Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Gregory, why are there holes in my shoes?” Glasser demanded suddenly.

  “Gad, lad, what has that to do with it?” Gregory asked. “Please do not burden the director with our poverty while a problem is under consideration.”

  “Our poverty is part of the problem we are considering,” Charles Cogsworth stated. “Were the universe a perfect sphere, then Glasser would not have holes in his shoes. Were it a perfect sphere, then there would be no weed growing in the world, there would not be anything that should not be. If the cosmos were perfectly spherical, then all details of it would be perfectly ordered, and the Institute for Impure Science would prosper, as would all good things. I myself don’t see how we would have liaison, though, not even as much as we have now. And it would soon cloy, I suppose. But why is it flawed, Gregory?”

  “It is flawed because of the brainlessness of the many, and of my own associates!” Gregory swore heavily. “Dammit, there is something the matter with the brains of every one of you.”

  “Lost lobes, maybe, Gregory?” Valery asked. “But we’re too spherical already. We all think spherical self-contained thoughts. Maybe we have to find more lost things. Lost legs of snakes, lost horns of horses, lost eyes of spark-worms, lost colons of sea-lice (it’s in their agony over the lack of that that they fluoresce, you know, like the meanest animal in the joke), lost eyes of moles—oh, oh, oh, we should have studied the patterns of mole burrows. I meant to. We will do it tomorrow.”

  “No, we will not do any such thing tomorrow. We will finish the project tonight,” Director Gregory insisted. “We’ll finish it right now. Is there anything else to throw into this devils’ stew? Anything of your own, Epikt?”

  “Certain anomalies of the inner ears of left-footed newts, inexplicable behavior of what is apparently a mobile extension of mine that I do not remember making, a tune I can’t quite place, a few loose quotes—‘Fear in a handful of dust—I did but taste a little honey and, lo, I must die’—that’s from some Jeremiad, I forget the author, I’ve got it filed in my main memory downstairs.”

  “Oh, damn your main memory downstairs!” Gregory roared. “Is there anything else, you cursed mechanismus?”

  “Prodigies, sayings, subliminals of myself and of all of you,” I issued. “The planet Aradne whose moons have moons which have moons which have moons. I know of Aradne intuitively. The astronomers do not know of her at all. Quick bulletins arriving every moment from elsewhere—‘Finn McCool has lost his orbs and oysters’—‘For Habakkuk, it was a bag of holes’—‘Lost upon the roundabouts’—I forget the various sources but I believe that they all mean something. I love people-sayings. I wish we had a corpus of machine-sayings.”

  “I thought it was ‘lost his orbs and apples,’ ” Aloysius said, “but my main memory also is elsewhere.”

  “Last call, anything else to go in?” Gregory hooted, like a boat leaving a shore.

  “Snake-belly botches, spark-worm patterns, snail-slime,” Valery was ticking them off. “Marrow designs of rock-badger bones, paddle-fish trails in the trailless ocean, mares’ nests, fluorescence of sea-lice, Sepulchers of Saints, mock-shape, blue lightning, four-letter words, healing hands. Check. Well, we don’t have near enough but we’ve got a lot of it. Do it, Epikt!”

  “I’ll shoot the works,” I issued. “That’s an old phrase, I forget the origin, I’ve got it filed in my—”

  “Get with it, Epikt,” they all cried.

  “Are you sure you’re all plugged in?” Charles Cogsworth asked carefully.

  “Don’t forget that little brain of yours and the memory cannister at what you call your summer cottage down at the town dump, Epikt,” Valery cautioned.

  “Got them all,” I issued. “Got them all plugged in.”

  “Let some sick face be brought,” said Easterwine as he shaped space with his healing hands. How did that spook appear now? I have slipped badly if I have made such an extension as that.

  Then the Ktistec machine, which is myself, went into its agony. The several thousand cubic meters of it shuddered with the effort, and the whole Institute building shook. Lights dimmed in all that part of town, and transfer switches cut more power into the lines.

  I correlated all the data of shape and pattern: standard and conventional data that the Institute people had gathered for years (including the original Cecil Corn data), newer data that had been caught in a final insane (no, not insane, sane, singularly sane) outburst: irregular and ridiculous data, wild data from sea-snails and inverted galaxies, from sun-motes on silica dust and from footprints of fevered mice (and of fevered children, and blue lightning got one), data from the machinery world of high iron and from the undine world of fragmented ions, data from mythoform and from novaform.

  The multidimensional screens came to life. The shape patterns came clearer and clearer. The people gasped at the power of it, and I the Ktistec groaned.

  And there it was before us all in all its bleak strength! It was passionately present but not yet realized. This was the pattern and shape of the cosmos, displayed authentically in the glowing maw of the transcendent Ktistec machine that was myself. Or was it in me? Which was inside and outside?

  “What a simulacrum!” Valery gasped.

  “No, it is not,” I issued quakingly. “Valery and all, this is real. No miniature or simulacrum is really similar to its original, since size itself is a distortion. Even two spheres of different size cannot really be of the same shape. It is for this reason that your servant and more-than-peer does not present a miniature, but the thing itself. I present it to you as it is seen by better eyes than your own—by mine. You will notice, or perhaps you will not, that this vision is not really inside me. I am inside it, as are you all. It will take a little getting used to, though.”

  Well, it did take some getting used to for them, even for myself. The thing was not really on the multidimensional screens. It was itself, everywhere, seen new, or seen out of buried memory. There was this very strong element of recognition, too strong to bear. Scales had fallen from eyes, shockingly. Scales on eyes have always had their purpose.

  “Why is there no motion in it, Epikt?” Valery asked fearfully.

  “There is, but on a cosmic scale, and too slow to see. Your eyes and yourselves aren’t cleared enough to see it yet,” I issued.

  “Then speed it up!”

  “I cannot speed up the worlds, Valery.”

  “Run it backwards then. I want to see what came out of those billion-by-billion kilometer eggshells.” Valery was unaccountably crying.

  “I cannot run time backward on a total mass,” I issued.

  The universe, new seen, grew in power and clarity, and ghastliness.

  “It’s still a sphere,” Gregory growled stubbornly. “A little bit rough, but a sphere.” But Gregory had slipped and shrunken. For the moment he was no giant. He had reached his limit, and perhaps his minutes as director were numbered.

  “It’s still a rotten apple?” Glasser gasped with a passion unusual to him. “Oh, oh, why have apples been the symbol both of the loss and the search? Oh, God of the gutted glob! The holes in it, the holes in it, the unfathomable abysses, the searing absences. What thing cries out of its absences? How will it be fulfilled?”

  “It’s a sponge,” said Cogsworth through closed teeth. “How sponges must suffer!”

  “It’s a cheese,” Valery offered hysterically, “rotted cheese and full of holes. A whole cosmos of maggotty cheese, turned green in its taint and rot. And the eggshells! What hatched out of them? I dreamed of them before I was born, pieces of broken eggshell millions of parsecs long.” Her shoulders were shaking. I couldn’t tell if she was crying or laughing. “It does have a strong smell, though,” she said, “the only one, ever, strong enough to suit me.”

  “It’s a weeping face,” said Aloysius Shiplap. “It’s the leprous face of a horrified and horrifying man, a face made out of livid and worm-eaten parchment, horrid with elliptical gaps.”

  “No
, Aloysius, it isn’t a weeping face, it’s a laughing face,” Charles Cogsworth said with bitter wonder. “But can I have liaison with that face? What has it to laugh about? It must surely be demented laughter.”

  “But it isn’t,” Glasser cut back in. “I see it right now. It’s clear and innocent. It’s a boy, a child laughing—”

  “—with holes rotted clear through him, dying in blinding pain—” Aloysius gagged.

  “—living in caves of excrement—” Valery burst out.

  “—childish, triumphant, leprous, ghostly—” Cogsworth chanted, “—dead and eternally damned to shrieking torture—a nightmare child surging through putrid flame—”

  “—still laughing, though,” said Aloysius. “A shaggy kid, that.”

  Well, it is strong, whatever it is, the shape we’re in. It swelled in its power and desolation and shook them all. Except the director Gregory. How had they forgotten that Goliath was essentially a Philistine?

  “I tell you all that it’s no more than a sphere,” this Gregory Smirnov insisted with a shocking lack of taste. “It’s a slightly distorted sphere. The matter is settled.” But they all rounded angrily on Gregory.

  “So is a cube only a slightly distorted sphere,” Cogsworth flared up. “Get out of here, Gregory, you damned cube.”

  “I am the director,” Gregory said stuffily, but something had gone out of the man.

  “Then we’ll find our indirection without you,” Aloysius challenged. “Get out of here, you sphere-loving fink. If that’s the shape it’s in, how come everything’s in such bad shape?”

  “Rump! Rump! Rump!” Valery howled.

  “What has possessed your female half, Cogsworth?” Gregory asked, puzzled by it all. “My dear Valery, the clunis, the rump-form is also no more than a distorted sphere.”

  “Rump, rump, rump-session!” Valery still howled, “and the rump-session will be without our august director. Now you get right out of here, you clunis-form Gregory!”

  Gregory Smirnov growled and left pompously, huffing on his last quality cigar butt.

  “Kill him, kill him,” I issued with a growl that surprised myself. “We can’t have ex-directors wandering around alive.” (Gregory had recently suggested that I should be split up into thirteen separate consciousnesses for greater efficiency. I hated him for it. I didn’t want more efficiency, if it would mean a fractured me.)

  “We’ll do it tomorrow,” Aloysius said listlessly. “Kill him tomorrow sure.”

  But the rump-session was frustrating and empty, even though we were now joined by Audifax and Diogenes and Easterwine. We knew, of course, that on some dim future day we would take Gregory back. But it wasn’t that dim yet.

  “Oh, it is spiritless,” Valery cried out. “What are we, Epikt? Are we just stuff to stuff in the holes?”

  “They aren’t really holes, Valery,” Aloysius tried to explain. “ ‘Hole’ itself is a concept, and these are conceptless areas—”

  “Oh, shut up, Aloysius. It’s a graveyard, isn’t it folks? Do you really think there is purposive shape in the Sepulchers of Saints, Diogenes? And we’re all dead things in it. Look at that place—piled billions of kilometers deep with estrogen and ectoplasm. Gah!” (Nobody could do the “Gah!” like Valery.) “Our worlds are the Teilhardian abomination after all, the sickening emptiness of Point Big-O. I’d a million times rather they were even Fortean, or anything clean. Aren’t we all dead and the ship going down for the third time?”

  “I don’t know, Valery,” Audifax grinned. “It can’t be all bad when it gives birth to such scrambled clichés.”

  “When I was a schoolboy, I gave the answer that an apocalypse was an ellipse with an infinite number of foci, the intersection of an elapse with a right circular cone,” Diogenes said. “I was right, of course. The shape of the universe is an apocalypse and all of us are the foci.”

  “Oh, shut up, Diogenes,” Valery exploded. “Yes, it’s a graveyard. Oh, how spiritless can it get?”

  “I pardon your unknowing pun,” I the machine issued, “but in the grotesque legends of humans the graveyard is not spiritless. In fact, it is the spirits supposed to be in it that fascinate boys and girls.”

  “I like that better,” Valery cried. “Maybe we can be haunts at least, if we can’t be people or super-people. But it’s all dead for all that. Look at you, Epikt, you’ve got a livid green dead glob inside you, and everything else is inside it.”

  “Oh, I’ll turn it off then,” I issued. “I don’t believe any one of you is likely to forget the shape of it anyhow.” I turned it off, but we would all be seeing it forever.

  “I wish it were anything else,” Valery insisted. “I even wish it were a damned sphere. How can we talk to it if we don’t know what it is? If we can’t have liaison with the shape then we can’t have anything. But it’s a dead and deserted graveyard and all the spheres have gone out of it. Make coffee, Epikt. Make a lot of it. I want it to last the night.”

  “It is not efficient to employ a complicated device when a simple device will serve,” I issued. “I am a Ktistec machine, but even a simple human person can make coffee. Make coffee, Aloysius.”

  Aloysius Shiplap made them enough coffee to last the night.

  And they spent most of the night bemoaning the shape of their fate and their universe. Except Diogenes Pontifex, who liked it. And Audifax O’Hanlon, who understood it, naturally, but who was tonguetied at explaining it.

  “It’s a riddle you’ve got to guess,” he smiled. “Every little kid has got to guess this riddle before he goes to Heaven. You’ll get hints to help you, though.”

  “It is the shape of a barracoon, of a slave-pen,” stated Glasser, who neither liked it nor understood it.

  “I see a glow light,” Aloysius whispered thickly—he had been lacing his coffee with the creature “—but I don’t know whether the glow is ahead or behind. With this shape, it’s hard to say.”

  “This is the limbus furtivus,” Cogsworth said sadly. “It is the most lost of all the limbos of which the Fathers wrote. There is no more hope at all in anything.”

  “I knew a fellow who lived in one of those limbos,” Aloysius remembered. “His name was Simon Frakes. He delivered some mighty odd lectures, but they weren’t at all hopeless. He was very peculiar, for a fellow who hadn’t been born yet. Folks, it’s just possible that the glow is ahead of us and not behind.”

  “Oh, it’s all dead,” Valery sighed. “It’s a dead graveyard. You can see the inner caul about us, shutting us in, not a dozen parsecs away. It’s an empty matrix, it’s a double-damned dead machine.”

  “Have a care, doll,” I issued angrily. “You think machines don’t have feelings, too?”

  “And Valery,” said Charles Cogsworth, her unoutstanding husband, “a matrix is the very opposite of a graveyard. And estrogen, which you see piled so deep, is a sign of life and not death. Even the ectoplasm that you perceive is a sign of survival, though in one of its senses of a phony sort. Are you sure the graveyard is quite dead, Valery? Are you sure the matrix is quite empty?”

  “But it is! It’s a dead quarry, a monument yard. All the gravestones have been sculpted out of it. That’s what makes the holes.”

  “Aye, the worlds going out leave the holes, Valery,” Charles said, “and the holes are their sculpted monuments right enough. But you don’t know how they go out of it and where they go to. And you misunderstand what you take for rot. That may be new growth. Hozza, hozza, I believe the glow is ahead of us after all. Turn the worlds on again, Epikt.”

  “It is agony to produce and maintain the shape again,” I protested.

  “Agonize then! Turn it on,” several of them barked at me.

  “Let some sick shape be brought,” said Easterwine as though talking in his sleep, but moving his healing hands. “Let some sick world be brought.” If he is an extension of mine I disown him. He is supposed to be a place or a state, not a person. He’s one of the shakiest jobs I ever did, if I did him.
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  In my Ktistec person I turned on the shape and the universe once more. It came back in all its staggering strength and cryptic promise.

  “Yes, it’s a quarry, Valery,” Cogsworth said, “the biggest one around this sector at least. But it’s the matrix and not the graveyard. Don’t you know what has been quarried out of it, girl?”

  “Tombstones,” Valery said miserably, “but I don’t understand the big eggshells. What hatched out of them anyhow?”

  “Spheres and batilia and saddles,” said Aloysius Shiplap, “distorted spheres after Gregory’s own heart, exploding spheres after yours, blessed unfinished globes, globs, new worlds for old: the billion billion forms which are mutually complementary to each other. This, Cogsworth, is the limbus lautumiae of which the Sons will write when they understand it more. This is no lost or furtive limbo. It is the quarrying limbo in all its agony and estrus. This is the mother quarry itself. All the grand worlds—which we have never seen, which we can’t imagine—have been sculpted out of it. They are the holes in it, they are what gives it its wild and riven shape. But look how much else new space is left. And look also that the holes do not remain holes. We have gazed at it all wrong: we’ve seen only the dark afterimages, not the bright fire itself. Here in limbo we already have intimation of these creating worlds. The spherical answer wasn’t entirely wrong, nor was the saddle-shaped answer, nor the torus-shaped. From this young quarry may not great worlds still be called?”

  “We should have guessed it,” said Glasser. “It isn’t as if each of us hadn’t been in one before. We all have been, except Epikt.”

  “And have I not been,” I demanded. They will make me feel unborn just because I am a machine. “I was in one of your own making, and I will tell you that the whole bunch of you don’t add up to a very pleasant womb. I thought I’d never come out of it, what with all the goat tricks you were playing. Naturally I understand the analogy better than you do, since I am a more analogous creature. We are here now in the quarry or matrix, and we are also enclosed in the inner caul which Valery saw and misunderstood. I believe that worlds, like snakes, are surprised in a moment of their evolution, midway between the oviparous and the viviparous stages. The caul will become a shell, and later a broken shell. We cannot go out of this till we are called out, but I believe it is a grand and early sign that a caul has formed.”