Hector Bogus was taking small effigies or dolls out of a cigar box, giving them a sort of galvanic shock between two brass balls which were opposite members of a condenser, and then setting them down to run about on his desk in a fever of life or pseudolife.
“I like to give them an appearance of animation and let them run around in the huge hippodrome that is the top of my desk,” Bogus said. “Ah, Polder, I believe that someone liked to give you the appearance of animation and to let you run in a limited spaciousness. And I believe that this someone is getting tired of watching you run and is about ready to disanimate you and put you back in the box.”
“I am no effigy, Bogus. I am real. You may find that out abruptly.”
But this man Hector Bogus made Polder nervous. How did Hector know of Polder’s queasy little daydreams or premonitions that he might not be real, that he might be no more than somebody’s animation? Hector Bogus was putting one of his own little animations into a sort of torture cabinet. He bellowed small flames into the cabinet then to get a white-hot fire going. There was a small explosion, and some wires and transistors burst out of the little creation. Bogus screwed a jeweler’s glass in his eye, repaired the wiring, and returned the small image to its torture. And it was torture!
“It is fun to manufacture a small person of exquisite and intense response and appreciation of pain and of time,” Bogus said. “One can study a soul in hell by this device. The pain is real to the animation, Polder, and the pain is eternal. There is no doubt that the image is horribly conscious of the pain. It does have consciousness; I devised it a consciousness that consists of an ingenious resonating circuit. Have you an even more ingenious resonating circuit in yourself, Polder, and does it serve you as well as a real consciousness? This little thing I have just put into the torture cabinet, it is living eternities and eternities of screaming pain in every second. I built this intense appreciation of time into it. You can barely hear it, but should I amplify it (and I have done so several times for fun), it becomes such a loud and horrifying screaming that it sends people into shock in all this part of the town. But I have my own amplification turned on. I can hear him with total intensity.”
“You like to do that?” Polder asked as he licked his lips. He liked the idea of it himself.
“Certainly I like it,” Bogus said. “And the beauty is that the manufacturer and observer (myself), after such pleasures, can salve his conscience by saying, ‘He isn’t real.’ He isn’t. But, to itself, the pain and the existence are real.
“What, does my little animated hint remind you of something, Polder? You have suspected that you are manufactured? You have suspected that, once someone turns you on fully, you will have the exquisite and intense response to pain and to time? You seem thoughtful, Polder.”
“Oh, I was thinking of certain screaming metals used in various instrumentations. They are put under terrific stress by torsion and heat, and they respond with waves at various complex frequencies. To me it sometimes seems that they are screaming in agony.”
“Of course they are, Polder, to themselves. But to a neutral observer it is all measurable physical reaction. So, I suspect, is the case with you. You have been worrying about not being real, Polder. Worrying is also a measurable physical reaction. And you begin to worry that this may really be Prime World.”
Bogus extinguished the small and hot fire in the toy cabinet. He took the suffering animation out, killed it by dipping it for a moment into a shot glass of corrosive sublimate (thus did the alchemists disanimate their miniatures), and put it back into the cigar box.
“Oh, well, if it’s artificial and electrical, then it isn’t live,” Polder said dully.
“Not necessarily so, Polder,” Bogus maintained. “Life is artificial. That’s one of the characters by which it may be known. And God was personally well into the electronic age by the time of the particular creations. The sophistication of our wiring schematics does not say whether we are live or not. There is very primitive life. You are pretty primitive yourself.
“You’re about through, Dossman. You know that, don’t you? You’re into your last world.” Bogus showed just the curling edge of his scorn.
“I’ll pay you back for your tedious affronts, Bogus. But are you not maintenance and repair station for Hand from Heaven presentations on this world?”
“No. There isn’t any such station here. Yours is the only Hand from Heaven on this world. And they never need repair or maintenance. I can modify the things slightly if you’re interested.”
“All right. I want it to just have thundered and lightened at the first appearance of the Hand. I want the echo and the afterflash, and the memory, of the thunder and lightning to be still hanging in the air. I want the sun to be sparkling on rain drops so small and attenuated that they are unable to complete their downward fall. Yes, gold sparkle in the air, and the memory of thunder and lightning. And the after-the-rain smell of wet sweet clover and amaranth.”
“All right. I can make the modifications in the Hand phenomena. I’ll do it. But why did you really come to see me, Dossman?”
“The reason for my visit? I sent certain announcements around to your chain, Bogus, and they weren’t published. It was an oversight, I’m sure, but I want it corrected at once. It is important that these announcements be widely published.”
“You are referring to your naive advertisements for your own cult, Dossman? Oh, I won’t publish such things, and no other responsible publisher will either. It might be better—no, it might be worse if you tried the obscenity presses on this. Some of those shoddies will publish almost anything, if they’re paid an unreasonable amount to do it.”
“There are no presses except the obscenity presses, Bogus. There are no Media publications, whether scatter-ray or focus-ray or ether-tinsel or solid-light transmission, except of the obscenity sort. And there is no art or argument or ethic anywhere except the obscenity variety. Obscenity loosens the tongues of all these things, and without obscenity those tongues would be tied forever. I have the impression that I once knew you or an echo of you some worlds back; you were a much younger man then. Your name was Trenchant, and you were a false Lord Spiritual.”
“And your name was Pilgrim, but you were a false Peter Pilgrim, not the true Peter Pilgrim of myth. But, Polder, you know that we’re unable to know the names of our corresponding figures on other worlds. It’s absolutely impossible that we should have this recognition. And the young mock Lord, Trenchant, he isn’t and he certainly wasn’t an exact correspondence to me. He hadn’t learned cruelty yet. Or disbelief.
“Yes, I was a much younger man then, Dossman. You can leave now.”
“Do you not go grand on me, Eidetic Lord, Media Lord, Advocate Lord, Wiggly-Word Lord!” Polder burst out in angry voice. “Get ready, or be left! The water is moving! The tide is running! I am the one who is moving it all. Every beach and shingle in every world will be covered with the dead and broken small creatures who waited too long to join the tide. The tide turns now, and it leaves them stranded. Small creature Bogus, easily broken small creature, I am that tide!”
“Tell that to your cultic followers, little pewter god Dossman. Continue to shuffle your commerce if you wish, and you can have a good enough future here. But do not threaten, do not cultify, do not corrupt! But if you disturb, if you distort, if you kill, if you perform any of the abominations that are attributed to you by death’s-land account or off-world rumor, then we will break you. And, as a broken one, you will go to the final place forever. There are those of us who have the power to break you, even if we dislike using that power.”
“Somewhere, I suppose, there are fish that dislike water,” Polder said. “Somewhere there are bees that hate clover. There are kine that dislike green pastures and fresh water; they’d rather eat hot dust and drink ashes. And there are birds that would rather crawl on their bellies than travel in air. There are all of those things somewhere, I know, but I have never seen any of them. Nor have I known
Lords of the Talking-Air, Lords Spiritual, Lords of the Media, Eidetic Lords who do not love to use their power.
“But the fact is, Bogus, that you use your power blindly when you are left to yourselves. Your power must be brought into focus by cultic figures like myself, or figures unlike myself but capable as I am of originating vital movements. All of you must be directed and impelled by a small multitude of such shimmering persons as myself, by such shining folks as are scarcely to be found at all on this local world.
“I notice there is a startling deficiency of cults here. Even the inept cults are missing. This emptiness has to be filled, and mostly it has to be filled by myself. It’s a weak world you have here, Bogus, until you can come up to the impelling level of the creative cults.”
“No. This is a strong world,” Hector Bogus said. “We have the strength and the grace here. We’re fortunate in everything. We have discovered the Larger Thing, and we’re intimate with it. We know it, whether we live up to it or not. Why, having the Thing Itself, should we lust after a ten-times-removed shadow of it?”
“Bogus, you are raw material and I will regard you that way,” Polder said. “I’ll chop you and I’ll harvest you; and I’ll reseed you so that you’ll not be extinguished. The Lords of the Media can play any realm or any world like a piano. They can direct a world and all its thought—most often, in all its unthought. They can compel a world absolutely to any notion. They can do these things if numinous persons show them how to do them.”
“We know how, Dossman. We can do whatever we want to do, but in many places we’ve begun to practice restraint. Why should we indulge in sinful abuses of power?”
“Consternation on you, Bogus!” Polder whipped with his flexible voice. “Power is made to be abused! That’s the whole purpose of it. You Lords of the Imagery and the Effigy can set all the idiots of a world braying like asses. You can set the people-parrots to squawking and squalling. You can make them gibber to each other any message you wish to exploit. First you can move them to noise, then you can move them to action. You can move mountains, if you first set up the compelling opinion that the mountains must be moved. You can do all these things. You can construct and create. There is nothing that cannot be made out of those building bricks of noise and stifling air. If we of the intense elite show you how, there is no limit to what you can effect.”
“We learn how to set limits,” Bogus said, “and we do not need the brittle elites to show us how to do anything. The strong know how to kill the weak. The intelligent know how to seize advantage from the stupid. The rich understand how the screws might be tightened on the poor. The living know how easy it is to remove the hands and the heritage of the dead. But none of these things is commonly done here. We have been building a harder thing than power: we’ve been building fences around it. Often we are given the necessary grace to restrain ourselves from the depredations. And, if we carelessly lose or spill some of that grace, then we must humbly beg for more.”
“When did any Media Lord ever do anything humbly? Why do you make these pretenses, you who torture small creations?”
“Oh, I torture the little fabrications of my own so that I won’t be torturing the larger fabrications. I do it because I climb out of one pit, only to fall into another. But I keep climbing. This world has acquired quite a number of climbers. And we won’t have it set back again. We know what your own cultishness amounts to.”
“Bogus, you’re a howling hypocrite!” Polder Dossman cried with that far-carrying power in his voice, with the threatening softness and the electrifying confidence of edged steel sheathed in velvet. But Hector Bogus seemed unelectrified by it.
“You’re a hypocrite,” Polder called in a higher key. “You have to be! There’s no sense at all to things if people aren’t hypocrites. Grace is for those without impetus or power. I swear by every obscenity that the evil will always turn the good over a fire as though on a spit. Ah, the folks of the good nations, we’ll roast them whole. We’ll even roast their screaming. And they’ll come to their own barbecuing under their own power because the Lords of the Media will tell them to come. And the Lords will tell them to come because we of the high elite will tell the Lords.”
“Polder Dossman, nobody can be set all the way down on first evidence. Are you evil for certain?”
“Yes, for certain, Bogus. To be evil is to call everything by its right name. My own preying on any world is always the primary action on that world. To cut me out would be like cutting a bowstring to let the bow go slack. A slack bow is no bow at all. It would be like cutting a sinew to relax a limb. Bogus, the worlds were weighty and without movement for a billion billion years. They did not stir. They did not move. And without movement there cannot be any real life. The primordial weight sat like a primordial toad or stone. And the name of this original weight that was without motion and without light was ‘The Good.’ And then a counterweight introduced itself, and the worlds began to move and to live. And the name of this counterweight has always been ‘The Evil.’ I am the counterweight newly arrived in this world, and I will compel it to move and to live. There wasn’t much movement or life apparent when I got here. Where did you get your name of Bogus?”
“We were living and moving before you came, Polder. If you could not see it, the fault was with your own eyes. I have my name from my father, and he from his. We are called Bogus because we are bogus Lords. It is all for fun, the Lord play, the big-man play; it becomes evil only when it becomes serious. Deliver me from evil! Deliver me from serious evil and from evil seriousness, and fortify me against the intimidating scorn of evil persons! Let me walk in the light and hear the laughter of God.”
“That’s my thing, Bogus. I’ve been having my cult promote the title the ‘Laughing God’ for myself. I discovered that there was a local leaning toward some such name. The notices I sent to your publications, the notices you did not publish, they were very much on the ‘Laughing God’ theme.”
“It didn’t work, did it, Dossman? Not for you. You’re not capable of real laughter. And you’re just not the god type.”
“Oh, but I am! I have to be!” Polder cried. His flexible voice cracked where it was supposed to achieve unbroken effect. “I look the part, Bogus. I act the image. I—Bogus, you’re laughing at me! I’ll not be laughed at! My person is above that!”
“Polder, you are no more than one of the little fabrications to be kept in a cigar box most of the time. Then you are taken out occasionally and set on somebody’s desk or sideboard, and you believe you have been born again into a new world. You’re a miniature effigy, a badly made one. And to torture you would not be the same thing as torturing something real.” Hector Bogus was laughing as he poured it on. He knew that Polder Dossman was not something to be kept in a cigar box. In a bigger box, perhaps.
“Man, I’ll destroy you if you don’t come around,” Polder huffed. “My tide is running now. Join it before it’s too late. If you do not—”
“—then you’ll designate me to be a dead and broken small creature stranded on the beach when the tide deserts it, will you, Polder? I like my own cigar box analogy better, and I like you as the miniature much better. Be careful, Polder, even on your imagined beach. I’m a crawfish! I can slide sideways and backward to backwaters if need be. Your tide has run out; that’s all it is. I’m not like to be broken or to perish on a backwater beach.
“I have my own tide, Polder, and it’s rising in me now. I have heard it told that you are a man of great strength and agility, both physically and mentally. I have heard this told, and I’m almost certain it was you who told it. Let’s try it, then. You will go out from here quickly and quietly, or I will throw you out quickly and not quietly. There’s no other choice for you, and you haven’t enough strength or ability to create one. But stay here another minute if you want to be broken by my own tide on my own sand.”
“No, man, no,” Polder Dossman said slowly and hedgingly. “There will be another day very soon, and I will have cut
all your own sand from under you when it comes.”
Polder went out to leave Hector Bogus, who was a mock Lord of the Eidetics and Media, But Bogus followed him out. Polder’s Hand from Heaven was hovering low there where Bogus had had it pulled down for modification.
And Bogus suddenly, roguishly, rather boyishly, set some special modifications into the Hand. Look out for it! It’s big; it’s impulsive with a high-sky charisma; it has, from its associations, a cloud-capping humor; it’s mindless, but it has intuition that is otherwhere based; and it partakes of the almighty.
The great Hand came down, took Polder by the scruff and the crine, and lifted and swooped with him for a hundred meters. There it dipped him into a vat of corrosive sublimate that a processor had in his reduction yard for breaking up discarded lumps of flesh and bones. The Hand held Polder in the vat for a moment (till he was dead), then lifted him further and deposited him in an ash-box in a trash area.
Oh, but this impulsive action by Hector Bogus, by the Hand from Heaven, by the whole cooperating neighborhood of little industrial back yards, brought quick and loud response from several concerned and entrapped persons! The young man Og Scath was there instantly.
“Thrones and Powers!” Og howled as he came at a run to a site. “Bogus, you’ve gone too far. You’ve killed him! He was one of the protected ones. You should have known that. You’re a master of eidetics. You know when an effigy is protected!”
“No, I didn’t; I sure didn’t. Why should a thing so worthless be protected? Oh, the gruesome humor of God! Why are these reservations placed against every honest impulse? Well, I’ve got to fix it then, I guess.”
“That was unethical to have him seized by his own Hand that he had contracted for and possibly paid for,” Moira Mara complained. “Oh, he’s dead. I’ll be held partly responsible. I think I’ve already been held responsible for it before. What can be done? He’s dead, I tell you, Bogus. You’ve killed him.”
Not To Mention Camels Page 18
