Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine

by R. A. Lafferty

  Farther than farthest, more fishy than sea,

  Comes the glad stumbling—directly to me.

  And even Charles Cogsworth—he could say things with his gray eyes, he could say things with his forming hands, but would you imagine that he could actually voice even a short verse?

  Pebbled and pearled

  To the aggregate Sky.

  So loved He the World.

  So love it I.

  And Aloysius Shiplap (no, you will not believe this), Aloysius, at work on the thing, was singing a high paean in honor of it. Well, it was high, but was it a paean? With Aloysius it is hard to tell. It was insincere on the surface, of course, but was there not something a little insincere about its insincerity?

  A Nation bug-bitten, and stumbled and stunken,

  By Essence besmitten, denatured and drunken,

  A strepto-damn-coccus, a Monster of Moxon,

  A hokus-in-locus, a boozy concoction,

  A razza-ma-tazza with whisky and mead in;

  (We are eyeless in Gaza and earless in Eden):

  To flout it is futile, to dam it or dike it;

  We’re all on a tootle. It’s Love, if you like it.

  And I myself made verse, quite the best verse of any of them, in my inner code. Is this important evidence of the working of love-abounding, or does it only seem like it? Valery had always been in love with everything anyhow. How is she a test? I will not tell her so, but a little bit of herself had been put into the Essence. Gregory, in his giant’s privacy, had been known to play the violin at night, and also to turn Greek tropes. Glasser, of course, had never been heard to versify, but I had not thought to plumb his depths before. Charles Cogsworth sometimes made little woodcarvings that were very like his little verse. Likely they had all had that love stuff in them always, but it surely had never burst out like this before.

  Can we even bring reason into the discussion of this, or shall we leave it irrational?

  “I suspect that we will not come to the drama itself,” Aloysius said. “You will never know how I wish that we might come to it. You do not understand that I do not mock the thing itself, that I mock the deformities of it. Now I begin to love even its deformities. But I believe that we will play out our lives in the lesser piece tentatively named ‘Preludes to Love’; I don’t believe that the main drama has been completed yet.”

  “But can we trust God to complete it or compose it?” Valery demanded. “He has spoiled so many things with that God-Awful humor of his. He is light-minded in all the wrong places. I believe that we had better do this ourselves. It is the drama itself. It is not named ‘Preludes to Love’; it is named ‘Love-Complete and Abounding’; it is the Drama Itself if I insist that it is.”

  These are truly peculiar people to work with, but I would not trade them for any others I have known.

  In our previous study of the coat-of-arms of the Balbo family (it is actually the coat-of-arms of the always-emerging World; it must have been for some heroic service that it was given to the Balbo family) we discovered that it contained a palimpsest at the Center, and that it goes far deeper than does Gaetan Balbo himself. We found that the name in the Center was not truly El Brusco, the brusk or the sudden one. That was a new and written-over name and meaning, scarcely three hundred years old. The Leader as the most Central Thing is neither old nor valid.

  But going deeper we discovered that the older name in the Center was Brusca or La Brusca, which is the brushwood plant, the love-wood, the brush-fire, the Burning Bush. This is the kindle and light of the world. It is Love-Complete. It is Love-Abounding, the Center thing of the World. And we come to it now.

  “—and at a still deeper and older level we discover—” Be quiet, my under-mind! We will not concern ourselves with any such primeval rock scrawlings, not when we have hold of the Central Thing Itself.

  “It is, it is the thing itself,” I insist to myself. I am caught up in this movement as much as the human persons are.

  “Why ain’t I scared, then?” Snake whispered loudly. “It’s been written that I’d be in a panic if it really came. Nah, it isn’t the thing itself.”

  I hadn’t known that Snake was listening to my thoughts, but Snake is always listening. Snakes are supposed to have poor hearing, but that isn’t true of Snake.

  “Why should anyone be in a panic when the greatest thing in the world arrives or returns?” I ask. “We come to the age of benignity, of beatitude.”

  “This sawdust doll you’ve stuck in with me, is she named Mary Sorrows?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” I tell him. “Where did you get an impossible name like that? Snake, you are not with it. What name is given to the symbol-figure will develop in time, or maybe she will remain nameless. But the thing that is happening in the world, Snake, is named Love-Complete.”

  “Why ain’t I scared, then?” Snake asks again. “Nah, it isn’t the real thing.”

  “Better order another tank-car-full of sulphuric acid, Glasser,” Gregory Smirnov says. “We’re using an awful lot of it.”

  “It’s already ordered, Gregory,” the careful Glasser says. “It’ll be spotted on the side track in the morning.”

  Well, why is it strange that we should use so much sulphuric acid in synthesizing the Essence of Love? The Essence is only a complex chemical colloid. We use other chemicals in tank-car lots for the synthesis, too. It’s getting a little expensive. The Institute has run out of money. I knew they would. The Institute people are an improvident and careless bunch. And several of the continuing funds that Gaetan Balbo had settled on them didn’t have much meat on them. I am picking up the tab now and it pleases me. It confirms my freedom, and their dependence on me.

  And it may be for only a short while that this support is needed. Nobody can see far enough into the future to predict it, but it is very possible that money will go out of use entirely as the age of Love-Complete and Love-Abounding is ushered in.

  Suddenly I have compassion on Snake. Is this proof of the Love-Complete in me? This comes in a quick morning dream. (Do machines dream? Certainly, certainly, they may; they may set up a dream-level in themselves; the technique is well known—to me at least.) I have quick dreams of Snake dying in noisome mud or in a caving-in pool of petroleum or sulphur waste. And Snake is in a panic of dying.

  The Snake is the only animal who is even in panic of dying; he is the only animal who fears annihilation; he is the only one who has enough of the spirit in him for annihilation to matter and yet has not the prospect of promise of survival or second life.

  And Snake, who has been smashed near to death on the flinty littoral of the pungent pool cannot now get out of this morass. He is knocked back in, he is pushed down into the bottomless sludge by a stick named virga in hands I can’t see. His head is bruised and burst, his eyes are torn and hanging. He is drowning in the foulness. (One does not usually think of snakes as drowning, or as bothered by foulness.)

  “Compassion, compassion!” I cry to whomever (the one I cannot see) is killing Snake.

  “If her name is Mary Compassion, then I’m lost,” Snake says muddily. His gaped mouth is full of mud, his broken eyes are filled with the stenchy mud. His smashed head disappears under the annihilating and panic slime.

  I awaken, as they say, in a cold sweat (I intuit cold sweat). Myself am in panic and I rush to check on Snake. But he is alive and unharmed, as snakey and noisome as ever.

  “Nah, it isn’t the real thing,” he says, as he said yesterday. “Why am I not scared if it is the real thing? Where in scripture do you find mention of a sawdust doll?”

  “I have no conception of what you are talking about,” I issue with that stiffness that Snake often inspires in me.

  “If her name is Mary Conception, then I am lost,” he says, lifting the word out of my mouth. “But I sure am not lost if her name is Mary Sawdust.”

  “Why have you this obsession for names?” I ask him, not really caring, not caring for his welfare now. “What does it ma
tter what her name is?”

  “Her name is Legion,” Snake says, “but she isn’t this sawdust doll. Nah, it isn’t the real thing.” And he made a dirty noise.

  So by one criterion, which I do not accept, this isn’t the real thing happening. Snake said one time that I wouldn’t love validly till I was able to love his repulsiveness. I have not loved him or his quality, except briefly there when I was half asleep, so by that test our project is false. But Snake isn’t making the rules of this game.

  Incidentally, the “woman,” the symbol, lags far behind reality, and she is supposed to be the forerunner to it. But she cannot run ahead (we haven’t made any feet for her yet, there is some difficulty about the feet); she cannot see or presage (we haven’t made any eyes for her). Well, she will have them or she will not. First things first. A new tank-car-full of sulphuric acid is on the side track this morning and all’s right with the world.

  Really, I should give up my gamy dreams, but instead I am constructing four more experimental dream-levels in myself. I wish to find out all that I can about these states.

  Question: Is Snake a universally valid snake? Or is he merely a Judeo-Christian concept snake?

  Startling question: Am I myself a universally valid Ktistec, or am I a limited concept machine?

  At dawn of the first day of the Love Era we began to spew the Essence into our town. This is our first target area, the test-plot of the world. Never has one year been so fortunate as to have two such events, my own birth earlier in the year, and now the renovation of the world. This is the beginning of the beatific era.

  We have fifty nozzles set up on the high ridges around the town, and the conditions are perfect for test-day. The morning is calm. The only air movement is off of these same ridges and gently down into the town. We will get good coverage.

  “Ah, we had better take it a little easy at first,” our great director Gregory says with happy unease. “There is likely to be such an explosion of goodness that someone may unwittingly be hurt. Gently, gently.”

  “No, no, violently, violently,” Valery cried in the violence of her love. “Full speed ahead. All out with the second creation! We’ll have no 99 percent effort here.”

  Gregory, Glasser, Cogsworth, Aloysius each mans a nozzle, and Valery womans one. (I’ve been told that I’m over-precise in my diction.) The other forty-five nozzles are handled by forty-five hasty-made extensions of myself. We nozzle the Love Essence down into the town and we are all happy-eyed with the wonder of it. In thirty minutes we have completely saturated the area with the invisible impregnating essence. Then we will wait for the world-expanding results.

  “It’s early yet,” Gregory says. “The people are still asleep. But we can presume that there is now a new dimension in their sleep. They sleep, surely, with fresh beauty and clarity, and they will awake to benevolence.”

  It is great to be alive, it is great to be a part of this. We are honored to be the high factors in the event, and we honor the world and Our Town by our doings. Our Town, of course, has always been much better than other towns. Now it becomes the privileged first. It had already contained three families and five singletons possessed of love-in-balance (well above average for its population); and today Our Town will become, for the first time, normal, as it was meant to be, uninhibitively loaded with Love-Abounding.

  “You can already notice the new depth and meaning and sweetness of the chittering of the birds,” Gregory says.

  “No, the birds are always glad in the mornings,” Aloysius contradicts, but I have never seen Aloysius himself looking so glad. “You guys just never get up early enough to hear them.”

  “The grass is greener,” Valery says. “And look, see there: two blades are growing where one grew before. The trees are leafier, the roads are whiter, the houses down there are shinier, such cars as are moving in the streets—”

  “—are carsier,” Aloysius said. “No doubt about it. This should not affect inanimate objects, though. It is all in your eyes, Valery.”

  “May the scales fall from your own eyes, Aloysius, and that quickly,” Valery said. “Do you not know that, especially in the new recension, there are no such things as inanimate objects? All are alive and loving. Can’t you feel it? Can’t you feel the difference?”

  “We will give it a few more minutes to work,” Gregory said.

  “We have made a bonfire in the world,” Valery chirped now like a mad canary. “Oh, let it scorch us all! Don’t you just love the holy scorching? Oh, here comes Diogenes in the distance! It’s bit him, too. I bet it’s got to him. Just imagine that sleek bull filled up to the top chuck with solid love!”

  “I will reserve judgment on that for the moment,” Charles Cogsworth grinned, but there was no doubt that Charles was Charlier this morning. He was happy and expectant.

  “Epikt, ah—one of you Epikts, who is the main one?” Gregory began. “Can you give us some sort of preliminary reading yet?”

  “Back to the potting shed, fellows,” I said, taking charge in one of my extensions and dismissing the others. “Let me tune into my main brain and see what I have there. I believe that I have been on instruments there for some time. Ah, triumph, the leading edge of triumph. I have to put it on to minute focus, but it does give a reading. It is very low yet, very low, but it is working.”

  “It has only been a half-hour,” Glasser said hopefully.

  “But it should be instantaneous,” Aloysius protested. “It isn’t going quite like it should.”

  “Should we spray more of the stuff down there, Epikt?” Gregory asked.

  “No. We have total saturation now, have had from the first,” I told him. “It is absolutely permeating. It will recognize no physical obstacle after its first release. And it is too weak, many times too weak for its total strength.”

  Diogenes Pontifex came up to us then, his intricate and sleek face beaming as always.

  “What’s up, folks?” he asks. “What could get the whole clutch of you up so early? There’s something new in the air.”

  “Oh, see, he senses it,” Valery beamed, her happy eyes popping out like Niagara grapes. “But don’t tell him what it is. Make him guess.”

  I must emphasize that Diogenes Pontifex is not a member of the Institute. He, more even than Audifax O’Hanlon, is barred by the minimal decency rule. He is out of bounds in all ways, some good and some bad. We are all of us continually amazed at his mind. He is concatenated genius itself, but he had been doubtful of our present project, from what little he had heard of it.

  “There is some new impurity in the air,” Diogenes said. “I’d better go back and set my machine to clear it out. I thought I’d whipped the air impurity business for this area a year ago.”

  “You turn your machine on this and I’ll kill you, Diogenes,” Valery said with loving mouth and twitching fingers.

  “Oh, Diogenes can do it no harm,” Gregory maintained. “His machine will discern. This is not an impurity, Diogenes. It is the return of purity itself. Smell it. Savor it. Let it impregnate your mind. Diogenes, you are present at a historic moment.”

  “I always am,” Diogenes grinned. “I only wish that everybody had the knack of it. No, I guess now that it isn’t really harmful. The hay-fever sufferers will suffer a little, but I wouldn’t want to take that away from them; it will remind them, faintly, of the good old days. Well, what is the stuff, little walleyed Valery?”

  “Diogenes, look at the moss there,” Valery ordered. “Does it not appear somehow different to you?”

  “Mauser’s moss blight, of course. I could cure it if there were any particular clamor to do so. But I believe the moss is a little bettered by the change; there are interesting patterns to the disease. It’s a little like persons afflicted with love. The affliction really makes them more, ah, ah, is that what you’re all up to? Is this the love-dust day? Oh, I suppose it will do no harm. What a shame that you kids will have to grow up someday.”

  “I suppose we may as well go down
into the town and observe the effects directly,” Gregory said.

  We went down into the town. There were no effects to be observed directly. There was only our target area: random people in random houses and random streets.

  “Of course we have neither statistical basis nor positive value criterion nor index-analysis,” Gregory observed.

  “Oh, yeah, I’ve put together a rough set of them,” I issue.

  There is a man and a woman on the walkway; I would have to describe them as congenial-appearing crabs.

  “Are you two married to each other?” Gregory asked them lovingly.

  “Got to be,” the man said. “Who else would have us?”

  “Do you not feel this morning a great new outpouring of love” —Valery circled on them with the rising intonation of a whirlwind— “—toward each other, toward everybody, toward every object whatsoever?”

  “Now that you mention it, why no, not particularly, sis,” the woman said.

  “But you are bubbling up with something new,” Valery insisted; “surely you are both bubbling over.”

  “Naw, Bubbles, I don’t bubble,” the man said.

  “Oh, but a bonfire is lighted in you,” Valery burned on, her tongue flicking like Pentecostal flame.

  “Got to be going,” the man said, “see you, sis.” (Valery was still a whirlwind, but now one that had blown a little dust into her own eyes.)

  “It hasn’t been nearly short enough,” the woman said; “see you, Bubbles.” And they moved off with what Valery had once called “Ah, that sweet dull-sharpness” in their eyes. I trailed a sensor after the couple.

  “You know the female nut? Is she really named Bubbles?” the man asked the wife.

  “I’ve heard her around,” the wife said, “I think they call her Valerrona of Pig-Barn Manor.”

  “Aw, Saramantha, you know nobody’s named that.”

  “Really, Renault, they do call her something like that,” the woman trailed off.