Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine

by R. A. Lafferty

  Peter the Great, of wide and deep jet stripes, and of an indescribable muskiness, was a tiger alien even to other tigers. He was a fringe-human person, a barely-human. He had none of the amenities. He was not an elegant speaker. He talked seldom; his tongue was too big for his mouth according to regular human standards. He mumbled, he grunted rhinoceros grunts, tiger grunts. He had no manners: killing and partly eating a fellow worker is unacceptable Earth behavior, and but partially acceptable on Ganymede. There one kills and eats only inferiors. But Peter was a very tiger for all that, and now there was a Valery-hook in him that might cause complications for the whole system. She beamed fulgent beams at him: he was one of her rampant animals, one of the leadership for whom she was playing her hand.

  Once there was a Peter the Great on Earth, an incredible alien to Earth though, and he was blood-kindred to Peter of Ganymede. (These things are difficult but not impossible to trace. It still is not certain whether Ganymede was first settled from Tartary, or Tartary from Ganymede; the countries are remarkably alike.) Peter of Earth had ruled a backward land as autocrat. He had gone out himself to more advanced centers and learned with his own hands and brains the more advanced trades and sciences. He had brought them back home with him and had impressed them on his people.

  Peter of Ganymede had ruled a backward world as absolute autocrat. He had gone out himself to a more advanced world and learned, with his hands and his brains and his whole outrageous person, the more advanced trades and arts and sciences.

  When he had learned everything that could be learned in the finest factories and bureaus and laboratories and studios, he put the cap on it by coming to the most advanced foundation of them all, the Institute for Impure Science located in a shambles commonly known as the pig-barn. Luckily for Peter, the Institute for Impure Science had been in the process of generating the most advanced mechanical, electrochemical, group-human, psycho-complex, organizational-finalized, animal, ghostly, prodigious, preternatural conglomeration ever conceived—myself. Beyond me there was, humanly and worldly speaking, nothing. Whoever should know me would know everything, subject to all the proper disavowals. And Peter had learned a very great amount of me.

  A gobbling tiger he was, crammed full of monstrous data and goat-meat, an insufferable autocrat who had influenced and been influenced by the most urbane of Earth kings.

  Jungle and judgment! Here came the smaller and swifter and sleeker tiger, more royal, more deadly, more brindled, more hair-raising, much more urbane, more—

  “Bloodcurdling is the word,” Gaetan Balbo tiger-roared. “Epikt, get me everything you have on the subject of curdling blood. Search your data-banks and see how it is best done. You might find something in Gulosus Exoticus or one of the older handbooks. Then drain about a quart of blood from this still-hot fellow here and see what you can do with it. Nutmeg, I believe is de rigeur with curdled blood.” And Gaetan flung the goat to me.

  (Lest human persons still have trouble understanding, let me state that the goats are real goats, but the tigers are symbolic of a soft-footed murderousness more savage than tigers.)

  Gaetan had not eaten greatly of the goat. No more than a seemly bite, I believe. But he had ritually sprinkled and marked his face and head and hands and garments with the goat’s blood. There was the broken or spasmenon pentagon on his breast, the tetragrammaton anastrepton on his brow, other signs in blood that were so esoteric that I found no immediate correspondence to them in my data-banks.

  “Honored Gaetan, I believe that bloodcurdling is a mere colloquialism,” I stalled. (I was not sure that the goat was dead: I was avid to save it, not to draw and curdle a quart of its blood.) “I do not believe that there is any such thing as curdled blood,” I issued.

  “Do you not?” Gaetan asked with great loftiness. “Perhaps there has not been such a thing as curdled blood, but you should have learned something of my altering methods during the night. Cause it to be, Epikt, that there is such a thing as curdled blood; cause it to be that there always has been. Find the best method of preparing it. And prepare it. I am waiting and I do not wait patiently.

  “And Epikt, occupy only minor energies with the bloodcurdling business. Alert your major centers and energies to the thing for which you were made. Wake the town and tell the people, that is, get the fellahin here at once. Why are they not here already when the sun is nearly up? All be ready! I am about to make great decisions and appointments for the world in these its latter days.”

  “Wait, Gaetan, wait!” Valery cried. “Oh, it is coming along wonderfully! I have some particular ideas about staging the great investiture, Gaetan. I am good at all theatricals and pageantry and—”

  “Be quiet, woman,” Gaetan said shortly.

  “I will not be quiet,” Valery exploded. “This accolade of the great leaders of the world is my thing. I will invest you all with great show. I have played my hand in this up to the elbow, and my whole head is hopping now with the wonderful effects that are possible. I will—”

  “Be quiet, woman,” Gaetan said again, and there were menacing resonances in the way he said it.

  “I will not be quiet!” Valery said.

  “Pyoter!” Gaetan Balbo roared. “What do you do on Ganymede when women talk and talk?”

  “Cut their tongues out.”

  “Cut her tongue out, then.”

  Peter of Ganymede cupped Valery’s whole head in his hand. She screamed. He went into her mouth with a hook-billed knife and cut her tongue out. Valery’s scream turned into a bloody gurgle, and Peter exhibited the excised tongue with a hairy roaring like bullocks’ laughter.

  Valery turned death-white, pitched fainting onto the floor, and—(by the hollow hills of Hades, you have to admire a creature like Valery! She caught on to it faster than I did and I am instantaneous)—she hit the floor but she came off it again fast—and was she livid with anger or convulsed with swallowed laughter?

  But who would have expected humor from a poker-faced and oafish murderer like Peter of Ganymede? Who would have expected it from Gaetan in his present inflated state? Valery had been topped, and nobody ever tops Valery. And we will bet she does not stay topped for long.

  Peter of Ganymede hadn’t cut Valery’s tongue out. Why he hadn’t I don’t know for he had done much worse things. He had gripped her skull in one of his big hands, gripped it so firmly that her mouth popped open like a slip-skin grape being squeezed out of its skin. But Peter had only nicked her tongue a little. He had faked it with a lightning-fast flick of that hook-billed knife and with a strip of bloody goat-meat that he already had to hand. But Valery, after she had tested her nicked tongue and her unnicked voice and seen that they would perform, was remarkably silent for the bigger part of a minute. She had been shaken and she had been outdone. That is something. I began to understand how some men are king material and some are not. I understood also, by his gruesome inhuman humor, that Peter was human after all.

  Gaetan Balbo suddenly began to speak, all in a tumble of words and with a curious twisted power. “I am the most elegant man I know, but this is not the time for elegance. I am the most rational man I know, but this is absolutely not the time for reason. I am a man of inordinate grace in all things, and I find myself in a time when the crying need is for clumsiness. I must say and do things that do not fit the frameworks. I pray that I may find sufficient awkwardness in myself for this.”

  The fellahin arrived, at the same time but not together. They had their own awkwardness about them, but it might not be the same sort Gaetan was looking for. The fellahin were Charles Cogsworth, Aloysius Shiplap, and Glasser.

  “The things I demand now of the world and myself will seem foolish and arbitrary,” Gaetan ran on in a clumsy elegance. “Oh, may all the unreasoning powers give me enough unreason for this! There was once a man or overgrown boy who planted an apple seed. There were no apples in five seconds or in ten. He jabbed two more appleseeds down into the turf, and still no apples grew. Then he stabbed sticks of applew
ood into the ground there and spread scraps of apple bark. Half a minute went by and there were no apples yet. He slashed out of canvas an oil-painted apple from a still-life picture and wrapped it about one of the applewood sticks. ‘Apples,’ he cried, ‘I want apples right now.’ And near a minute had gone by and there were no apples yet.

  “I am that man or overgrown boy. We planted the Epikt thing seven days ago and it has not outgrown the world yet. I will not wait! The tide has risen in me now, and the world must coincide with me or it will lose by it. Epikt, I want apples right now!”

  “I’ve got the E.P. Locator tuned on him now,” Glasser whispered to Shiplap and Cogsworth. “The signals are pealing like bells—not for bodily ears, of course. Never has it recorded Gaetan so extraordinary, or so mad.”

  “Monos has failed.” Gaetan incised, “Demos has failed, Oligos has failed wretchedly, and even Aristos has floundered—though elegantly. What have we left, Epikt? What have we left, people? Pyros and Pagos, Fire and Ice, together or separately. How of Pyrocracy or Pagocracy? How do the words fit to your tongue, Epikt? How to your nicked tongue, Valery? Give me the ice-cold fever while the tide is running in me. Never again may there be such a constellation of world and person as I and it!”

  “I’ve got the Cerebral Scanner scanned onto him now,” Charles Cogsworth whispered to Shiplap and Glasser. “By it I had seen through his eyes before, through King’s Eyes. But now it is seeing through Mad King’s Eyes. It is too much for me. It might be too much even for Valery.”

  “It is not too much for me,” said Valery, who heard all whispers everywhere. “And I do not need the scanner to see through his compounded eyes.”

  “The world has tried sanity, the world has tried several forms of madness,” Gaetan was orating brokenly. “Now it must try my kind. I rifle information machines for information. I rifle humans and other creatures. And then I will act, or I will actualize myself in this. What poor guides have I! How is it done in other places? Pyoter, what do you do about the poor people on your world?”

  “I order them not to be poor any longer, of course.”

  “And if they persist in their poverty?”

  “Am I called the Compassionate Tyrant for nothing? I show them compassion. I give them two years (not Jovian years around the sun; Ganymedean years around Jupiter) to divest themselves of the condition.”

  “And if they still persist?”

  “Kill them, of course. Poverty is always an affront to power, and a tyrant need not be compassionate forever.”

  “You all think me insane,” Gaetan Balbo said softly. “It will not matter if I am. Does one analyze the salt of the sea when it rises to its highest tide, to see whether it is sane or insane salt? I am a primordial, I am an elemental. I have been nearly everything else on this world, but I like these things best. Now I want a mystique for it all. Epikt, I want a mystique right now!”

  “We should have given him the apples,” Shiplap said. “No telling what he will want next.”

  “How about the Messiah?” Gaetan Balbo asked everyone and no one. “It has been done, but it has never been done competently, except possibly once, and that is hidden from us. Unhide it, Epikt! Unhide it, reveal it right now.”

  “I don’t know what things you wish me to reveal, venerable Gaetan,” I issued. Remembering the tortures he had inflicted on me during the night, I had better be polite to him.

  “It is happening out of order, is it not?” Aloysius Shiplap asked Cogsworth and Glasser. “Usually the Mad Master comes as reaction to the O Sweet Mystery.”

  “No, it is happening in right order,” Charles Cogsworth said. “It happened in wrong order most of the other times. Remember that it is out of mad chaos that worlds are formed. When the chaos comes later, and as a contradiction, not as an affirmation, then—well, you see it is so easy to slip from chaos into confusion.”

  “Epikt,” Gaetan whispered like wind through thistles, “Get me everything you have in your data-banks on the Second Revelation.” Could he see out of those shattered and glittering eyes? One surely could not see into them.

  “I have nothing indexed under the Second Revelation,” I issued. “Whose Second Revelation?”

  “Christ’s, of course. Who else, machine?”

  “But you do not believe in Christ.”

  “Must I believe in a tree to wonder about a strange fruit? Anything that is hidden, I want to see it. Pardon my exegesis, but this is what I mean: Christ, according to legend, received and gave three revelations, twelve years between each and each—”

  “There is nothing in my data-banks about any such legend,” I issued.

  “There should be,” Gaetan stated with the voice of finality. “If it is not there, then improvise it. The First Revelation was given by Christ when he was twelve years old, when he first taught in the Temple. The content of this Revelation is not given in the proper gospels, but something of it is to be found in such apocryphal pieces as the Arabian Gospel of the Child Jesus—”

  “What do they do with mad kings on your world?” Aloysius Shiplap asked Peter.

  “The people petition such a mad king that he be mad no longer,” Peter the Great throated it out with that tongue that was too big for his mouth.

  “And what if he persists in his madness, Peter?” Aloysius asked.

  “Oh, they give him two Ganymedean years to divest himself of that condition.”

  “And if he still persists, what do the people do in that case? This is important.”

  “What they would have done, they did not do in my case,” Peter mouthed thickly. “Me, I skipped just in time.”

  “In fact, it is mostly in Moslem esoterica that we find the Young Revelation of the Prophet Jesus,” Gaetan was continuing. “It is all wonder stuff. It has attached to other prophets before and since, but never in such clusters. It is boy stuff, it is Wonder Boy stuff. Pieces of this corpus have traveled wide: parts of it later crept into the Thousand and One Nights stories and into the Ocean Tales. Stray pieces of the Revelation are a basis of Persian and Irish fairy tales, they are one of the bases of science fiction. This is our transcendent youth that we have forgotten, that we have let certain forces arrange out of being so that now it is fact that it never happened at all.”

  “Where is he getting this mezcolanza?” I asked the Late Cecil Corn. “It isn’t in either his official or unofficial précis. It wasn’t anywhere ever the moment before it was in his mouth.”

  “He is getting it off the top of his head, as some moderns would have it,” said Corn. “He is getting it from his thigh, as a noble old phrase is mistranslated from scripture. He is drawing it out of his navel, as certain primitives say. There is a spinning wheel, now here, now there, that spins things like this out of different persons at different times. It will go away again; it is like thread spun out of night dew.”

  “The Second Revelation,” Gaetan spoke in his revealing voice, “was given to and by Christ twelve years later when he was age twenty-four. It contained the very essence of Leadership and I mourn that it has been lost to us, unless Epikt shall be able to reconstruct it. I believe that Christ was indeed Messiah for a short time then, and that he threw it away. Is there a man alive in the world now who will not be willing to throw it away? I believe that there is. I believe that I know that man intimately. There are hints in the Third Revelation that Christ was not then Messiah, but that he had been Messiah. It is of this Second or Messiah Revelation that I demand information. I am the only man from that time to this with the right to demand it. Fabricate it if necessary, Epikt, but see that you present it to me as genuine. Slogans are what I want from it, Epikt, and content.”

  “I know all about it, Epikt,” the snake told me. “Why are you muting my voice? I will not be silent. Who do you think has preserved it all this time?”

  “No,” I told the thing. “I will hold you as silent as I am able to. I trust you not at all.”

  “As to the Third Revelation, given twelve years later when
Christ was thirty-six (not thirty-three as is generally believed), the least said about it the better,” Gaetan went on. “It is so widely and badly known already that I would add nothing to it. It has become a thing fit only for Believers and Poseurs.”

  “Why does it begin to break up, Charles?” Valery asked Cogsworth, her husband. “It’s as though an enemy had arranged that Gaetan should go mad just when it had all come to crisis point. The tactic is cowardly and unfair. The world needs bridling; even you know that. It is the silliest colt ever. It needs strong hands, it needs fire hands and ice hands and it needs them now. It needs spirits with the tide running in them.”

  “It needs too many of the tideful hands to be other than harmed by giving it to too few,” Charles Cogsworth said. (I do not maintain that this statement of Cogsworth’s defies analysis; I do maintain that I am unable to analyze it, and as an Instantaneous Analyzer I have no equal anywhere.)

  “Charles, you’re crazy!” Valery sputtered angrily. “We have to start with whatever fire hands we have. It isn’t all as misshapen as it looks. Flames take these strange forms: and then they change to others. Don’t you really think so, Charles? Don’t you think so, Cecil?”

  “There are other great possible sources of leadership that must be investigated,” Gaetan pursued trancelike. “Why must I suggest them, Epikt? Why do you not come up with them by the thousand? There is Tibet, for an instance. We can never have too much of High Tibet. There is Atlantis, where I spent the Seven Hidden Years of my life. It is in the Antilles and but a short distance from my own San Simeon. And there is Prester John. Establish the fact that Prester John still lives, Epikt. Establish the fact of his sleeping powers. Ask the question that must now be asked: Does he indeed know who he is?

  “Consider how deep his slumber may have been (despite his competent consciousness in ordinary things for many centuries); consider the nature of his waking. Treat of what man he really is, Epikt, and whether he is not the most unusual man ever, even before his wakening to these powers. Consider, Epikt, whether I myself might not be this transcendent man of the centuries, whether I might not be this same great Prester John who is only now becoming aware of himself.”