Past Master

by R. A. Lafferty

  They crossed the last of the feral strip, moving in an agony of weariness and blood-loss, still pursued by the mechanical killers (as all would be pursued for the short remainder of their lives), still in the black afterglow of the dizzy light. They were alive, but not entirely. There had been tracers burned into them. Defiant though they might be, they could no longer be their own people untrammeled. They were marked.

  “Really, it was a sight worth seeing, once,” Thomas said. “I have found the strong skeleton beneath the golden flesh of the world, the iron in the marrow, and the deep green blood. And the something else, the void. Ah, those grinning empty faces up in the sky that were all the Nothing Face!”

  “Not up in the sky,” Evita said. “Down in the sky. We be upside down on Astrobe, and we saw down into the ultimate pit when we were on the mountain.”

  Crossing the last of the feral strip, followed closely and hounded, in the very early morning they came into giant Cathead from the backside.

  THOMAS HAD been lingering in Cathead for several days. Evita and Paul had left him: to do his work for him, they said. Kingmaker sent word for him to get back to Cosmopolis immediately; he stated that it was time Thomas campaigned, or at least stood by to be shown.

  Thomas sent back word that he had been proposed for the job of physician, and that as such he intended to examine the disease, at least superficially. He had been around the fringes of Cathead before, on its borders with the Barrio, and into certain of its tortuous suburbs. Now he had to study the sick giant itself, that mad thing that was eating into beautiful and rational Astrobe. He had to find out the riddle of this bleak monster city.

  Cathead was larger even than Cosmopolis. It had a population of more than twenty million persons. And it had grown to that in twenty years. It was human misery on the largest scale ever known anywhere.

  Take it from the outside and in general: Cathead fronted on the Stoimenof Sea; it connected with both the Grand Trunk Canal and the Intercity Canal; it had a hundred navigation channels; it was astride all the lines of civilized Astrobe like a huge spider. It had tremendous industry, stark and noisome, not hidden and disguised like the industries of the Golden Cities. It was an angry town built out of extreme poverty with all commodities produced at a much greater real expense than in any of the Golden Cities.

  It was a noisome place based on noisome cargo. But Cathead produced nothing that was not produced elsewhere in Astrobe, nothing that was not already present in abundance. Cathead handled all the products of marine mining, for the Astrobe seas were vast chemical vats sharper than the seas of Earth. But the other cities also handled all the products of marine mining, and without the repulsiveness of the processes of Cathead.

  Manufacturing techniques in Cathead were archaic, inhuman, and very expensive if human years and lives were counted in the costs. And cheap clean processes in all the other cities stood in ironic parallel to the Cathead thing. First stages of some chemical processes as performed in Cathead were so raw that they were absolutely deadly. People died like day-flies in these industries, and they lived miserably while they lived. And there was no need of Cathead at all.

  But some millions of Citizens had left the Golden Cities of Astrobe, had refused advice, had defied threats, had climbed barricades (in more recent years) and run the gauntlet of gunfire to get out of the pleasant Golden Cities and into bleak Cathead, to suffer there and to die there. And the lives they left for this were the most pleasant lives that men and machines had yet been able to devise. It seemed a poor trade. This was the riddle of Cathead and the sickness of Astrobe.

  The people had entered the Cathead thing by free choice, and they could give it up any instant they wished. The people who coughed up their lungs at the terrible labor there were low poor people who could be high rich people by sundown tonight if they wished. They were hard surly folks who had entered the slavery deliberately, and more were entering it all the time. They went out in the sea-harvest boats that made old-fashioned garbage scows seem like dream ships. They worked twenty hours a day on the noisome sea, and three years of such work would kill the strongest. But the Golden Cities had automatic sea-harvesters. The slag-workers in Cathead lost all their coordination; they stuttered and slobbered and could not speak or think straight. The gell-miners coughed up blood by the bucketful and went insane at the work within eighteen months. The extractors of oxypyrites had the most terrible labor of all, absolutely killing. And the curiosity of this is that there was no market or use for the product, no pay for the work, no reward of any kind. Men borrowed and begged and sold their children for food, and went to the non-paying labor that maimed and killed, they turned blue and went mad from it. The product was piled up useless and poisonous, and the corpses that were the by-product were piled nearly as high. And yet more than half a million men, women and children worked their twenty hours a day extracting oxypyrites, and wagered whether starvation or the poison would kill them first.

  Take it from the inside and in particular: Take the Rat Castle. This was thirty-five stories high and a hundred and fifty meters on a side. Once twenty-five thousand people had lived closely crowded in it. Now there were perhaps some remnants of those twenty-five thousand skeletons, and there were one billion rats. They covered the outside so that the color of the old building could not be told. They throbbed inside in carpets a meter deep, and covered the walls like live paper. They raided out from the Rat Castle, killing and eating children by the thousands, killing women, killing grown men, covering them in a devouring cloak and shrinking them down to bones. They went right through wooden buildings. They ate mortar as though it were cheese and weakened and entered and toppled brick structures. They ate three thousand people alive every day in Cathead. There were upwards of a hundred other tenements in Cathead taken over completely by rats, but none of the magnitude of the Rat Castle itself.

  Well then, why the unburied bodies that were everywhere in Cathead? Why the putrid flesh bubbling and near exploding in the sun? Why the odor that would actually fell the poor people with the strength of it, and these the lungers who could stand anything? Why did the rats not clean up the bodies?

  Why, most of them they did. This remnant, the few hundred you would see in a morning’s stroll through the lanes of Cathead, were too strong for the rats. There are poisons and poisons. There is flesh so poisoned in the death of it that even the rats will not touch it.

  Take the sadists’ dives. Take the children sold into them. From one of these, in quite recent years, the Devil himself ran retching. Take the rat-hunters and the rat-butchers and the rat-markets and the rat-eaters. The only way to stay ahead of them is to eat them first. Take the day of the yellow flag (usually Monday). That means that the plague itself is loose in Cathead. It will usually run its course, take its toll, and pass on within four days. And then it strikes again and the yellow flag is out once more. Inoculation is available and free to all persons in Cathead. But few will accept it.

  Take Bethlehem which began as a mad-house, grew to a mad-farm, grew to a mad-district, and is now more than one third of all Cathead. Eight million persons live in the Bethlehem district. Every one of them is insane to some degree. They get along about as well or as badly as the other citizens of Cathead.

  “Copperhead,” Thomas said, for they walked together. “Look at the men working on that project! There’s no organization at all. A good swine steward from my day could order things better than that. Why?”

  “They suffer more at the badly ordered work, Thomas. Extreme suffering is a part of the Cathead thing.”

  “Walter, why are the bodies left unburied in the lanes?”

  “A reminder of death. Follow it out far enough and it becomes a reminder of life.”

  “Copperhead, is there not one ray of sanity in all this? Why do the people not return to the golden life?”

  “This they choose.”

  “But it spreads, it spreads! More
leave the world of perfection and join the misery every day.”

  “Better a life of misery than no life at all.”

  “But there is life, the most wonderful life ever, in the golden cities. These dying miserables can receive it back within an hour. Why don’t they do it? Damn you, man, you’re laughing at me!”

  Thomas talked to some of the leading men of Cathead: Battersea, Shanty. He asked them again and again the reason for it. They looked at him with curling contempt and made cryptic remarks that he couldn’t understand. They turned aside and spat green every time he suggested that the Cathead lungers should return to civilized Astrobe.

  “Fool!” said Battersea.

  “Blind man!” said Shanty.

  “I must have caught fools’ fever to talk to you at all,” Thomas swore. “I would say die in your misery and be damned to you. But it spreads! It’s eating up the world. I swear that when I come into my power I will raze every brick and stone of this place and destroy every unreconstructed being here.”

  “Blind man,” said Shanty.

  “Fool,” said Battersea.

  Thomas looked up Rimrock the ansel. This was one mind in Cathead he respected. He found him (tired from three days’ diving) in a fan-tan parlor where the ansels went to be fleeced.

  “Good Thomas,” Rimrock greeted him, “I preach you as the hero above all heroes to the people and ansels and other creatures of Cathead. I tell them all, as the Battersea also tells them, that you are, as of now, a total fool, of course. But I tell them that you will be given one moment right at the end of your life when you are not a fool. I tell them that many entities do not have even one moment when they are not fools. I build you up every way I can.”

  “I hold you less a fool than the other men of Cathead, Rimrock,” Thomas said. “After all, ansels are not much regarded in civilized Astrobe. You do not have the golden life to go back to.”

  “Have I not, Thomas? You never lived in the ocean depths or you would not say that. It has its own perfection there, and I left it willingly for this.”

  “Why, Rimrock? It seems that that would be a life of total freedom. Why trade it for the slavery and misery of Cathead?”

  “No, Thomas, the life in the ocean depths is very like the life of Golden Astrobe, too much like it. I lose my identity there. I am one of the school, and my mind is merged into the school mind. I never regretted becoming a man; I never regretted becoming a Cathead man; but you set me too low when you imply that I haven’t given anything up. I’ve given up as much as any of them. Though, of course, there was a certain ignominy in being taken and eaten for a fish, which might have happened to me in my former state.”

  Thomas left all those hard-heads of Cathead in disgust. They had been offered happiness on a platter again and again, and they had rejected it for misery. They were killing themselves for no point at all, or for a childish point. And they were poisoning and destroying a whole world with their madness. They had to be exterminated, like the rats that they refused to exterminate.

  Thomas walked long and he thought hard. He grew sick unto staggering from the surroundings. He was the doctor, and the sickness made a strange insane appeal to him to let it live and let the host die.

  “It would be intolerable if there were something valid in all these miserable people and their thing, and it be beyond my comprehension,” he said.

  A poor woman reached out and touched Thomas as he walked in a muddy lane in the outskirts of Cathead.

  “You will be king for nine days. Then you will die,” she whispered. She was crying softly.

  “Make me no salvator, you witch,” he grumbled. “I’ll have nowt to do with the High Fate business.”

  In his walking Thomas came onto a small medieval castle dwarfed by the giant shanty tenements of Cathead.

  “What is it the building here?” he asked a coughing man. “Is it a show-house? A hobby? Is it the residence of some old fogey? Does anyone live here?”

  “Nobody lives there,” the coughing man said. “The Metropolitan of Astrobe dies there.”

  “Sure the cranky old man is a long time dying,” said Thomas.

  He knocked at the door of the old buzzard roost and there was no answer, except perhaps a low moan and rale inside. He opened the door and went in. He went through the first and second rooms without finding anyone. Then he came to a room with an old battered bed with a faded royal canopy over it.

  A very old thin black man lay in the bed. He showed all his bones; he was no more than a skeleton. There was a fetid odor, and Thomas believed the man was dead.

  On his finger the old black man had the fisherman’s ring such as is worn by only one other. There was no one in attendance on him. This was the Metropolitan (the last of them, it was said), the Pope of Astrobe.

  “Dead, are you,” Thomas said. “Well, you’ve lived a life. A Dutchman I knew would have liked you to paint as you lie there, skeleton though you be. You’re a striking man, little as there is left of you.”

  But the old Metropolitan was not dead. He began, eyes still closed, to speak in an old sort of liturgical canto.

  “Deus, qui beatos martyres tuos Joannem et Thomam, verae fidei et Romanae Ecclesiae principatus propugnatores, inter Anglos suscitasti; eorum meritis ac precibus concede; ut ejusdem fidei professione, unum omnes in Christo efficiamur et simus.”

  “Your eyes are closed, but your voice is good and you seem to recognize me,” Thomas said. “I assume that I am Thomas, but who is Joannem?”

  “Saint John Fisher,” the Metropolitan said. “You have saints’-day jointly.”

  “Ah, yes, lost his head just fourteen days before I lost mine, I’m told. I have never heard the collect of my own mass before.”

  “Damme, man, who has? Save from the other side.”

  “Have you no followers? Are there none to attend to you?”

  “But certainly I have followers, Thomas. I have five or six followers left. Someone looks in on me every few hours. I have everything I need.”

  “Have you food and drink?”

  “I have, but no stomach left for them. I am eaten up. In the cabinet there, pour yourself a large glass of wine and myself a small one.”

  “Can you open your eyes?” Thomas asked as he poured out the wine.

  “I can make the muscular effort, but it is to no avail. I am blind.”

  “So this is the way it ends here? You are the last of them?”

  “No, I am not the last, Thomas. We have the promise. We last till the end of the world.”

  “You yourself die soon, old man.”

  “Quite soon, Thomas. Thirty hours before yourself.”

  “I’m minded of the words of a partisan of mine, since turned strange and useless: ‘But we are not the world! We are quite a different world, and no promise was ever given to us.’ What say you of that, good Metropolitan?”

  “Nonsense, nonsense,” he said, “we have the Promise. It was given to us here on Astrobe in these latter days, given in a queerer and more flaming way than you could imagine. Know you that Christ has walked on Astrobe in human form, in the company of Saint Klingensmith and others. Know you that the burning promise was given, and the flame begins to rise.”

  “In your five or six followers?”

  “Those in the immediate neighborhood, Thomas. More than a hundred left on all Astrobe. It will grow. If you are of the Faith, then the very stones and clods of Astrobe will sing of the Promise to you. If you regard all such things as legends, learn then and regard the legends at least! You will find here a richer legendry than ever greened Old Earth!”

  “Go to sleep, old man; it’s all finished.”

  “’Tis never finished, Thomas, ’tis never hopeless. You are a living witness to what you cannot see. You, you ferret-faced little man, you became a saint.”

  “How can you know I’m ferre
t-faced, blind man?”

  “You are the blind man, not I.” And the old skeleton was laughing.

  They drank the good wine and talked a while. Then a coughing young man came in to attend to the Metropolitan. He was still filthy from work.

  “Good the day, Thomas,” the young man said. “Sometimes the old man is crazy and sometimes he is not. Be patient with him.”

  Thomas rose to go.

  “Turn, God, and bring us to life again!” the old Metropol blessed him hopefully.

  “And thy people rejoice in thee,” Thomas gave him the response. Then he left him.

  “The last of them,” Thomas said to himself when he was out in the roadway again. “This is the way it ends here.”

  Sea-gleaners were just bringing in a scow-load of Dutch-fish to be ground for fish meal. It was not really brutal work by Cathead standards, but it was plague day and three of the men had died. The scow-master stripped them of their boots (dead-men’s boots are lucky and there is a regular market for them), and then rolled the three bodies in with the Dutch-fish. He buried them in the fish, but half-heartedly, not caring much.

  The buyer came onto the scow, surveyed the take, and saw a leg sticking out and the outlines of all three bodies.

  “We’ll weigh them along with the fish and take them,” he said, “but I’ll have to dock you a stoimenof d’etain for each body. They just aren’t up to the fish in phosphor and sulphur. And they are hard on the grinders.”

  “IT IS unexpected that you do not come through on Replica,” Cosmos Kingmaker told Thomas. “Your voice comes through wonderfully, the people standing with you come through, but you do not appear at all. I don’t believe your invisibility on Replica is entirely due to your being a man out of the past. You’re solid enough to the touch. And then, you may not know it, about one person out of a hundred does not come through on Replica. Of course you’d come through on the old Video-Vision, but that had only two dimensions and carried to only two senses.”