“No, I was not at Jesus College at Cambridge. I was at Magdalen College at Oxford. Get your facts straight, people. Archbishop of Canterbury? No. No. I was Archbishop of York. Yes, it's true that I was Lord Chancellor of England. Who wasn't, in those decades of flux? And I was also a cardinal of the Church. And twice I reached for the papacy, but it escaped my hand. I thought then that the Holy Ghost was mistaken to pass over me, but now I see that He may have been correct.
“Did I have the best singing voice in England? you ask. And you laugh as you ask it. Yes I did. I had the best. And many of my high contemporaries had wonderful voices.
“Yes, I wrote great things, both in Latin and in English. My known works of hand—but I believe that you may be referring to the chests full of livelinesses, and full of lives. Have they been found? That's delightful. 'Twill be like an extra springtime to the whole Earth if you make them public now. They'll still be a fresh breath after the centuries.
“What words are you trying to put into my mouth, little machine? What thoughts into my electronically assembled head? ‘Impress on them that the works are worth tons of kale’—is that it? Is the contingent translation correct? Of course they are worth many tons of kale. I assume that kale is still the name of the Flemish cabbage.
“Were there seven hidden years in my life? you ask. I would guess that you have somehow woven the seven-hidden-years motif into a fiction about the excellent entertainments, about the plays stored in great chests in—in Calais. Where else? And I can hear the tinny thunder of the plot you're putting together. Why, I believe that it is our old friend the Spanish Prisoner Mystery! It's come back to visit us. Somebody look outdoors and see whether it's springtime. The Spanish Prisoner Mystery always blooms in the springtime. Oh yes, there were seven hidden years in my life. Perhaps they weren't hidden well enough, for they caught up with me and ended my life finally.
“No, I did not burn at the stake, nor was I either hanged or beheaded. An executioner's dagger found me at Leicester on my way to London to stand trial for treason. I had been taken sick at Leicester and was dying. But my dying had to be interrupted by the irregular execution to make it official. This is not generally known, that I was murdered and did not die of sickness.
“I must go now, though I'd like to stay for the end of it. I salute you, happy shills and thrice-happy gills. And some day, on the other side, when we are all finally sanctified, we will talk about such things over rum of the Indies. I myself was the most adept confidence man in England and perhaps in all Europe. I pulled some of the most towering cons ever. Ah, those were the days, those were the days! But you little machines aren't bad at it at all.”
And then that fourth and final aspect of Great Tom Fool faded away.
“Dude,” Proctor Shepherd O'Shire ordered sharply, “project immediately the four historical portraits done by Fliccius, Hans Holbein the Younger, John Melo, and Sampson Strong, of what are possibly the several aspects of Tom Fool. I want to compare them.” “Quite impossible, Shep,” Dude snapped. “They are not available. Perhaps I could obtain them after a few weeks, after an exhausting search.”
“You lie, Dude,” Shepherd accused. “You have them available here and now. You projected them subliminally when each of the scan-persons appeared. Lavender, I recall when we were programming Dude, you were the one who said ‘What's the use of having a machine that can't lie a little bit?’ But Dude lies too easily.”
Dude projected the four pictures together for one one-hundredth of a second.
“A little bit longer projection, Dude,” Shepherd ordered. So Dude projected them for a little bit longer, for .010101 of a second. That still wasn't quite long enough, but there was a good possibility that the four pictures were all of the same man, the same man perhaps not wearing exactly the same flesh in every case, the same man who created his own dumfounding resonances that walked and talked and strode as great men among the great. And the pub-reps caught all the implications and were impressed.
“Gentlemen and ladies, we may as well begin,” Dude stated. He stood up and snapped his dragon tail back on and strode to the fore.
“Why, it's a great confidence game that our machines are playing on these credulous people.” Shepherd O'Shire spoke to Arsene Gopherwood in admiration. “It's well done, in a crude way. The four greatest Englishmen of their century, Tom Cranmer, Tom Cromwell, Tom More, Tom Wolsey—they do add up to more than themselves, to Tom Foule, to Tom Crowd. Yes, those four great contemporaries do make a convincing Tom Fool. And it may have taken somebody of the scope of this Amalgamated Great Tom to be the Shakespeare herein expanded by more than a hundred new plays. But it's so weakly verified, Arsene. The Happy Braindom institution can't allow it to pass without more verification. The gills do come avidly to it though. And how could you, Arsene, the unofficial con man of the Braindom you are, be left on the outside of such a clever con pulled by mere machines?”
“I'll go a flat billion dollars for all rights to the Shakespearean and pseudo-Shakespearean works in the great chest in the Calais customhouse,” said pub-rep Kendell Kimberly. “But put the homegrown small fry outside first.”
“What makes you think I am on the outside of this con, Shepherd?” Arsene Gopherwood asked. “To be left on the outside of a con, that wouldn't be like me at all. Ah, Shep, and you others, they mean you when they speak of the homegrown small fry. Out, Shep. Out, the rest of you Happy Braindomers!”
“Don't push me out, Arsene,” Shepherd O'Shire howled. “I'll inform, I'll peach, I'll grass, I'll stool! Gills, gills, don't you know that you're being gilled? Don't you understand?”
“Don't you understand, voicey man?” pub-rep Greta Samuelsdatter asked with a sneer. “We want to go as high as we can. This is for prestige and glory. Who'd want to win a bid at a half-billion dollars when, with proper management, he could win it at two or three billion? I bid two billion. And the announced figure, of course, will be double the real figure. Get those poor twits out of here, Dude!”
The twits, all the members of Happy Braindom Ltd. except Arsene Gopherwood, were being pushed out of the auction lounge. They fought hard to stay, but they were pushed out harder. Shepherd O'Shire, Lavender Brodie, Emery Briton, Byron Verre, they were plain thrown out of that place, the lounge of their own Happy Braindom.
“Three billion dollars,” pub-rep George Hebert bid. “There's a lot of ridiculous anomalies in the cover story, but our script writers can fix up anything.”
“I'll hear, I'll hear how it goes!” Lavender was squalling. “I'll listen at the keyhole.”
“If you do, Dame Lavender, remember that there is nothing harder to reconstitute than a vaporized ear,” said that French machine Dingo. “Out, Dame, out!”
“Four billion dollars,” pub-rep Efraim McSweeny bid.
Even if they weren't very good, a hundred or more “new-and-genuine” Shakespearean plays, presented to the world with a whanging cover story that could be smoothed in the rough places, were bound to bring a pretty good price.
“Five billion dollars,” pub-rep Agnes Wankowitz bid.
But all the Happy Braindom people except Arsene Gopherwood had been locked out of there, out into the exterior darkness. And there was weeping and gnashing of teeth.
The Last Astronomer
A new worry for High Rider Charles-Wain began that morning when he stepped on a weighing machine and got a tune and a print-out. The tune was Winterset's ‘Funeral March’, and the print out read:
“You're one and ninety kilograms.
Oh sing a roundelay!
No more'll you have to give the damns,
For you will die today.”
But High Rider didn't much want to die that day. “The machine is off a kilogram too,” he growled. He crumpled up the print-out and flung it on the red grass. And thereupon the machine gave out with that ear-wrenching wail that is called the ‘poor man's siren’. It signals that it has another communication for the same person. High Rider took it from the slot, and
the new print out read:
“Pick up that print-out from the grass, you jasper. Were you raised in a swinery?”
High Rider threw that print-out on the grass too. Then he quickly took the third one from the slot to cut off the ‘poor man's siren’ in mid-squawl. This print-out read only “Oaf”, and High Rider threw it on the grass with the other two and ambled off to try to leave the noise behind him. But he was crosswise with the Red World today, and with all the worlds.
Ah, you have heard of the persons who have had their whole world crumble under them. It's a desolate and damnable feeling. But High Rider Charles-Wain had had his approximately ten billion billion billion (1027) worlds crumble under him. And the small handful of worlds that were left were all perverse. Certainly Red World was. That weighing machine, for instance —
The weighing machine wasn't a Red World idea or invention at all. It was Earthian in its origin. But almost as soon as the things were built on Red World, the smudged Martian spirit took over. There was not any mechanism for printing anything except the weight. There wasn't any provision for the machines to give personal rimed messages. All that smart stuff had an irrational origin. There sure wasn't any mechanism for that horrible howling called the ‘poor man's siren’.
“It's little guys that like to holler that get into them,” one Martian red-neck explained. “Nah, you can't see them in there. It's just their holler that gets in. The rest of them stays outside.”
On Red World there was no clear line between machines and animals and people. An automobile might argue with people and even buck and try to throw them out. And yet there were other cases of automobiles starting up and plunging into canals and saving people from drowning. There wasn't any mechanism for these things. There was only the irrational thing called ‘Spirit of Automobile’ that came to inhabit each auto.
Mars, the Red World, was somewhat irrational by old standards. But what was ‘rational’ nowadays?
“ ‘Rational’ is a little man with big eye-glasses going out with a micronomer shorter than his finger to measure the whole outdoors,” another Martian red-neck said once. “He gets owl dirt on his glasses, but he thinks that the owl dirt on them is really far galaxies. So he measures the gravity of that owl dirt and calculates how much it will bend space. That is ‘rational’.”
The reason for High Rider having worlds to the number of ten to the twenty-seventh power collapse under him was that he had been an astronomer, and all those worlds collapsed when astronomy collapsed. The bursting of the ‘Great Astronomical Bubble’ had been funny, of course. But it wasn't as funny to some of the old and intransigent astronomers as it was to other people. Some of them died of the shock of that collapse. And they continued to die at an unseemly rate.
When the profession and passion of High Rider Charles-Wain, the old classical astronomy, collapsed, that bereaved astronomer fell into a despondency that was almost worse than death. Well, he just couldn't face the derision on Earth. None of the old astronomers could. So some of them came to Mars where the ‘people’ were kinder.
Kinder? The Martians? Oh yes, they were very apologetic about anything that even seemed to give offense.
“No, no, that wasn't ourselves snickering,” those funny folks would lie. “That was the Snicker Weeds snickering.” But the Snicker Weeds only snickered when some Martian was within snicker-shot of them.
But there was an illusion of kindness and compassion here, and High Rider found a bit of solace as he walked through the pink meadows and listened to the pleasant whistles of the canal boats.
He loved the canal boats, and he had several times lived on one of them since his coming to Mars. He remembered with pleasure one night when he and a canal boat family had had a very large fish for dinner. No, no, you misunderstand. The huge fish sat at table with them and ate with them, manipulating the Martian finger sticks as well as any person could. He was a big striped fellow and an interesting talker in spite of the fish-lipped manner of his pronunciation. There was an easy camaraderie among all the creatures of Red World.
Quite a few Earth people came to Mars to die. Death on Red World didn't seem so final, or at least it didn't seem so sharp and sudden as on Earth. And the distance to Mars, once mankind had been liberated from the old astronomy and the old mathematics, was not at all great. It was an easy trip in a variety of scheduled and unscheduled vehicles.
“This life is too pleasant to leave,” High Rider mumbled on that day when he had received his death notice. “The taste of gall and disillusionment is bearable here so long as the sunlight is still golden and the fields are living scarlet and the waters are bright green. And I will not admit that a weighing machine can predict the day of my death. That would be coarse superstition. It's a fact that in the dozen cases I know about the predictions have come true, but that is only coarse coincidence. It's true that the Martians see death on me, but I bet I wouldn't have to die if I really decided that I didn't want to. To die is the only honorable thing for a discredited astronomer to do, of course, but I was never one to insist on my honor in other things. I suppose I really want to die though, or I wouldn't be doing it.” High Rider wasn't really very old — an even hundred years by Earth time; and he belonged to the first generation that was supposed to average a hundred and fifty years. But, yes, the Martians could see death on him.
They smiled at him this day and they encouraged him with such hearty sayings as “The last day of a life should be the best day of it. Enjoy it, enjoy it! How we envy you!”
The collapse, several years before this, of the classical Hubbleian Astronomy should have surprised no one. It was built on nothing but extrapolations from very faint smudges of light, on angles smaller than that subtended by a beebee or a birdshot on Earth's moon as observed from Earth, on mathematics too coarse to deal with really tenuous operations, and on an open violation of both common-sense and divine economy. It was really Occam's Razor (“If that man had such a sharp razor, why is he wearing a full beard in the only picture we have of him?”) that cut the old astronomy to pieces. What is the use of ten billion galaxies if one galaxy will do? What is the use of ten billion suns in a galaxy if fifty suns will do? What is the use of thirty billion light years of distance-time if thirty light years will do?
It was the Razor that did it in. And it was nine basic mathematical errors, one each in the calculations of Herschel, Bessel, Petzval, Dreyer, Max Wolf, Einstein, De Sitter, Slipher, and Hubble that did it in. “Every grade school boy could point out those errors today, but why did we not see them immediately?” High Rider Charles-Wain asked the sorrel-colored hills of Mars. “Of course all of us astronomers copied each other unthinkingly, but such trunk-to-tail following is characteristic of every elite of every species, not just of the old astronomers of Earth. Oh, why did we never doubt? Why did we never cross-check with common sense and with different-viewpoint observation? They've been laughing at us for several painful years now, and they'll not stop till the last one of us is gone. I'm about the last of us, I guess, and I'm about gone.”
And the only astronomy had collapsed also because of all the living anomalies that took the easy rationality out of the cosmos. These living anomalies became undeniable as soon as Earthians got to Mars and the other planets. One of those living anomalies landed beside High Rider Charles-Wain right now, and he began to talk to the old astronomer.
“I knew that this was your last day and I wanted to see you one final time,” this anomaly said. “I was afraid I would be too late and wouldn't be able to find you. There are dozens of burial meadows you could be plodding to, but I guessed it would be the ‘Star-Flower Burial Meadow’. I finished the regatta just after dawn this morning, and I'm bone tired and wing tired; but I wanted to see you again. You're the last of them, here on Red World at least.”
This person who cared enough to look up High Rider for a last visit was a Bird Man who had just finished the Phobos Regatta that day. The regatta was about 3,700 miles or 5,900 kilometers. It had take
n nine Martian days of flying. It was a stark physical test. Yes, the Bird Men flew from the Martian Moon Phobos to the Planet Mars. They slept and ate on the wing, but provisions were brought to them by little provisioning boats.
“How did you do in the Regatta?” High Rider asked.
“Oh, I finished three hundred and ninth out of a flight of four hundred and seventeen. But anyone who finishes at all wins a great personal victory. Remember when you Earthians used to say that creatures couldn't fly between planets, or even from a moon to a planet, because there was no ‘air’ out there? Remember when they said that creatures could not make the flights because the ‘distances’ were so great? That was funny. But the funniest of all was your believing that there were no canals on Mars when anyone with a cheap telescope could see ten thousand of them. Your theories got in the way of plain facts.”
“Our theories did not allow for howling anomalies, and there are thousands of them on the half dozen worlds we now know. And you, Bird Man, are about as feathery an anomaly as any of them.”
“I suppose so,” the Bird Man said, “yet I sometimes find myself wishing that the grotesque old theories of Earthians had been true. When I was a boy and a young man (and by all the red meadows of Mars I'm still a young man) I loved to read the ‘Astronomy Fiction’ of Earth. I still say that there was no harm in it. It tickled the imagination. But they say that those old pathological astronomers of Earth really believed in their astronomy. And some of the Earth people believed in their astronomers. Only a few oddities like the great Charles Fort knew that your astronomy was total hokum. Fort has always been popular on Mars. Fort and Edgar Rice Burroughs. It's said that Burroughs was never on Mars, but I do not understand how he was able to describe us so accurately if he was never here. But tell me, Last One, did you yourself believe in the old astronomy? And did you ever stop believing in it?”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 280