Past Master

by R. A. Lafferty

  “It’s probably an advantage,” Thomas said. “I sound better than I look.”

  “Yes, it seems that it is an advantage. It adds a little mystery to you. You are quite in the public fancy now. There are always intangibles at work in a thing like this, but it is going much more successfully than we had hoped. Your animal and your mistress help. People instinctively trust a man who has an animal and a mistress. The Higher Ethics crowd has swung to you on their account.”

  “Kingmaker, you’re crazy. I have neither. Oh, you mean Rimrock and the child-brat? But Rimrock the ansel is a man and not an animal.”

  “And the child-brat is a woman and not a child, Thomas. Dammit, my father had her once. All the lies about her aren’t lies. But they both have popular appeal, Rimrock and Evita, and they can both talk for you with the damnest left-handed eloquence ever heard. Almost everyone on Astrobe had them on Replica last night and they threw the whole planet into a delightful panic. The people are completely taken with the sweep of their talk. Fortunately, they do not seem to grasp the meaning. Both your Things are heretics to the Dream, Thomas, and they would be dangerous if they were understood. There is a lot to your doxie besides her paradoxes.”

  “She reminds me of my youngest daughter,” Thomas said, “but she is not so well brought up. Kingmaker, cannot something be done about the Programmed Killers? They nearly had me last night again. Let them go kill someone else for a while! They make me jumpy. Whether I have nine lives or not I do not know, but they have now made nine attempts on my life. And they become trickier. They aren’t mere machines as I understand machines. They learn and adapt, and they aren’t avoided by the same trick twice. I am not a threat to the Dream! I love it. I am an intense partisan of it. I also in all honesty could blazon on my breast I have not been false to the Vision. There is something wrong with the programming of these things.”

  “No, Thomas. It is impossible that anything should be wrong with their programming. Thomas, the Dream is in trouble, and any man by some quirk of circumstance may be a threat to it. But the Programmed Killers are too mechanical in one way; they take propositions too literally. We will guard you, but the judgment of the Programmed Killers must be respected. We must be careful not to break their spirit with undue frustration.”

  “I believe that I am winning,” Thomas said. “I get the smell of Victory.”

  “Oh yes, we’ll win,” Kingmaker said. “The trick is not to appear to win too easily.”

  “How is that, Kingmaker? I was a politician in my normal life, and we said Win First, Make Adjustments Later. I’d never lose anything from any reluctance on my part.”

  “There are certain parties that we do not wish to accrete to us, Thomas. They will all swing to a clear winner and hug him to death in the closing days. The ones who always make me uneasy are the Hatrack Party, and the Kiss of Death Party. And I am a little leery of the Third Compromise Party. They hurt you when they come to you. We want our hands unbound when we go to work after we have won.”

  “You want your own hands unbound, Kingmaker. You’d bind mine a little.”

  There had been various methods of election on Astrobe; and there had always been a jungle of parties, with a man being permitted membership in many of them at the same time.

  Once it had been One Person One Vote, an idea that had been brought from Old Earth. Later had come the weighted vote, by which every voter was given the full rights he was entitled to. A man might be awarded additional votes for distinguished service—public, private, scientific or ethical. Most ranks carried with them a number of votes. Entertainers of various sorts might receive additional votes as accolade. Wealth was a two-bladed sword, however. A man like Kingmaker might have had a thousand votes; but another very rich man, who shall be nameless here, had had only one quarter of a vote. He was not popular in his wealth.

  Citizens of Cathead and the Barrio had had only one quarter of a vote each, they being under blanket penalty. Ansels and other citizens of intelligence but not of human form had had only one eighth of a vote each. Nevertheless there had been a scandal when certain shrewd ansel leaders went down and registered and voted millions of wild ansels in the ocean depths. Their votes had finally been disallowed. It was declared that only Astrobe creatures of the land-living sort might vote.

  Finally the Vote itself was done away with. There was no way to modernize it. It was a relic. Everything was now left to the sensing machines.

  These worked on the auras of every person of Astrobe, for a running record of all their nuances was always kept—however far away they might be. It took very little adaption to add this burden to the machines.

  The sensing machines could assess and compile the weight of opinion and choice in the totality of the minds on Astrobe. At the zero hour they took their reading, and it was the correct reading. Every conviction, every inkling, every resolution or irresolution of every mind on Astrobe was given its proper weight.

  And the machines could not be tampered with. Their scanning was perfect. They weighed everything properly. This combined the best elements of all systems. A person of very fine intellect and well-studied judgment would have more effect on the scanners than would a joker with a head full of notions. Persons of strong personality and vital character naturally weighed more in the machines’ totals than did lesser persons. But frustration and confusion of mind subtracted from the body of a personal opinion.

  This was the Weighted Vote carried out with honesty and justice.

  There was only one thing wrong with this arrangement, and it could not be the fault of the machines since they were flawless. Cathead and the Barrio came to have undue influence. It was almost as if these regions had a disproportionate number of persons of very fine intellect and well-studied judgment, and this was not possible.

  A modification of the system was being worked out. Judgments and decisions not in accord with the full Astrobe Dream were to be discounted or thrown out entirely. But there had been difficulties in this. What was involved was that, sooner or later, there must be a definition of just what the full Astrobe Dream consisted of. The modifications would not be worked out in time for the coming election in which Thomas More was involved.

  But the Parties—who could ever make sense out of their jungle? The Center Party, of course, was Thomas’ own, and that of his three big sponsors. There was the First Compromise Party, the Second Compromise Party, the Third Compromise Party; there was the Hatrack (or Conglomerate) Party, and the Solidarity Labor Party; there was Demos and the Programmed Liberal Party; there was Mechanicus and Censor and the Pyramid; there was the New Salt Party and the Kiss of Death Party; there was the Intransigents and the Reformed Intransigents and there was the Hive; there were the Golden Drones, and the Penultimate and the Ultimate parties. It sometimes seemed that there were too many of them, but they all had their programs and their platforms. There were the Obstructionists and the New Obstructionists. There were the Esthetics, the Anesthetics, and a splinter group called the Local Anesthetics; these latter were jokesters and so automatically their opinions counted for nothing on Astrobe, though the party was allowed to register. There was Ochlos, which carried the special blessings of Ouden. Several of these parties were for Programmed Persons only; one, the Unreconstructeds, was for humans only; but most had a varied membership.

  A crank got in to see Thomas More. He was not a wild-eyed crank. He was dull-eyed and he spoke in a singsong voice.

  “Thomas Momus, the Big Boys’ Toy,” he began rather rudely. “I am the leader of a certified party, and the law obliges you as a major candidate to give me a fair hearing.”

  “Right, a short fair hearing it shall be,” said Thomas. “What is the name of your party?”

  “It’s the Crank. I organized it and named it. I am the Crank and I make myself heard.”

  “And how many members has the Crank?”

  “Only myself, doubting Thomas.
You may wonder how I was able to get a one-man party certified. Well, the ways of bureaucracy are strange. An application, timed just right, will sometimes slide through in the dark. My program is simple: I battle that pair of insufficiencies, Humanism which has no meat, and Materialism which has no bones.”

  “That’s good,” Thomas said. “I always liked a good round phrase. It doesn’t mean anything, but I suspect I will use it myself in my next speech.”

  “I see the parties at an end,” the Crank said. “Some grow old, some develop quirks, some catch the biliousness of repentance, some begin to apply words and thoughts too literally. All are dying. Soon only my own party will remain.”

  “Ah well, what is your party for?”

  “It is against all false things, doubting Thomas. I believed it a mistake when pornography was given equal time in the schools with ethics, and both compulsory. I believed it a mistake when the law was enacted that perversion and normalcy should be given equal space and time in literature and on stage, though at that time normalcy gained by the ruling. I think it a mistake that marriages may be terminated by an Evaluator against the wishes of the parties concerned. I think it wrong that nothing may be taught in the schools that is not in accord with the Golden Dream. I think it wrong that a law should be able to deny offspring to private persons. I believe it was a serious error when the Psychologs were made a privileged class with powers of entry and seizure. I believe that the human person should be inviolate, and that mechanical tampering with the brain of an individual should not be allowed. An adjustability chart should not be everything, particularly when it cannot be adjusted. I believe that a man should be allowed to choose his own occupation and his own unhappiness. Do you not believe as I do?”

  “No, I do not, Crank, on no point whatsoever.”

  “It is no wonder that they called you the doubting Thomas on your home world.”

  “But they didn’t. You have me confused with another and more famous man.”

  “You are not the Doubting Thomas, the Apostle who betrayed the Christ?”

  “No I am not. You are badly confused.”

  “So are a lot of people, then. You owe your sudden surge of popularity to this false identification that has been hung on you. They’ve made you out a great hero, the betrayer of an old mountebank. Who are you, then?”

  “I’m a stranger from another time who was brought here to give testimony to a great thing. I do so. I am in love with the Dream of Engineered Humanity.”

  “I have no faith at all in Engineered Humanity. I am neither humanist nor materialist. I am a heretic.”

  “Why do you not go to cancerous Cathead and live with your own kind?”

  “Because that life is too hard. I claim the right to protest. I know that my talk is the dangerous sort. Men have been beheaded for such talk.”

  “I think not,” Thomas said. “Just why they are beheaded I don’t know, and perhaps I’m a man who should. Now then, I have given you a short fair hearing as the law requires. I do not solicit the support of your party, though, in all honesty, if it had more than one member I might. Here, here, good contrivances, throw this fellow out!”

  And a couple of contrivances, Programmed Persons, came to pitch the Crank out.

  “I hate it!” the Crank roared. “I do not so much mind being booted out by a good human toe—it has happened to me often enough. But I hate to be kicked out by a machine. Damn all mechanicals to the reclamation heap!”

  Thomas was on the campaign trail and he enjoyed it. He was annoyed a little by the Programmed Killers always in every audience he addressed, ever ready to rush the podium and kill him swiftly; but he provided himself with a screen of retainers to keep them off. He was annoyed a little by other Cranks, but he was good at putting down hecklers. And he was good at the rhetoric business; he was indeed the noblest rhetor of them all. He had the straight clear touch and an intricate lash to his tongue.

  “I cannot really move mountains,” he told one audience. “Hell, a man’d strain himself on a thing like that. But I can move this world—ahead. Is not that much more important? I come to implement the Astrobe dream. Perfection itself is in stages. We ascend! Obstacles shall be removed! All unhealthy growth will be excised. I preach sanity of mind and body and society, and the perfect symbiosis between humans and Programmed. We come to the high plateau, we lie down in green grass—no, belay that phrase; perhaps it has not a progressive meaning on Astrobe. We come to the stage of dynamic rest. All things flow into us and we all become one. Minds and bodies merge.”

  And he continued in that happy vein for above an hour.

  “You were talking nonsense, you know,” Paul told him after that particular speech. “I wonder if you were even listening to yourself.”

  “You didn’t like me, Paul? I liked me. And yet I was bothered a couple of times.”

  “By what, Thomas? You of the golden mediocrity should not be bothered by anything.”

  “Paul, I said words and I said words, but there were other words that I did not say.”

  “What are you trying to say now, Thomas?”

  “Somebody else spoke some of those words out of my mouth.”

  “Oh, that! I suspect they’ve been doing it to you for a long time, and you just haven’t been paying attention. You’ve been saying many things, publicly and privately, that don’t sound like you. It’s one of the oldest and easiest tricks of the Programmed. They crawl into your mind at odd moments and take control. It’s only a mechanical trick that they have. Surely you’ve heard of it before.”

  “As one hears of everything. But it never happened to me before so obviously. Those words were thought in my mind and said out of my mouth by someone else. I resent it a little.”

  “Why, there’s nothing to it, Thomas. Kick them out. Your mind is your own. They plainly can’t stay in your mind if you don’t allow them to. Kick them out. Sometimes they’ll stay gone for as long as ten minutes. It’s all a question of will.”

  “That’s what makes me feel uneasy. I haven’t as much will as I used to have. And I’m not sure that a strong will is commensurate with the Astrobe Dream. After all, I should be submerging my own will to the group will.”

  “Holy hoptoads, Thomas, you begin to sound like one of them. Be a man.”

  “Why, no, I believe that I should leave off being a man absolutely. We should all strive for the synthesis, part man and part Programmed. We have to submerge ourselves in our mechanical brothers for the good of all.”

  “They’ll eat us alive if we do, Thomas. They never back up; they’re into any opening we give them. Where do you get that bit about leaving off being a man absolutely?”

  “Oh, those were some of the words that someone else spoke out of my mouth in my speech just concluded. They’re true, though, and the audience liked them. We have to be more flexible, Paul. This hasn’t been easy for me, coming from Earth. But I learn to give in on one thing, and then another, and then another.”

  “And then on everything, Thomas.”

  “I didn’t like the Pandomations at first. But I learned to tolerate them, and I can see that, when I become more perfected, I will love them. And at first I felt that there was something very wrong with the Open Mind Act. Now I can see how essentially right it was.”

  “Nobody but a filthy fruit would submit to either, Thomas.”

  “Watch your talk, Paul! I’m a solider fellow than you are. I’ll thrash you.”

  “You can’t, Thomas. You have left off being a man absolutely.”

  The Pandomation was a machine available in various scanner booths, and many persons had them in their homes. An early critic, with no real understanding of the purpose or practique of this marvelous machine, had called it “peeping-tomry carried to the ultimate.” It was an unjust criticism.

  The Pandomation, the machine in accord with the open-mind policy of Astrobe,
was simply a machine for permitting the curious to look into a variety of rooms, at random or according to selection. One could look into the private chambers of the citizens and their wives and watch them at their home-like activities. One could look into any room anywhere on Astrobe, except for less than a dozen restricted rooms—certain semi-public meeting rooms of leaders. This device was a strong adjunct to knowledge, as it permitted all interested persons to know all things about everyone. It was surely in accord with the Astrobe aspiration: “That we be all ultimately one person, that we have no secrets whatsoever from ourselves.”

  But it was not used as much as it had once been. The general public hadn’t yet come to understand its fruitful purpose. With many it had reached the point of boredom—and yet how could anyone be bored by looking at the activities of his fellows, the other aspects of himself? Here was a man and wife, here was a man and mistress, here were lovers. There could no longer be secret lovers. The device was no longer limited to rooms, but any point indoors or outdoors in all civilized Astrobe could be dialed by anyone, except for the very few shielded areas.

  The Pandomation was only the first step. The Open Mind Act itself encouraged further inventions and found fruitful use for many already in being. The subtitle of the act, I Have As Much Right In Your Mind As You Have, expressed the beautiful new concept. Now mind-scanners were available for everyone, and recalcitrants who resented having their minds invaded could be cited for it and haled into court for antisocial acts.

  “We are all the same thing. We are identical,” ran part of the wording of the act. “How can all minds become alike and merge into one if each aspect of that ultimate mind is not free to examine every other aspect of itself?”