Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Is that capable of analysis?” Gregory asked me doubtfully.

  “Oh, yes,” I issue. “In fact it indicates a steep local upturn. It’s about balanced by others, though.” We multiply incidents and encounters. It will keep the human members harmlessly occupied while I take the true statistical profile.

  “Let’s go down to Lean Eagle Street,” Aloysius suggested. “That’s the test.” So we went with some trepidation. The thing about Lean Eagle Street was that it hadn’t modern ways. The kids there were mean, and with an old-fashioned meanness. The ground around the houses was bare and scraggled and rocky, not grassed and parklike and kempt in the modern spirit. Rocky it was in Lean Eagle Street: a person could get a real trauma from the rocks there.

  “As I remember it here, you got to sort of roll your nape up to protect your head,” Aloysius said, “and the gift of bi-location helps.” The fact is that there were, there had always been, a bunch of rock-throwing kids in Lean Eagle Street. But at the moment it was quiet.

  “It really does seem like a new Lean Eagle Street and a new Earth,” Charles Cogsworth smiled. “The spotted hyena lies down with the cony. The kids have a sort of hooded love in their eyes, and their fangs are sheathed for the moment.” Then Charles Cogsworth received a sudden trauma in the back of the head, “kloonk,” from a nice fist-sized rock. Glasser received one in the jaw, and really there wasn’t much jaw to him.

  Then it was fast and happy for several minutes. I activated a rock-throwing mechanism in myself. Aloysius and Valery had both been this way before; and Cogsworth was capable in a big-handed way when he rolled bloodily to his feet again. We sent those rock-throwing kids to cover.

  “But it has failed!” Valery wailed. “Oh, it was fun for a moment, but it’s just like it was when I was a kid. There’s no new love kindled in them. The little buggers are just as mean as they ever were. Where is the total transformation?”

  “I believe they’re throwing a little bit softer rocks than they used to,” Charles Cogsworth said hopefully.

  “Oh, I think so, too,” Valery flung to it. “I’m sure of it. Much softer rocks. It’s true. Love is transforming everything after all.”

  “Epikt,” Gregory whispered to me privately, “we aren’t getting anywhere, are we?” Gregory had an open rock-trauma on his left cheek and it was bleeding nicely.

  “Certainly we’re getting somewhere,” I issued. “The investigation is coming along nicely.”

  “But these are all intangibles,” the giant puzzled, “and, really, we have no way to record them or compare them, and we do not know what they were before this transforming morning.”

  “Oh, come off it, Gregory,” I issue. “I’ve got good précis on every twist and turning of this town, on every person and poppy that inhabits it. And I’m busy now extracting updated précis. I recalled the other forty-four extensions before they got to the potting shed and put them to work on it. A few thousand adjusted précis are all I need. Then I will superimpose them upon the old and note the coefficient of non-coincidence. I can give you results at any moment, but I believe it is better to wait till the fall of day.”

  “Ah, and what will we humans do in the meanwhile, Epikt?”

  “Watch and pray, gentle Gregory, it’s sure going to need it.” So went the day.

  We gathered together, and O’Hanlon and Pontifex joined us, in a café just before dusk.

  “It’s a shame that you kids will have to grow up someday,” Diogenes Pontifex said again.

  “I could have told you that you were taking it by the blade instead of the handle,” Audifax O’Hanlon said. “You’re doing nothing at all by reintroducing that virus. That handle you’re waving won’t cut.”

  “Oh, yes, we could wave globs of hot butter and cut with them,” Valery stated. “We can cut and move anything with anything. We will infuse with the Love Essence, and love will bloom again.”

  “Oh, it’s been blooming all the while, in a crippled sort of way,” Diogenes spoke. Why do I always assume that Diogenes is mocking? It’s just the way his face and his mind are made, just the striking appearance of his rediscovered youth. Diogenes is the archaic youth just dug up out of Cretan sands or Cappadocian clays, and glinting the brighter colors for having just returned to sunlight.

  “How has it been blooming all the while?” Gregory asked.

  “The love disease has been endemic in mankind for many millennia,” Audifax said. “And naturally and wisely (with its cellular wisdom) the human apparatus has built up immunity to it. You are parading your futility when you try to reintroduce the already balked and nativized virus which has long ago come to tolerable terms with its immunity. I could devise a ‘cide’ to kill the immunity, of course. Diogenes could do it as easily. Even Epikt here could do it. But it wouldn’t be wise to kill this adjusted immunity.”

  “But love is the great motivator of the world!” Valery confronted. “It must not be immunized or modified or sheathed.”

  “And fire is the great heater of the world,” Diogenes cut in, “and very often it must be modified and sheathed. After all, these are but two of the many names for the same thing. In another time, in another place, after the sanctification, this sheathing may not be necessary. But now it is.”

  “But all fire and all everything is contained in love”—Valery still held fast—“and today is the day of the sanctification. Love is everything. There is nothing like true love.”

  “Oh, yes, false love is very like it, Valery,” Audifax said. “And I do not mean the dishonestly false: but the honest, naturally false, sublunar sort which is all that we have as yet. And that is not everything. It is part and part only; as we ourselves are part only.”

  “Oh, blather-lather!” Valery shooshed them.

  “Shut up, Pontifex, shut up, O’Hanlon,” Gregory Smirnov ordered. “Let us get on with it, Epikt. It has come on sundown. Make a pronouncement.”

  “That hopefully we may not learn too much from this our second great mistake,” I pronounced. “For a second time we have made a mistake that isn’t entirely mistaken.”

  “The results, Epikt, not the shallow profundities!” Gregory thundered harshly, almost like the old-time Gregory before the Love Essence. “You indicated a positive trend.”

  “Oh, absolutely. It comes now, it comes,” I issue. “I am working quite closely with the data-interchange of my main brain.”

  “How long till the essence has 90 percent effect?” Valery asked confidently.

  “Let us drop the percent a little to get a more accurate and shorter-term estimate,” I suggested. “My main brain is now exploring much smaller effect percent.”

  “How long till 50 percent then?” Glasser asked with clouding doubt.

  “We are still on too coarse a scale,” I issued. “For the sake of accuracy let us reduce it a little more.”

  “How long till a 20 percent effect?” Charles Cogsworth ventured.

  “Epikt, how long till a 5 percent effect?” Gregory Smirnov asked gently.

  “It’s a shame that you kids have to start growing up today,” Diogenes smiled sadly.

  “Aw, porcupine juice, how long till the Love Essence will have a one-tenth of 1 percent effect, assuming continuous maximum coverage all the while?” Aloysius demanded.

  “Two hundred and forty-five thousand years and a bit,” I announced. Everyone seemed to give a collective sigh, and then to ante something into the collective silence.

  “Why, that’s hardly any time at all,” Valery said, after quite a long time, “and for such a big percent, too. It’s a mere day after tomorrow. Look at the little mill down at the bottom of the ocean that grinds out the salt; look how long it’s been—

  CHAPTER NINE

  Of sudden arrival, and crystalline flame,

  Over the edges and out of the frame.

  “—Look at the little mill down at the bottom of the ocean that grinds out the salt; look how long it’s been grinding it out. I bet it didn’t get any one-tenth of
1 percent saltiness in any hundred and forty-five thousand years. But it kept grinding, and look how salty it’s got the water now!”

  We realize, however, and even Valery will come to realize, that our adventure with the Love Essence was not an unqualified success. In fact, it will have to go down as the second of our great failures.

  But how did I know in the beginning, while I was yet in the act of being born, that there would be three great failures? At that time I had no information or context except that to be found in the minds of the Institute members. How did Gregory in that beginning know of the three failures, though he called them the three tasks? And how were Valery and Aloysius and Cecil Corn able to take them out of his mouth before he uttered them? A leader, a love, a liaison. Why did they have to be failures, though each was first seen as success and nothing seen beyond it? Why are we lucky that we do not learn too much from these failures? And why does it not matter too much that they are failures? What have we to show for these first two mistakes that were not entirely mistaken?

  All that I seem to have inside me are a surly snake and a sawdust doll. The snake is clammy and pungent, and it is doing contrary work. But he is intelligent; some days he seems to be the only intelligent person I have to talk to. He is the adversary, but he does keep the issues clear and the arena cleaned of trash. The confusing trash, the unessentials, he withers away with his contempt. And the sawdust doll is rather attractive and likable, with a dreamy quality like morning mist, and a possibility of growth. Snake says that she is pregnant, and he sniggers when he says it. But she has no feet as yet, and she has no eyes. And no name.

  Anyhow, it is not a question of love failing, but of ourselves having got hold of only a very small piece of it. Diogenes says that we didn’t have the Love Essence at all but only one of the boxes that it sometimes comes in. Charles Cogsworth says that love is only one of the many names of God, and why had he forgotten that for a while? Valery says that love is only one of the many names for everything and that she hadn’t forgotten it. The Late Cecil Corn hadn’t taken a very active part in our manipulation of the Love Essence. He says that, when you yourself are reduced to essence only, you come to have a clearer understanding of what essence is and what it is not.

  But onward and upward, brave people, with our figurative swords raised in a very real salute. On to the third thing, on to the third! And we have no idea what it is.

  In the third and deepest writing of the palimpsest center of the Balbo coat-of-arms there is the name Labrusca. It means the wild-wine, and what does the wild-wine mean? Aloysius is toying with a name from the Old English period. This name may be Eosterwin, and it may mean Easterwine, or it may mean East-Wind. What has that to do with this? What has that to do with anything?

  And Valery just flashed me one of those grins of hers that should be unlawful.

  “How about pickles and ice cream, Epikt?” she says. Even in my most humanoid mobile would I want something like that? And when I catch her meaning I am even more dumbfounded. Oh, no, not that again! Surely I will not conceive a third meaningless monster! There is no understanding this curious interplay of which I am a part. Somewhere there is a third party to myself and the human mesh. And as to humans, I understand them scarcely better than they understand themselves.

  Most of my human associates say that my way of seeing humans is fanciful and unreal, that I see human persons as myth figures or archetypes. And I say that their way of seeing themselves is fanciful and unreal, and that my way of seeing them is at least in the direction of reality. I believe this is because humans have high-speed rotation nowhere in their make-up. They are low-speed creatures, and they cannot see in motion at all. By being low-speed persons, they miss fifty-nine sixtieths of the reality. Humans hit about one frame in sixty, and if the pattern is a rapid one they miss that pattern entirely.

  There is nothing fanciful about the high-speed rotation, the near total view that I use. It is the simplified strobe-view of the limited humans that is fanciful, even when it is the view of themselves. For humans, not being able to see in motion, which is not being able to see live, use for their view a mosaic of the sixtieth fragments; they do not even know that there are gaps in their images, even when they are almost all gap. And their flickering strobe picture will often have no connection with reality: it may be like the conjunction of mountain slopes which, from a distance and in a certain light, may seem to resemble the face of a man, but will have no real counterpart. So the humans sometimes accuse me of putting things in. I do not put things in; it is humans who leave almost everything out.

  I will illustrate this in a moment. I will discuss a character, one who comes very near to joining us at the Institute. I will show him as he is. And I will show him as he seems to be to humans.

  “The Institute is becoming a little ingrown,” our director Gregory said. “We do not need more members (we have perfection in our present membership); but it may be that we need more acquaintances, or that we should establish closer ties with those we have.”

  “Outside of those men that Aloysius plays poker with once a week, the total of acquaintances of all the members of the Institute is two,” Valery said. “Two people; that’s really all the people we know beyond ourselves. Which one of the two do you think we ought to get to know better, Gregory?”

  “Surely there are more than two,” Gregory hazarded, with the air of a man who couldn’t think of even one.

  “No, two’s all,” Charles Cogsworth said. “We may be exclusive, not by our own choosing, but by the world’s choosing. Yes, I say that we should open up a little, if any one of us knows how.”

  Diogenes Pontifex is a brightly colored ceramic bull. That’s exactly what he is, but humans, with their limited strobe vision, are likely to see him as something else.

  “I don’t know how,” Valery said, “but I’ll try. I’ll even try to know Diogenes. I really ought to learn to know people. There’s about a dozen little redheaded girls in my block and I don’t know any of them. Every morning when I go by there’s one of them out on her front stoop. She always says ‘Good morning, Miss Valery.’ Isn’t that friendly?” There was really only one little redheaded girl in Valery’s block, but Valery who saw the world with different eyes every day always saw the little girl as different. And she never came to know her at all.

  Diogenes Pontifex is a curled and absolutely elegant bull. Get that fact in your tight little head and hold on to it.

  Valery had had trouble with even the people she should have known well. “Who is that man?” she had asked her mother some years before when Charles Cogsworth had talked to them for a while in the street. “He is Charles, the man you are going to marry. What’s the matter with you?” the mother had said crossly. “Well, he certainly looks different today, doesn’t he?” Valery said. “No, he doesn’t. He looks just the same as always,” the mother had said still more crossly.

  And it was Diogenes who recalled some odd words that Valery had said on the morning of her wedding. “ ‘You are Charles Cogsworth?’ That’s what Valery said. ‘Well, I sure had it in my mind that Cogsworth was one of the other fellows. If you’ve sure that you’re Charles I guess we may as well go ahead with it though.’ ”

  “Oh, Diogenes,” Valery had said. “I know that’s what I said that morning, but I didn’t mean it quite the way you try to make me mean it. I knew who he was. I just saw him a little bit different than I had ever seen him before. He did look different that morning.”

  “No, he looked just the same as always.”

  Diogenes is a man-form bull, a prophetic Matthew-man and Luke-bull. And he is of ceramic, of a sophisticated firing and an almost too-bright-for-life coloring.

  It was for insistence on this peculiar ceramic form that Diogenes had been bounced from the Archeologists’ Club. He had, it was charged plainly against him, faked ancient statuettes and tablets. “They could not be,” it was stated; “the technique is several thousand years too modern.” “Oh, they’re authenti
c,” Diogenes had defended himself, “absolutely. We used to do them that way, we used to do them that way all the time.”

  “And the diggings are suspect,” the accusers said. “All of them, in Etruria, or Magna Graecia, or Crete, or Cappadocia, or Gaza are suspect. How was it that Pontifex, in every case, was able to point out the spot for digging instantly? Always it was an unlikely spot, and always the ceramics were found at once, deep enough in strata but quite unencumbered by earth or aging?”

  “Oh, I buried a lot of them myself,” Diogenes said, “and I watched most of the others being buried. We knew that cataclysm was due. Why shouldn’t I know where to dig up things that I had buried?” “A confession!” the accusers howled. “We have you cold.” But Diogenes hadn’t meant that he had buried them in modern centuries.

  A thought comes to me: is not the bull an odd symbol for liaison, for linkage, for communication? And another thought comes to me: is not much symbolism improbable? How is the bickering dove a symbol of peace? And how is that same mumbling songless bird to be linked with tongues-of-fire? How is the most fierce of stallions, the unicorn, the symbol of chastity? How is the cold-blood fish a symbol of the blood of Christ? And how is the eagle, a scavenger and sky-skulker, frightened of shrikes and terrified of king-birds, a symbol of nobility?

  Now I, in my own profound way, realize why each of these symbols is valid. Symbolism is thought of by humans as a simplifying: but it is the total complexity, the all-containing nest from which all lesser “realities” are hatched. It is these daily-seen “realities” that are simplifications, so thin that you can see through them. Humans, with their strobe-vision that leaves almost everything out, have no way of seeing the basic validity. And yet it was by humans that each of these symbols was selected.

  So it is with the bull, the prophetic-mouthed, goldenvoiced bull, the communication, the liaison, the linkage, the full brother of the Wild-Wine.