Past Master

by R. A. Lafferty

  The vast sound of the Exultation Trumpets broke. It died down in echoing fragments and left a vibrating silence.

  And a Person had declared himself!

  This was the Past Master, dead a thousand years, a dumpy little almost-old man, a pinkish little elf on a world of golden-bronzed giants. But on him in that moment was the magikos, the charismatic grace, the transcendent magnetism, the presence, the messiahship, the draiocht. He had erupted in the middle of them with the dirt of the grave still on him, so it seemed. It was sheer ghostliness, the seeming of one who comes through closed doors and sealed tombs, one who is the master of time. It was transcendence touching them all.

  Then came the Ovation like a pouring ocean. It broke in heavy crested waves, each one higher than the former. It lasted a great while. It lifted them up, all the golden cynics who had forgotten what it was to be exalted. Some of them would speak of it later as their fools’ carnival, yet it would always remain a stunning thing in their lives.

  Thomas had them hooked without speaking a word. A presence had been created for him, and it had won. How that presence had been managed, and by whom, Thomas would try to sort out in his mind later. Had it all been done by a quack man and a quack animal, and a brat child? Who makes magic here? Clearly, several powers of a near-alien sort had been working for him there.

  And that presence made itself known immediately, through all the Cities and through all that world, from one end to the other.

  “It is the Past Master,” the people everywhere said.

  He had them, he had them. Then he spoke, loudly and clearly.

  “I accept the great burden that has been given me to bear,” Thomas announced in a silver voice that had a bit of the old grave-duct in its burr. “Now we will set about the governing and righting of this world.”

  “He hasn’t been offered the burden yet,” Peter Proctor throat-growled to himself. But Peter was grinning a weird fox-like grin. Nobody appreciated a successful master-stroke so well as did Proctor.

  And after minutes, or perhaps hours, the Convocation broke, and moved away in glittering fragments. The implementation of it would be done in smaller gatherings, in tight groups and committees. The particular details would evolve themselves out of shrewd staff work.

  But nobody really doubted that they had their man.

  “It was Rimrock, the rubber-nosed ocean-man thing,” said Thomas when he had withdrawn with his party and was mingling with other functionaries. “It was the Copperhead with his occult stuff. It was Paul with his broken crown, and the child-witch with the two opposite auras about her. They took all the grand ones like country ganglers with the magic show they did for me.

  “Aye, and with trumpets!”

  “I thought I was a master of contrived effects,” Cosmos Kingmaker told Thomas, “but I never put together a show like yours. I have a personal difficulty. My wife has been regarded as the most beautiful woman on Astrobe, and she so regards herself. It is, indeed, a requisite of my position that I have the most beautiful woman on Astrobe. But the legend-girl who is in your entourage has her startled, and the popular reports have torn her up. So long as the Evita was believed a legend it could be lived with. Now she has made another public appearance and everybody on the planet knows who she is.”

  “I have not seen the one, nor greatly noticed the other, except for certain queer qualities that cling to her, and they are not altogether of beauty. I have no idea at all how she happens to be in my entourage. She’s a puzzler.”

  “So, you’ve been wandering like a loon these days and nights,” Kingmaker accused, “and no telling into what hands you’ve fallen. It isn’t a very responsible beginning. What hills and dales of Astrobe you’ve been wandering over I don’t know.”

  “Through what swamps, rather. On Earth, at least, the loon is a bird of the swamps and meres. I’ve been in some brackish swamps.”

  “It’s a bird, is it?” Kingmaker asked. “I thought it was only an expression. Well, whatever swamps you have been wading in, do not go to them again till you have been instructed. You will not know with what eyes to look at these things until we tell you.”

  “I had intended to use my own eyes.”

  “No, no, that won’t do at all. We won’t have you interfering with the things we have set up for you to do, or offering untutored programs on your own.”

  “You are saying that you won’t have me interfering with the image that you intend to present me under?”

  “That’s it exactly, Thomas. The image has already gotten a little beyond what we intended. We were worried whether we could make it strong enough. Now we are worried that perhaps it is a little too strong. I had expected you to be more amazed at the wonders of Astrobe, however.”

  “Kingmaker, man, I stand and stare boggle-eyed at them like a calf at the new barn door. Of course I’m impressed by the thousand years of technological advance since my time, half of it made since the first landing on Astrobe, much of it quite new to me. And in my day I had the name of being a forerunner in these things. I didn’t know what questions to ask about the future when—well, when I talked to certain traveling men on this subject a long time ago, or at least a long time from here. I asked them questions of philosophy and theology and the political formation of commonwealths, and of the arts and tongues and of the mind understanding itself. It never struck me that the changes would be in material things. We had already made great advances in these, far beyond the Greeks and Romans, and I thought the cycle would swing back and the thousand years after myself would be devoted to advances in the intangibles. Aye, I’m impressed; the more I hear, the more I see, I’m impressed.

  “The fact that there are no sick of body among you (except in the Barrio and Cathead) amazes me. The fact that there are no sick of mind among you would entice me also, had I not discovered for myself that so many of you are dead of mind. All your mechanical and mental things are new coinage to me. Your mind-probes and mind-crawls fascinate me, even when they are turned on myself. You have loosed them on me within the last several moments, have you not, Kingmaker? I can feel them crawling like moles through the tunnels of my head. Hah! I’ve got them calked now, though. I’ve but to think in Latin and they can’t come into me. I always believed that it would be a mental image thing, not a verbal thing, when it came.”

  “We have both sorts, Thomas. The verbal is the simpler.”

  “So simple that you can hide it in the palm of your hand, Kingmaker, and you do.”

  “It’s neater than eavesdropping,” Kingmaker said, “and it does pick up the sub-vocals. You yourself use an ansel, but they haven’t proved satisfactory. The ansel tends to forget that he is only a communication device. Sometimes he becomes the master. Most men think in words in their unguarded moments, and particularly when they are voicing other words at the same time. Of course my own device here can be fitted with a Latin or any other attachment; it is just that I had forgotten that Latin was still used in your day by the international scholar crowd. So I have missed a sequence out of your private thought, and just when it was getting pretty good. Would you repeat it for me?”

  “No I won’t, Kingmaker. It would burn the ears off you. But of all the things I have seen on Astrobe to this minute, it is your Programmed Persons who most enchant me: not the Programmed Killers, who have given me some trouble, but the others. What a boys’ dream come true! The old-time Greeks dreamed of this, you know, and the latter-time Jews. The mechanical man who works! What clockmaker’s apprentice would not give half his soul for the secret? That we can make machines in our own image, and that they can outthink and outperform us! It’s a marvel, Kingmaker. It hasn’t grown to be a stale marvel with you, has it? And not only have men made them to perform better than men; but now, so I’m told, the things make themselves better than men can make them.”

  “No, this marvel hasn’t become stale to me, Thomas. I wasn’t sure how yo
u would take it, particularly since you yourself have been attacked by the Programmed. The Killers themselves are a specialized minority, built to guard against any threat to the Astrobe Dream. But sometimes, it seems, they make mistakes. The Programmed themselves are the main thing, the men of the future, the successors to ourselves.”

  While Kingmaker talked, Thomas entertained in the cellar of his mind one of those passage dreams such as both he and Paul had experienced on the transit between Earth and Astrobe. Cosmos Kingmaker was a great golden spider, for all that he wore the head of a lion in the dream. Out of her webs she spun (for sex is often confused in these passage dreams) the whole great civilized world of Astrobe. The great buildings, the great societies, all were the fruit of these webs. The whole world of Astrobe was entirely of gossamer. But the rampant spider would defend her work in every flossy pinnacle of it. There would be no compromise here. The silky facade must be preserved. What matter that it had no substance?

  Then a black wind arose, blowing out of Cathead. It began to rend the webs. “Here, here!” great Kingmaker shouted in the superb spidery voice. “It is a false thing that blows. I am the true thing. I am the true cat-head, and not this other. I say to the winds ‘Be quiet! Do not rumble my webs, Oh do not rumble my webs!’”

  “I will return to these wonders again and again, Kingmaker,” Thomas said, talking on an entirely different level than that of his passage dream. “And the most wonderful of all is your travel today. On my trip to Astrobe I traveled a hundred times farther in every second than I had gone in all my life before; and I am a traveled man, familiar in all the capitals of Christendom. Speed has become infinite.”

  “No, Thomas. Hopp-Equation travel is only the square of eight, or sixty-four times light speed. With that we can never hope to reach more than a narrow corner of the universe. Other number-base travel has been tried—the square of thirty-seven, for instance, or Horwitz-Equation travel. But no pilot has ever returned from that, or from any of the others. They may return a billion years in the future or in the past, or they may be lost. We aren’t the lords of speed yet.”

  “Even so, you must have billions of worlds to colonize.”

  “No, not yet, not for many centuries. We have only six Proven Reserve Worlds after Astrobe. And the colonies on them are still sickly things. The elites do not go out to them as they went out from Earth to Astrobe. At the moment we are going nowhere except backwards.”

  “With every man-jack of you a thumping genius you should be going forward with a surge. Kingmaker, you figure to use me as a front; you have admitted as much. But a little study of recent Astrobe politics is not reassuring. I find that you have had for recent short-term world presidents a Mr. X, the Masked Marvel, the Asteroid Midas, and the Hawk-Man from Helios. The latter must have looked rather like Foreman. They sound like the names of ancient Rome gladiators or, as one has suggested to me, of medieval American wrestlers. Now you take me for another costumed actor, a contrived front-symbol for you to manipulate. You will bill me as the Past Master.”

  “Probably, since the name has taken the popular fancy. We haven’t yet decided.”

  “Cosmos, I will be manipulated by no one! If elected president, I will preside!”

  “That is what we both hope and fear, Thomas. No, your case is not like the others. We have run out of tricks, but the people haven’t run out of expecting tricks. To be elected you must be presented as a contrived front-symbol. But to rescue Astrobe from its mortal difficulties you must supply us with a new element.”

  “I believe you’re afraid of a new element, Kingmaker.”

  “Of course I am. But I will not have the fabric of our world rended.”

  “Do not rumble my webs, Oh do not rumble my webs!”

  “What, Thomas?”

  “A fragment of a dream up from the cellar of my mind, no more. You will try anything, be it deepest change, to preserve the changelessness.”

  “I don’t know what the necessary element will be, Thomas. Foreman believes that he knows. Thomas, you don’t seem too curious about your own attempted assassinations.”

  “Oh, I’ve set up my own apparatus to go into that, Kingmaker. It reaches higher than the simple Programmed; it reaches to the complex Programmed and to the high-ranking human. There’s a pretty strong party that wants me dead before I am ever, as it were, born on Astrobe.”

  “There’s another thing we’re afraid of, Thomas. We’re afraid to show you, and afraid to hide you, and it’s too late to make another choice. You have an impressive name to the initiates, you received a startling ovation which we do not understand—neither the thing itself nor our own part in it—and you have an impressive costuming for the people. But you’re not an impressive personality.”

  “You hear me now, Kingmaker! I do not strut sitting down, if that is what you mean. I do not play the great man privately. But I can be an excellent man when there is time for it, and you will not find a better. I was counted a master in my own time, and I be a master here. On the scena I can play the noblest rhetor of them all! There’ll be nowt awkward or awry about my performance, Kingmaker. At this one thing for which Astrobe has a hunger now, high oratory, we were the professionals and you are the amateurs. I know that you have analyzed the thing and broken the personal aura down into its elements. It is like chopping up a bird, but can you make a bird? Perhaps you can, since you made the Programmed Persons, but we recognize them as artificial. I know that you have built intricate eloquence machines, man, but they ring false. The laughter of the people at them like autumn leaves blowing is evidence of this. I’ve heard the eloquence machines, and I’ve heard the people’s response. I’ve heard human and programmed orators who have studied under the eloquence machines; I’ve heard a lot of things in one week on Astrobe. People are hungry for the real thing, and I can give it to them. You try to analyze my ovation at my coming to Convocation Hall, and you fail. Part of it was the connivance of my friends and associates, and part of it was a congruity of circumstances. But the most of it, Kingmaker, was myself.”

  “We’ll have to let you try it, Thomas. But don’t ever try to set policy. Politics on Astrobe has become an intricate science.”

  “Politics was intricate in my day,” Thomas maintained.

  But Kingmaker began to laugh at that. Thomas was not sure whether or not he had reason.

  “We are lucky to be alive, Thomas,” said Peter Proctor the lucky fox, “and I do not mean it in any negative way, as though there were something threatening us. I mean that developments themselves are lucky, and on Astrobe today things are the luckiest ever.”

  “Then why do so many choose to leave this life, Proctor?” Thomas asked.

  “Leave it? You mean to join the Cathead thing? Or do you mean what was once vulgarly called the suicide rate? The first depresses me, the second delights me. Is it not lucky to be able to leave a life that cloys? Is it not lucky that there are such neat facilities for it? Should a man sit at table after he is sated? Why then should he live a moment longer than is required? Golden Astrobe is no prison; we do not build walls around it to keep men in. Life is not for everybody, and long life should be for none. A man may dispose of himself in a booth on any street corner. All apprehension and uneasiness has been removed. A man can leave with a clear conscience.”

  “Aye, do the dirty thing with a clear conscience. And you make it work.”

  “We live in a lucky world, Thomas. Now we rub our hands, and we will bring still more luck to it.”

  “I am the good-luck piece now, am I?” Thomas asked. “And what thing are you, Peter? I have wondered. And so, I am told, have others.”

  “Me, Thomas? I’m the luckiest man in the world, any world. No need to look more deeply into me. I’m the second richest man on Astrobe, after Kingmaker. And all envy attaches to him, not to me. I am fortunate in wife, in offspring, in attainments, in residence—”

  �
�I have heard the scree,” Thomas said.

  “And I am universally liked,” Proctor finished with a look that was more than commonly fox-like.

  It was another of those passage dreams up from the cellar of Thomas’ mind. Peter Proctor was a fox indeed, and he ran nimbly over a thin volcanic crust that had a very great depth below it. Thomas was in sudden terror of that emptiness below the crust, and the flickering flames that were only an aspect of that emptiness. Just how deep was the great space below that thin crust? Thomas peered down. The space was forever. There was no bottom. Stars could be seen below, under their feet, but there was something the matter with these stars. They were crooked things, stars of the crooked light. But Peter the fox was in no way terrified with that great depth, not even when great clumps of the volcanic crust broke away before his feet and fell forever. “It is my home there,” said the fox. “Let the crust sink down in it; let it fragment and break, and pitch all its fauna into the flames in the void. I welcome it, the fundamental void. I was born for it, and I will take all to it quickly, if only the meddlers who would prop up the crust will desist. The flames in the void are my home. Nothing can harm a fox with an asbestos tail.” And then Thomas noticed that Peter the fox did indeed have an asbestos tail.

  “But you were one of the three men who sent to bring me out of the past,” Thomas said. “Why should you, if everything goes so well here?”

  “Oh, I believed that you might do less harm than another, little Thomas. You will be the newest novelty. We need such for the people in this temporality, this passing phase. The people must dine on novelties after they are cloyed of food.”