Past Master

by R. A. Lafferty

  “But here is an odd thing, Paul. I am told by time travelers that my angry humor piece has always been misunderstood. It came to be believed that I wrote of an ideal world. It even came to be believed that I wrote with a straight face. My mind boggles at the very idea, but I’m told that it is so. Paul, there is something very slack about a future that will take a biting satire for a vapid dream.”

  “Will you come back with me?”

  “Not to any Astrobe, no, Paul. I can’t help you or yours, you red-headed ogre. I like you, man. There’s something pleasant about a really ugly man, and we both qualify. But I can’t go with you. I will try to explain.

  “I have asked questions of the Time Men who came to question me, so I know a little of several futures. You live about a thousand years from now, at my guess, at the time of the First Astrobian Time of Troubles; and Astrobe in your time is in wobbly shape. But a thousand years after you are dead, Astrobe will still be in wobbly shape. It will have a different wobble then, however. Astrobe will have long since survived the crisis that worries you now.”

  “A crisis is survived only by the doings of one critical man.”

  “I know it.”

  “Thomas, you are that man.”

  “No. I am not. It is another. I begin to recall it now. I hadn’t paid too much attention to the accounts of the Other World when I was told of such; it all seemed pretty fanciful. His name, his name, I wish I could remember his name.”

  “So do I, Thomas. You would surely recognize your own, if you were presented under it.”

  “The man who brought Astrobe out of its first time of troubles, and in so left-handed a manner, his name, it will come to me, Paul, that man was quite in the heroic mold, and I am not. That man, after he had been shamefully put to de— Jerusalem irredenta! It cannot be! The name of that man, Paul—miserere mihi Domine!—his name isn’t known. Always he is identified only as the Past Master. It’s a startling thought. You believe him to be me?”

  “Yes. I’m sure now, Thomas. You’ve told me something that isn’t known to them there yet. They’re still searching for a name to present you under. ‘Past Master’ is one of those they are considering, but they won’t decide till they see you. ‘Past Master’ it will be, then. The Master out of the past is yourself, Thomas.”

  “Paul, you also have been pursued for your life, as I have been lately. I know the look of a hunted man, even a defiant one. Surely there are not King’s Men on Astrobe who hunt down and kill.”

  “No, they are different, Thomas. They are Programmed Mechanical Killers.”

  “No, they are the same, Paul. King’s Men everywhere are programmed mechanical killers. But I see that I will have to discover for myself the name of the real king of Astrobe. Yes, I’ll go. Stay the night. I’ll go with you in the morning.”

  “Thomas, what happened, what is happening to your own world?” Paul asked as they talked together that night. “You built it according to an ideal of high perfection, but it started to come apart a hundred years before this time. Your world is at an end, and another one, in some ways much worse, is beginning. What goes wrong with your world, Thomas?”

  “We built it too small, Paul, we built it too small. And what is really wrong with Astrobe? Can you not give me the name of it? It helps to know the name of your opponent.”

  “It’s name is the monster Ouden, the open mouth of Ouden, of whom you have not heard.”

  “I’m an educated man, Paul, in my own opinion at least. I’m one of the handful of men who brought Greek back to Western Europe. History should remember that much of me. And Ouden means nothingness.”

  “That’s the name of him, Thomas, and he has his growing legions.”

  They burned oak and pitch-pine and yew in the open fire, and drank a little of the native. In that century England still had a wine of its own.

  They were up early in the morning. Thomas More, about to start on a strange journey, went to be shriven. “I believe only in spurts now, Paul,” he said. “My faith is weak. Is it not ironic that I will die for it in the near future? And that those of strong faith will hide and be silent?”

  Paul went with Thomas and did likewise, perhaps the first man to be absolved of sins a thousand years before he committed them.

  They went to London afterwards. They went through the tunnel loop and came out in Kingmaker’s London office, where Brooks was sleeping on a sofa. He wakened and recognized Thomas at once.

  “I’d guessed it was he you came to take, Paul,” he said. “I’d rather you took the crown jewels or the Seal or the Charter. If his bones are no longer with us, then we are not the same man.”

  “Let’s go see, Paul,” Thomas said. “A man owes himself that much curiosity.”

  They went to the old church of St. Peter in Chains. “You are buried here,” Paul said. “The church is a reconstruction, but the graves underneath are still there.”

  An old priest came to them there.

  “Do the bones of Thomas More for certain lie below?” Thomas asked the old priest.

  “They do. This very year we opened several of the graves. The bones of Thomas More are there, and on one finger bone is the famous signet ring of which you wear a replica on your own finger. You are an antiquarian.”

  “No, I’m an antiquary,” Thomas said. “I have a special interest in this man. What other man, Paul, looks down on his own grave and he in it? All except my head. I’m told that it’s buried at Canterbury. Parboiled it, did they not? I’d like to see it, but I suspect that it’s too long a journey.”

  They were going on a journey of a parsec and a half, but seventy miles was too long a journey.

  As they strolled about London, Paul realized that this man Thomas would never be an anachronism, either on Earth or on Astrobe. Thomas was already onto the new pronunciation of the language—to the point of burlesquing it. He was at home, too much at home, in this latter world. He did everything directly, and as his right. He got into a fist fight with a bulky young man in a drinking place.

  Thomas won the fight, too, but Paul saw fit to chide him about it.

  “Remember, Thomas, you were sainted after you were dead,” Paul told him. “Saints do not indulge in bar-room brawls.”

  “Some do, Paul, some don’t,” Thomas maintained, wiping blood off his peculiar nose. Whatever happened to that nose wouldn’t matter much; it wasn’t a pretty one, but it had a lot of character. “Several men of my acquaintance were later sainted, so I’ve been told. One of them was a withdrawn man who didn’t brawl. One of them was too puny for it. But the third of them did indulge in just such brawls. I’ve seen him.”

  And this reminded Thomas of something else. “One thing I forgot to ask, Paul. How is the fishing on Astrobe? You are silent, Paul. I can still withdraw from this adventure, you know. Answer me, man.”

  “I am trying to contain myself, Thomas. You will not believe it until you see it. It is one of the great things that have remained great.”

  “You mean it, Paul? You can go out any afternoon and take a string of them?”

  “A string of them? Thomas, you talk like a boy. How can you string fish that are as long as a man? On Astrobe, if you go out in a boat for any purpose other than angling, the fish will rise to the surface about you and howl for the hook.”

  “I am glad, Paul, that the new-day fishermen have not suffered any shortening of the tongue. That is what really worried me.”

  They went to Sky-Port and entered their craft for Astrobe, Thomas with an armful of mystery novels, revels, bonanzas, and science fiction books, all new things to him. Thomas had also discovered tobacco and he swore that the stogie was the most wonderful thing in the world since the Evangels. He announced that he would smoke and read for the whole trip to Astrobe. So they enskied.

  And so it went well till their first period of cosmic disappearance.

  He
was trying to bellow, the man Thomas, no, the creature Thomas, and his voice was no longer one to bellow with. The fundamental reversal had taken place in him as they made the Hopp-Equation trip, and Thomas seethed with a fury that he could not express.

  “Does it happen to all travelers, Paul?” the Thomas finally asked in frustration.

  “To all who travel by Hopp-Equation journey. The regular trip takes five years.”

  “What’s time to a revenant? I’ve been dead a thousand years, that I should live to such shame,” he, she, it said.

  The Passage dreams again, to Paul, and now to the Thomas also. Thousands of them, no more than a minute and a half each, incomparably vivid. In passage dream Thomas met an oceanic man named Rimrock and did not find it odd. He encountered a female creature who was at the same time Succubus, Eve, Lilith, Judith, Mary, and Valkyrie. He dreamed three quick vivid dreams of three men he had never met. One man for his moment was a spider with a lion’s head. One man was a most peculiar fox. And one man was a hawk who sat and shuffled shells at a table, and one shell was different.

  These dreams sank down into the cellar of the Thomas mind, but they would come up to him again when he met those persons.

  “WHY, THIS IS beyond wonder, Paul,” Thomas said when they had toppled into normal space and began to orbit in to Astrobe. “It’s a golden world. When I was a boy I was told that the streets of Paris were gold; or, if not they, then those of Rome, or Constantinople, or Cordova. I visited them all, and they weren’t. The Spanish ambassador told me that it was so in Mexico City. I didn’t get to go there, but I had long since come to my doubting years. But the whole world here is gold.”

  “It is the color of our grian-sun,” Paul said. “It is our white, and so it will seem to you.”

  They came onto firm Astrobe, dismounted, and gave the craft to the keepers. They started towards the easy rooms.

  “Not that way, Red, it’s a trap, it’s a trap!” an ansel voice erupted in Paul’s head. “To your left! To your left quickly and find friends by the edging trees.”

  “Not that way, Thomas,” said Paul, and they veered off their course. “We walk in this direction. Careful now. It was the voice of Rimrock the ansel in my head warning us. You wouldn’t know about ansels.”

  “Why, certainly I know, Paul. He spoke in my own head several times during the late hours of the passage. I look forward to meeting him. But I heard no warning. Are you sure of this?”

  “No. But we’ll not go to the easy rooms till we are sure. We’ll find what’s going on over by the edging trees. Come, quickly, but carefully.”

  “Paul, I don’t like it,” Thomas said, hanging back a little. “Don’t hand me around like a boy. I know more of snares and traps than you do. The King’s Men do sometimes employ the left-handed trap, and I smell the iron of it now.”

  Too late.

  “Paul! Thomas! Away fast!” came the oceanic voice of Rimrock in their heads. “It was not myself who spoke to you. It was another. Away!”

  Too late.

  Paul and Thomas were chopped down like weeds.

  It was agonizingly painful darkness, blind nauseating confusion, a devouring death that encompassed Paul in mind and body. It stank, it roared, it blasted, it disgusted and affrighted. A growing rumor was rising in the near distance, but too far, too late surely to save them.

  Paul remarked, with his riven mind and suddenly shattered and darkened vision, and with dirt in his mouth, on how beautiful was the afterglow of the day, especially when one has just died. The double vision of the reeling, the syndrome of the split head lends itself to detachment.

  Paul heard, with ears that seemed to belong to someone else, a new booming roar very near. He was amused that Thomas More, dead a thousand years, was so angrily refusing to die. There was another fellow, a long crooked sorrel-top who was making a great fuss about it also. Paul pulled the two halves of his mind back together and realized that the other fellow was himself, and that refreshing and kindling anger had flowed back into him. It had been a new blow, one that should have crushed his skull, that rather torched off the reaction in him, canny coolness linked with white-hot anger.

  “If that didn’t get me, I’ll be a devilish hard man to kill,” he spat through the dirt in his mouth, and had already fought his way to his feet. He had hope now. He recognized the growing rumor in the ever nearer distance as the shouting of the poor lungers from Cathead, and he knew that those miserables were on his side. The lungers hated everybody, but they hated the stilted-gaited assassins most of all.

  And Thomas had not stayed down when struck down. He had been up again and giving battle. There had been words in his booming roar, but they came to Paul’s understanding only now:

  “Front them! Front them!” Thomas shouted. “They’re King’s Men. They kill from behind. They go for the dorsalis, the spinal, the brain base. One who flees them is already dead. Front them! Front them!”

  It was not now the original assassins only. It was a churning mob, and men and things were killing and being killed. Paul was struck another blow that drove bone splinters into his brain, but oblivion never quite closed down on him. Oblivion was like a mirage that receded so that he could not come up to it; and the confusion had multiplied mightily. Distant sounds had a mocking quality that set the conflict off as a sort of dream world. The hoot of distant slag boats calling had a terrible profundity coming over the pungent water.

  One of the assassins was broken and useless. A giant lunger was killed. And a boy named Adam was killed.

  But hadn’t the boy Adam been killed before? No, Adam hadn’t necessarily been killed that other time. Not this time either. The boy had been killed in one of those dreams of passage, and those dreams (being out of time) could be of either past or future things.

  When it came to Paul that he was being saved, it came to him with a childish delight as though it was his right. He heard Thomas and Rimrock the ansel talking, but not in words. “It were better to hide in a den like a wounded bear and study the events and their foundations,” the ansel told Thomas; and the ansel was a native of Astrobe and had never seen a bear. “It were best to get to any low hidden place with remarkable suddenness and wait for the worse day that is sure to come,” Thomas told the creature, and Thomas had a broken jaw and wouldn’t be able to speak till it was wired up.

  “We are only poor miserable lungers from Cathead!” cried the powerful breaking voice of Battersea to what sounded like a crowd gathering. “It is only a little scuffle among ourselves, and we carry away our own dead. Decent people need not be concerned with it. We go quickly, and regret having intruded onto an open area.”

  Paul was being carried somewhere. It was easier that way. Oblivion flickered around the edges of Paul, and then closed in completely on him.

  A few hours for the beginning of recovery, and Paul awoke to a great odor, a writhing of many strong odors of men and seas and things.

  “It smells like the Barrio,” Paul told himself, and smelling seemed to be the only one of his senses that was functioning well. “Worse, it smells like Cathead. Still worse, it smells like the strip where they merge. It smells like one of the ten thousand low bordello inns in the teeming region. It smells like the worst of them all, the Naked Sailor.”

  Paul found that he could see, though crookedly out of an unmended head. He had been lying on hay, and he had the impression that goats had been kept in that room. He found that he could walk, though not straight as a rational man would. He staggered out of the doorless room. He walked in an angular and indirect manner through the viscera of a rambling and noisome building, past a kitchen where a mad-eyed girl gave him a length of strong fish twined in kelp, and he continued on his way eating it. He lurched along till he found a common room, and then another on a lower level. He heard the voice of Thomas More. He saw that it was coming through wired jaws.

  “It’s a bleak ba
ck-byre we have here,” Thomas said. “We’ll clean it up, or we’ll pull it down and burn it. What we need is a tub in the middle of the room, and dip the whole clutch of you.”

  Thomas was holding a sort of court there. He was a lively little runt with a clear voice and a pleasant unhandsome face. He was attended by a dozen weary ragged men who sat about on the floor and regarded him with red-rimmed eyes.

  “Where in hell are we, Thomas?” Paul asked in a voice that hurt him to use. He had floating bones in his head somewhere.

  “Fourth of the seven sections, Paul,” Thomas said cheerfully. “According to the Moslems, the fourth section of Hell is for Christians. Be appeased; there are three worse Hells than this. It’s named the Naked Sailor.”

  “The Naked Sailor! Thomas, there aren’t three worse Hells than this,” Paul stated.

  “Aye, man, there are,” said one of the men with red-rimmed eyes.

  “It’s a compendium, Paul,” said Thomas as if he were lecturing a congregation of barons. “It gives me a vantage point to study what is wrong with your Astrobe, before I make my appearance from beyond the grave. The Naked Sailor is itself a grave. I have ventured out three times this day, and have had three men killed defending you.”

  “You venture out again, man, and we kill you ourselves to save us the trouble,” said another of the shot-eyed men sitting on the floor. “Ourselves, we have only a life each. You’re not worth another one, old potato-face.”

  “There’s something deformed about this whole business,” Thomas said. “These giant settlements here are pieces right out of Hell. Do you know, Paul, that there are unburied dead lying in some of the alleys? This must be the underside of this world, this world’s sick delirium. Well, I’m finding what is wrong. I’ll see the top side soon enough and find how right everything is there.”

  “Be on your guard when you do, man,” said another of the weary-eyed fellows. “It is in these places here that the savor of the only things that are still right on Astrobe clings.”