So he was on to one of them as he came up over a ledge! He pinned it with a snake-pinner. He turned it over on its writhing back. Doggedly he recorded the pattern of striations and botches on its belly. But he was trembling and quivering. He was deathly afraid of the things.
He continued to climb. He was afraid of heights also, and the cliffs were very high and sheer. He pinned two more of the writhers and recorded their belly marks. Then he indulged himself in a jolting swallow of snake-bite remedy.
“It’s an unusual place to write messages,” he said, “on a snake’s belly. But perhaps it is a logical place to write hidden messages. If I were a Power looming above the world, where on the world would I write messages that might not be immediately discovered? Why not on the hidden side of an object that has a certain repulsiveness? Who will investigate it willingly? The instructions that we are seeking have certainly been well hidden so far, if they exist. Just where on Earth, or off it, would be a good hiding place for such messages? This isn’t a bad place, not for them to remain hidden.”
There was rank odor above Glasser, so extreme as to be hardly authentic. It might be a large and dangerous serpent. Glasser’s teeth rattled like dice in his mouth. The very lights were scared out of him, but he was a member of the Institute, and Institute members were accustomed to outrageous investigations. Anything for Impure Science!
“Ah, well, the starker the snake the stronger the message, perhaps,” he rationalized. “And it’s important to me and to all of us to find out just what shape we are in.”
Doggedly fearful, Glasser came up over the next ledge and pinned the big snake before his spirit should fail him. He was hit by staccato quivering and withering shock that nearly tore his arm off. It was a mighty snake and he pinned it with difficulty.
The snake’s eyes glittered with evil humor. They were the eyes of someone he knew, but Glasser didn’t know any snakes personally, except Snake. And this one was something like, but it was not Snake.
And the dirgelike tune that the snake was whistling was unnerving. Well, there is a South American snake with a whistlelike hiss, but this shouldn’t have been a South American snake. With great effort Glasser turned the monstrous thing over.
“Ever feel like crawling under one, Glass?” the words erupted on the snake’s belly.
“Oh, damn you, Epikt, you idiot machine!” Glasser burst out angrily. (I’m a card, I tell you, I’m a clown, I’m a character, and Glasser’s fright broke me up completely. Valery said once that she counted as one of the blessings of her life knowing a machine that giggled.) “Oh, stop it, Epikt, it isn’t that funny!” Glasser swore furiously. Well, Glasser’s own fright and fury pattern had entered the data, and perhaps it was as valuable as any other item. Then he sighed all the way to the hollow middle of him: “Epikt, you’re a natural snake, you’re a snake from the beginning, you’re a perverted legless mechanism. But what is it about snakes, Epikt, what is it? Why isn’t a fish weird like a snake? It lacks the same appendages. Epikt, is there any possibility at all that this data will be of value?”
Glasser gestured hopelessly. Well, maybe the pattern, when we found it, would be a pattern of hopelessness.
“Sure is a slim chance, Glass, sure is slim,” the words wrote themselves on the snake’s belly. “And a fish isn’t weird, Glasser, because he’s fishy—a much more profound quality.”
Myself the Ktistec machine always liked to make these extensions of myself to keep abreast of the field work when the Institute people were collecting wild data, especially when (as in the present case) I myself had selected the impossible fields of study by rogue-random calculation. My main brain of course, remained back at the Institute (it itself is of building-sized bulk) but these runners of myself with which I have so much fun are likely to turn up anywhere. And you should have seen me this time. I do make a good snake.
“It’s so frustrating, Epikt,” Glasser complained, and I almost broke up again to see him standing and talking down awkwardly to the snake that he hated, even though he knew it was myself, whom he rather liked. “In all the years of man, in all the years of rocks, in all the years of orbs, nobody has ever found the pattern or shape of it. And we can’t know the pattern and shape of ourselves till we know it of the larger thing. The easy answer, the spherical answer, has always been given, but there is something the matter with the answer. There’s something too finished about a sphere—unless it bursts.”
“Stay with it, Glasser,” I flashed the words on the belly of my snake-extension. “We may find that it is an inside-out pattern. We may find the pattern in our failures and omissions. We may see it in the reverse shape of our blindness. Now I will unmake myself here, and I will go and be a rampant ram to meet the Valery person.”
I disappeared before his eyes and he shivered. The only thing more disquieting than coming on a snake suddenly is to have one disappear suddenly into nothing.
Glasser continued to climb up the gypsum cliffs. He found a gravid adder on a high sun-warmed ledge, pinned her, slit her open, and recorded the belly marks of the seven unborn crawlers. This might be important. The unborn may carry messages from before or outside the worlds. It was important. Certain of the markings faded almost immediately. If he had not caught them then they would never have been caught. Glasser also recorded the markings on the cauls that adhered to several of the unborn. This is a place where, perhaps, nobody had ever thought to look for a message before: on the bluish cauls of unborn snakes.
“Therefore think him a serpent’s egg … And kill him in the shell.” The words were flashed subliminally on Glasser’s unconscious, but the recorder recorded them. But the adders of the gypsum cliffs were live-bearing snakes, a few of them having cauls only in remembrance of shells. Whence this strong under-vision of great broken shells? Even of oviparous snakes, the eggs are rubbery. But the vision recorded out of Glasser’s mind, but not known to him consciously, was of people-shells and not of snake-eggshells. Still more strange: even of oviparous people, the eggs are rubbery. (See the old tome De Miraculi by Quaesitor.)
When you have looked in all sane places for the answer, for the message, the shape and pattern, then you may as well look in the insane places. Institute members were out now trying to read patterns and shapes in the fluorescence of sea-lice, in snail-slime patterns, in the cross sections of marrow of rock-badger bones, in paddle-fish trails, in nine-year flightway designs, in constellations, in ballads (especially in roundels which never do find their own round), in the polterghostly unbalance of a hiatus-human species known as the adolescents, in the cross-timbers, in spark-worm responses. Nobody could say that they didn’t look everywhere for the messages, if indeed there were any.
Several miles away from Glasser, in another part of the glob-form subject, Valery Mok was undertaking her own investigations with a little more liveliness. She wasn’t scared of snakes, she wasn’t scared of anything, and there was nothing in the whole buggy world that would make Valery ill. Of her several assignments, she had begun with hunting out mares’ nests. Their significance is in folk-colloquy, so it may be in fact. But a mare’s nest is usually no more than a circle of trampled grass in a thicket of small trees. Still, Valery recorded all that she might find in them. It was more than most persons would find. A shape or pattern might adhere to these places. There was something that adhered strongly.
“A habitation of dragons and a court of owls” reflected on her under-mind too rapidly for her mind itself to know. But not too rapidly for the recorder. In these little closes of runt cedar trees and sumac bushes Valery sensed and recorded a vestige of something older: Pan-Demonium. Before there had been mares’ nests there had been these old holds of the cloven-hoofs, of all horned and hoofed creatures, and of their double-named patron. Valery also sensed and recorded the relationship between Pan and panic, and she got a happy hold on the terrifying impetus of that old headlong flight.
There had been a sudden appearance that broke the rules, a creature of an unnaturaln
ess and weirdness beyond the cloven-hoofs. It had been a paranatural solid-hoofed animal or specter, at first single-horned, then hornless. There had never been a hornless hoofed creature before. The first mare, of course, had been the nightmare, and out of that first mare’s nest had been foaled a wrong-shaped thing that panicked Pan and all his devils. We remember the solid-hoofed unicorns only a little. We are afraid to remember that very first foal, and the shape of it.
But should the lack of things, horns, or dividedness, or legs, or other, make a creature or paracreature to be unnatural?
All of this was only a little half-conscious fancy of Valery, of course, but the small recorder hooked behind her ear recorded it all. Even in the random fancies of human persons it is possible that a pattern may be found.
She experienced quick peace there in the middle of one of the cedar closes. “A lodge in a garden of cucumbers,” it recorded brightly, but unknown to her, in her dark plasm. Then sudden thunder!
There were hard driving hoofs behind Valery, old cloven-hoofs returned with a vengeance. And a rush! There was terrible impact before she could turn. She was knocked down violently. She was raked horribly with horns. She screamed in anger and surprise.
It was a rampant ram there, with three sets of horns, and dancing evil humor in his too-familiar eyes. I do these things rather well.
“Oh, damn you, Epikt, you ramshackle fool!” Valery swore. “You can kill a guy hitting her there!” She rolled around delighted in the grass. “Boy, where did you think up those horns? One pair brass, one pair wood, one pair plastic. Don’t you have any horns made out of horn? Have you forgotten the symbolism, that true things come through the gate of horn? No, you will not give me a tune on the brass ones. You don’t even know how to make a ram. You aren’t even all ram. Part of you is goat.”
Well, that is the way I intuit a ram, and I can’t let Valery know I am mistaken so I will fake it. “I am chimera,” I issue with all the profundity of a con man. “Do I not do the ghost-animal sparkle well, Valery?”
“With eyes of gold and bramble-dew,” flashed through the subliminal area of my ram-mobile. What, have machines subliminal areas? Some of us have.
“Damn the hoofs,” Valery said. “I’ll let them pound and ferment in me while I do other things now. I want to do blind moles. The Late Cecil Corn had set great store in blind moles before he, ah, well, before. You know, of course, that ‘The Shape We’re In’ is one of his unfinished projects?”
“Of course I know it. Yes, blind moles are fun, Valery,” I issued. “And you also might do crow-calls while you’re out today. And thistledown has points of interest. Don’t forget the spark-worms either; they’re prime stuff. I go now to be a flying fish for a while and to keep an eye on the boys at sea. That rabbit there, it might be interesting for you to study the pattern of the hairs between its toes.”
“I will kill and eat the rabbit,” Valery said. “We don’t seem to eat so well at the Institute any more. Ram it, you ramshackle ram, get gone!”
“The Hare sits snug in leaves and grass … And laughs to see the green man pass,” flicked in and out of the subliminal of Valery. “But this green woman will have him and rend him!” Valery cried, as she dipped down into her own under-pattern like a swooping howlet. Valery had access to herself in ways that were almost dirty.
I had left in my ram-extension, and then I had left my ram-extension, sending it off by itself to the potting shed. And both Valery and I heard it singing “I am a linen-draper bold” as it went away. It puzzles me sometimes how these things seem to have a life of their own after I have withdrawn from them.
Valery killed that rabbit and studied the pattern of hairs between its toes. The toe hairs are of very ancient pattern, though sloths have not come to it yet and conies have it all wrong. Then Valery cooked the rabbit and ate it. There wasn’t much left of a rabbit after Valery had cooked and eaten it. She boned it first with the finesse of a surgeon or a female butcher. She made the fire of the bones and a few punks of stump wood. She put the rabbit pieces in a sack of its own skin, filled it with stream water, and boiled it. It boils till the water is entirely juice, till the water-empty skin burns through and spills the hunks in the burning ashes. And she ate a lot of hot ashes with the meat, and then drank off a little dram of the blood that she had set aside in the cup of the skull. Valery enjoyed such casual meals.
She came through groves and meadows then, and on through blue-stem pastures. She looked down from the high pastures to the cross-timbers and gypsum cliffs and little mountains. She met Glasser coming to the top of the gypsum cliffs. She bussed him and embarrassed him, and together they went to hunt and kill rock-badgers to read the patterns of their bone-marrow.
How do you kill them? Why, you kill rock-badgers with rocks, how else? At least Valery did, snatching its hissing growling life from it and enjoying the death-muskiness it put out. Then she laid it open with a pig-sticker knife and unshaped it with fast strong hands plunged inside. And the bones are broken laterally with a little geologist’s hammer such as any Institute member will always be carrying.
Glasser—why Glasser was almost as afraid of badgers as he was of snakes. He was even a little fearful of them when they were dismembered. They don’t quit fighting even then, you know. The old truculence still flickers along the bones themselves, like fire in ashes. But even Glasser can see the importance of what they have here.
The patterns of badger-bone marrow give all the highway maps of the worlds. They give every inlet and tidal estuary of every planet of every sun. Here were all sorts of plans and patterns writ small. There were blueprints (gray-red prints) of how to build worlds and welkins. If the whole universe were destroyed, it could be reconstructed pretty nearly from the patterns of rock-badger bone-marrow. The badger is dead, but its bone-marrow is not dead yet. It is still living, almost lunging in the color flickers of it.
Later, Valery and Glasser studied and recorded cloudcastles and thunderheads, for these have patterns like nothing else. And they took readings on the emanations of sick swamps.
“What advantageth me if the dead rise not?” whipped through the lower apperceptions of them both, shivering Glasser, delighting Valery. She had always loved the image of the dead rising with just the rough memory of rot on them. There was reminder in this, also, that they were trampling in the road of a project of the Late Cecil Corn.
Four children, two boys and two girls (one of them the little redheaded girl in Valery’s block), were following out a devilish maze and fetish in Lean Eagle Street. These four had been ordained as auxiliary members of the Institute by Aloysius Shiplap who understood the need of them. These kids had followed such fetishes and mazes before, but not in full knowledge that they were devilish. It would have been forbidden absolutely to adults to follow a fetish trail in such a spirit, but where was the harm in innocent children doing it?
Look me in the eyes and say that again! No, no, in my main eyes below: those are pseudo-eyes above there and they fulfill another function entirely. Now then, tell me whether you have ever known an innocent child? Innocent, innocens, not-nocens, not noxious, not harming or threatening, not weaponed. Older persons may sometimes fall into a state of innocence (after they have lost their teeth and their claws), but children are never innocent if they are real. These four were real and not at all innocent.
They played at odds and evens on sidewalk squares. They played at Count Five and Count Nine. You step on a wrong square in either of those and you are dead literally. The patterns of their meanders were being recorded as they created them. They played at live cracks and dead cracks in the street, and Lean Eagle Street is the crackiest street in town.
Live lines, live cracks is as mystical a thing as dowsing. Many of the lines are invisible in their writhing, and it isn’t just anybody who can follow them. But these four children had special powers. They each followed out one of the live lines, constructing as they did so a large and intricate tetragrammaton. A tetragrammaton, beyond
its original and limited meaning, is a four-letter word, usually a four-letter dirty word, and dirtier than you think. It is said that the pattern of live lines, which are mostly below the earth, but which do sometimes appear as cracks in pavement or withered strips of grass, is invisible and unknown to the Almighty who looks down from above: that He would be shocked beyond bearing if He did know of them, and that He would blast them to great depth. But there is another belief: that He does know of the pattern of the live lines, and that He bides His time. I do not know.
The live lines, when drawn into the tetragrammaton, portray the mock-shape of the universe. Some of the Institute members believed that it would be possible to construct the true shape of the universe from the mock- or caricature-shape. Again, I do not know.
The four young creatures (they had left off being human children for a while; they became something else when they did this thing) completed their four-part weave of live lines and cracks. Four young creatures, and the cracks stood. And, naturally, the sky also cracked. Blue lightning came and got one of the young creatures. And then there were three.
Oh, come off it, Epikt, admit it. Weren’t there only three kids all the time?
No, there were clearly four figures there through it all. One of them, however, had been stranger than the others. He was not one of the known kids of Lean Eagle Street. He had come from somewhere, and he had gone again with the blue lightning. The gobbling up of one was a necessity to the success of the recording.
But at least we had a recording of the mock-shape of the universe.
Diogenes Pontifex, who was almost a member of the Institute, being barred only by the minimal decency rule (he accepted the Full Revelation and he rejected the Liberal Consensus), was trying to extract valid patterns from the Sepulchers of Saints. But first let me tell you an early story of Diogenes which I have extracted from his person-précis.
Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine Page 19
