And below this unfinished drawing, scraped and obliterated to make room for it, is (I call on all electrical and ghostly things to give me the power for this reading) Brusca or La Brusca, which is the brushwood plant, the love-wood or the brush-fire, the Burning Bush. The beauty and passion of the Burning Bush, though obliterated and marked over, is so strong that it brings a catch to my throat. I have no throat but I intuit throats. Should this not be the end of the search, the end of everything? Love, sheer love, how is it not sufficient? Well, perhaps it is insufficient by not being sheer enough. This is, after all, a designer’s idea of how the Burning Bush should be. It is not the Bush itself. It is simplistic. Is that bad? I myself cannot see what is lacking. But there must be a lack. Because—
Because there is something else written and drawn earlier and deeper (I call on all chemical and dynamic and human and inhuman and celestial things to give me the power for this deeper reading.) But I can make little of it, only the name Labrusca, which is the wild-wine. I do not understand this. I think of that cheap wine that Valery drinks and I laugh. (I am being tortured otherwhere but I laugh; that is one advantage of being a multiplex machine.)
And is that all of the coat-of-arms of the Balbo family?—for it is theirs. No, it is not. There is a further thing that turns me clammy even to contemplate it. It is the scroll that writhes. The bottom scroll of the escudo, it lives, it moves, it writhes. This is very strong, where all the other memories are very weak, in the childhood section of the pseudo-précis. And it also occurs, the only memory of the shield that does occur, in the primary précis. Beyond this, I have dredged up from my memory banks that it has been going on for hundreds of years, before the family left Estremadura in Spain to go to San Simeon. In every replication of the coat-of-arms, on shield, on finger ring, on parchment, on paper, the scroll moves and writhes. The present head of this family (Ah, an invading person still torturing and enchanting me in some of my other areas) has had to leave this proud coat-of-arms off his business letterheads. It was too disconcerting for clients to open a letter and see that live scroll writhing on the paper.
And yet the scroll, which should bear a meaningful motto, does not convey any sense at all. The words—they change constantly as is not ordinary with written mottos—are sometimes obscenities, sometimes offensive nonsense, sometimes almost nothing. Ah, there has just flashed the meaningless words El Snako. And then there flashes the words “It is coming along wonderfully now, is it not?” What dark thing is coming along wonderfully now? I shiver. My own snake, that lives and grows inside my danker machinery, often uses the same phrase, and I trust him not at all. Coming wonderfully for whom?
It breaks up in me. My bleeding valve, my safety valve blows out from the force of my invasion. The encounter becomes too intense for me to have any further diversion in any of my areas.
But where is the giant whose name means “I am awake” or “I watch”? Why does he not watch from his high rocks now? Why does he not intervene? It is his job to guard. Where is he?
I find that he is frozen into sleep by the laughing and invading king. He twists, he tortures himself against the bonds, he roars in his dreams against the dreams, he shakes, he cannot yet awaken.
“Easy does it, old duffer,” the laughing king needles him. “You will awake when I let you awake. You will come trumpeting down after I have stolen all that I want to steal. Get you a good bulldog, giant. Do not depend on a giant to guard.”
This phase in myself is almost over, I know, but will I live to the end of it? The Invader has gotten almost all that he wants out of me. He has changed me mightily, he has changed the rules of the game, he has changed many of the rules of the world. I do not remember, in many ways, what I was before he invaded me, and I will never remember it. The pain of it! But machines do not feel pain. Trade places with me, fellow, trade places with me!
I quake, I faint, I die. Distantly I hear the bleating of goats.
It was Valery arriving with her decoys in the hours before dawn. With real goats? They sure did seem real, and she handled them as if they were real. Who would go to the trouble to conjure goats when real goats are so easily had?
She staked out the three of them: one in the region of certain liquid pools of myself which had already been known as the Water Hole. I now had the illusion of multi-kneed cypress trees growing out of a sweet-water swamp (do tiger-jungles have cypress trees?), of sedge-grass and of reeds, of buffalo-bush growing close and tight, and of loons landing. I have never personally seen a jungle water hole, but I intuit water holes—stylized conglomerate ones.
As to the second goat, Valery staked it out in some of my aromatic Flatlands (parts of my sensitivity division), which to me now seemed like clover and bee-meadows. My building hadn’t followed conventional architecture and machine design at all. It followed a casual naturalness, and in many places I look more like landscape than like building.
And Valery staked the third goat out in my extreme upper reaches, my tor extensions, the rough uneven areas which I had come to call my Rock Castles. These were parts of my discernment and proportion and perspective areas.
Three goats staked out, bleating at first, then mewing into quivering and fearful silence. They know when they are decoy. Oh, Valery was on her tiger hunt!
Then I was shocked and horrified, not just to sense murder coming on heavy padded feet, but to sense more than one striped murderer prowling.
The giant had risen now. He had broken the bonds of his spooky sleep with a strength that had not been attributed to him. But it may be that the giant had risen in his wrong aspect: not as a guardian, but as a raider himself. The giant Gregory Smirnov was not completely awake, or he had awakened in the wrong direction. This was an older and shaggier giant than I had remembered. Who will guard the guards when the guards themselves turn robber?
And Valery Mok was prowling, not on cat’s feet, but on—what?—dog-witch feet? No, on her own improper feet, not quite silently (sizzling of ozone, singing of electrical corona, other small noises). She came to one of my lesser centers and winked an evil wink. (Is there not a proverb in me that Valery’s winks go all the way down?) “Get me everything you have on cooking tiger steak, Epikt,” she grinned. “See what you can find in the précis of Safari Club members.” “Be careful, Valery,” I issued. “The third one has just arrived. There are not one, but three tigers aprowl.”
“I know it. Oh, it is coming along wonderfully!”
Why did I shiver to hear her use the same words as the scroll snake used, the same words as the larger snake inside me also used so often?
Then the first goat died, loudly and—
CHAPTER FOUR
Primordial creatures have stumbled, and stake
The Title to World on the Turn of the Snake.
—Then the first goat died, loudly and quickly, cut off so suddenly as to leave a cliff of bleating and nothing beyond it. I knew the quick blood, the broken neck and back and the crushed withers, the contusing and tearing teeth working their rapid murder. But it had been so fast that I did not have the direction of it. I did not know which prowler had which prey, or where.
“Be careful, Valery,” I issued once more. “There are three of them now at large.”
“No. There are four of us,” she corrected me.
The third “tiger,” which I now knew for the first time under the name of Peter the Great, had just entered the building, the complex that is mostly myself. I had known him earlier as the workman Pyoter, he who had killed and partly eaten another workman. Peter was going directly for the goat staked out in my aromatic Flatlands, regions of my sensitivity division (and the stalking was doing great violence to my sensitivity), the area which I seem to call the clover and bee-meadows. And these meadows resembled to many of the senses (but riot to the sense of temperature) large areas of Peter’s own world.
(Is there room here to run another world in; one about the size of Earth, but colder and more rocky? It will not be easy to find roo
m for that other world here. We will see.)
Gaetan Balbo, now in his own person and no longer that of the anonymous invading and raping night spirit, was stalking with his easy humor and his hair-raising urbanity. And he was quite aware of his own stalker. This was a minor and amusing thing to Gaetan. He had often been a tiger before. And he had also been animals of a still deeper stripe.
And Gregory Smirnov, the worried giant, was moving confusedly and too powerfully. He had broken the sleep but not the dream. He took the goat but he did not kill it. He took it up as though it were a friend of whom he had forgotten the face and the name. He was bewildered.
He came to one of my centers, and Valery came there also. She was excited and heaving. Gregory was dazed, carrying a palpitating goat as though he did not know what it was.
“You are a false tiger and you will have none of the spoil,” Valery accused him. “Why do you not kill and eat? This is accolade, and you will not have it unless you kill and eat. Will you be nothing but a shambling giant forever?”
“The goat was terrified,” Gregory rumbled. “He said that he was terrified of tigers, but how could there be such things in a well-run Institute?”
“Give me the goat, Gregory,” I issued. “I have these pastures inside me.”
“There will be tigers because I call the tigers to assemble,” Valery maintained. “I have no need to call out shambling giants of congregations of millers—” (somehow Valery meant that last for myself)—“I motion them to follow and they will follow me easily. Ah, will the tigers never come? There is something of me in the goat-bait, you know. I hook them, and they are hooked. Who are the drooling ones who say that the Day of the Tigers is finished? It is not finished with them, I have told you both, until I have played my own hand for them.”
“Give me the goat, Gregory,” I issued.
Tiger-musk then, so strong that it would billow grass or bend saplings with the breath of it! Here was coming a tiger that was killing and eating his prey, and he had swallowed the hook at the same time. A hooked tiger, but he did not have the aura of a hooked one. In the approach of him he was master and rogue and insane.
“Give me the goat, Gregory,” I issued once more. “One is enough for him. Never give the devil more than his due. It is necessary that we save some part of the prey. It is even necessary that we save some part of the hook that is in the bait-prey.”
Gregory gave me the goat, just in time, and I put it into the area that I call my pastures. But how would the palpitating thing get along with the snake there? Would he be as fearful of the snake as of the tigers?
No, he would not. And this goat, to tell a hard truth, had not been very much afraid of the tigers. There had been a lot of fakery in the goat’s palpitating. Goats are prescient, and this one had known that he would not be taken and eaten. The goat had a double look in his eye that was as familiar as it was eerie. Who else had such a double look as to raise my hackles? (I intuit hackles.) Valery, that was who! This goat had the Valery hook in him forever. Let the tiger be thankful who did not take him. I almost pitied my rude snake, who would have the goat for companion in my rock pastures.
The tiger-musk grew even stronger, and the first tiger loomed up, chomping and crunching. He was Peter the Great, the alien who had been the workman called Pyoter. He fed savagely and rampantly in the throat and breast of his goat, and the back legs of the animal were still kicking.
Is there room here to run another world in? There is impatience of people at all these interruptions, I know, but should we give in to this false impatience of people? Is there room to run a world in, on about the size of Earth, but colder and more rocky? It named Ganymede (we will not make a secret of this thing); it is the home world of Peter the Great; it is a Jovian moon; (Peter swears, with hot goat-flesh in his mouth, that it is also a Jovial moon, in its own way, in his one way).
No, a little later, perhaps. There is no room to run another world in right here. There is barely room here for certain explanations whose giving may be vital to some.
“Get on with the tigers,” the people shout. “Tigers and blood! Let there be no interruptions. On with the show!” (I hear this in my mind’s ear.)
Oh, tell the people to shut up! It is for them that the explanations are necessary. Should these journals ever fall into the hands of human persons, they will encounter great difficulties in much of them. For other intelligent machines, there should be no difficulties here; but should the knowledge of these affairs be limited to our two peers? (A third abuilding.) We believe that human persons have the right to know what has happened and is happening to human persons. We will temper the metaphor for these shorn sheep who have no criterion for reality, who see only surfaces. But we see human persons and their interplay as they are, not as they see themselves. For this reason, there is no sense in the human questions, “Are you speaking literally of tigers?” and “When you say snake do you really mean snake?”
The only answer we can give is, “No, we may not mean tigers literal. We may mean things incomparably fiercer than tigers, but there are no tokens in human imagery (and few in our own) to express these fiercer things, even though they are human things.”
And to another question we can only say, “Yes, brother, when we say snake, we mean snake” But there are snakes and snakes. Alone of all creatures, the snake was symbol before he was living thing.
The trouble with humans is that they are not instantaneous as we are; that they are always putting one thing after another. Of the night that is now ending, they might from their human surface viewpoint give such a pale rending as that a certain sneaky man (noble even in his sneakiness, they have to admit that much) stole into a building at night and tampered with the programming of a machine so as to be certain that is would give answers according to the man’s liking. People might not be able to understand the shattering bit about the night of assault and torture; even less might they understand that the night of assault and torture is euphemism, is paler allegory for the much more horrifying things that actually happened. Human persons (except such a rare one as violated last night) do not understand pattern; and they do not understand that its deformity is more than screw and rack and torture machine.
“Then it’s all a blamed mechanical hoax?” the wan-wits among the human persons will say. “It isn’t real? It isn’t actionable blood and gore and anger and lust? It is just some of that fancy talk that machines talk to one another?”
People, people, earless, eyeless, touchless, noninstantaneous people, this is more real than anything you ever encountered in your lives before; more real than anything you will ever encounter in your lives hence, unless your ears and eyes and fingers are opened and you are redeemed. You never saw anything before, not even yourselves. You never saw or touched flesh before, not even your own. You have observed nothing but shadow, and not even good shadow. You have never heard voice; you have hardly heard echo. You have not seen your own faces, you have not felt your own passions (except such a rare person as was hunting tigers here before dawn); you have not known you, and we must find you out for you.
Come, all well-meaning and dishonest persons, see yourselves turned right side out for once (you’re much better turned the right way). Throw away the package you’re packaged in and see yourself for the first and likely only time. Your packaging was never very good. Watch your old self be beheaded and drawn and quartered. The heads were set on you all wrong anyhow, and the drawn entrails will be the first human things you ever see. This righting will frighten most of you, it will hurt some of you, and it will improve you all.
This isn’t a question of turning you upside down or inside out. You have all been turned inside out for a very long time. The approximate dates of the turning are in my databanks; the reasons and circumstances of it are not. That is not your right surfaces that you have been seeing for this long time. Those are your blooming entrails on the outside of you, draped about you, looped over your pseudo-ears. Even more than on the physical
do these analogies apply on the psychic plain.
People, human persons, you are not hopeless, you are not really the nothing things that you have appeared to each other this long time. Here are your depths revealed in their true aspects, which can only seem allegory to your uninstructed visions. I instruct you now! Follow me into this and through it all. You set me up, out of your blind need, to show yourselves to you. Then look! You do not even know which side of your eyes to look out of. Understand these wild creatures that are yourselves. Never has there been offered to your vision such fascinating things as are you, and you have not seen them. See them now. See them right. Tigers and giants and kings; witches and primordials, snakes and loaded prey; incandescent fellahin in their true Cogsworthian and Shiplapian forms, and the bush named Brusca, the love-wood, the. Burning Bush; insufferable elegants who take it as high as it will humanly go, Corn oil from a dead man and the Audifaxian premise, aye, and the Diogenestic conclusion; and the earlier and more elegant bush with the fuller name, Labrusca, the wild-wine.
This is no common contraption which will show yourselves to yourselves. This is I myself, the congregation named Molino de Sangre, the assembly named Blood-Mill.
(Sorry, Klingwar and Wanhok, my fellow thinking machines in distant parts of the world. That little sermon was not for you who already understand such things. It was for the human persons, should any of them ever attempt these High Journals.)
Where did I leave off? With tigers. For practical purposes, there can never be enough tigers. And looming over my center was a tiger larger and more ill-kempt than any I had ever intuited.
Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine Page 6