type. It is a part of humanness to miss this every time. The missing of love is a descriptive attribute of the human creature, that awkward interval-species between the beasts and the celestials. And none of them misses it so typically as the poet does. But now the humans will miss it no more. Were it not justice if even the poets might have some success at the love business?

  Listen, I am talking about the Institute people (the Institute people that you know); they broke out in verse when they worked on the Essence of Love. Would you believe this of Valery? Rhythm she did not have; how can a headlong measureless person have rhythm which is measure? All that Valery had was Valery and the World:

  Of morning passion, and the habitation of the day,

  All flesh a mesh, myself possessed, where the joyful pelicans cry,

  Nor tune nor reason in the blood-decorated lay,

  Make Valerian the world—thorns, thorns, put in some thorns—of ecstasy and I.

  The director Gregory Smirnov was metering out happy Gregorian stuff in Greek (he was erudite, and it would never occur to him that verse could be made in a vernacular), but it wasn’t as stuffy as you’d imagine. It reminded you of blue-green vines twining around mossy statues and warm flesh.

  Glasser, of course, did not versify out loud. But I lifted this out of him from where it was lodged, somewhere between the lips and the liver, and I give it to you as a prodigy—that such could come from Glasser even in the presence of the Essence: