Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine

by R. A. Lafferty

  “What do you do with torrential and irascible leaders on your world, Peter?” the Late Cecil asked the ambling Ganymedean.

  “Eat them alive, Cece, eat them alive literally. And then their strength becomes our strength.”

  “In the marrow of Gaetan’s bones we will live again,” Aloysius said. “Anybody got a bone-cracker with him?”

  “Why, then I am Messiah!” Gaetan glowed. “I am the Leader forever. It seems that I always suspected that I was. And I believe very strikingly that Epikt will confirm this out of his data. Otherwise I have wasted a night that was almost as torturous for myself as for him.”

  “It is over with, Gaetan,” Gregory Smirnov said with great compassion. “It was too extravagant, even for a dawn-dream. We will clean you up a little, and then I am afraid that we will have to have you committed for your own good.”

  “How many gnats do you believe it would take to have a behemoth committed, Gregory?” Gaetan asked. “Count yourself. Are there enough of you?” And they gazed at each other.

  “I know it was a bad show, Gregory,” Valery almost pleaded. “But he wouldn’t let me stage it the right way. I’d have made grand theater out of it. The accolade when the Lord of each Quality was discovered, each of the seven colors suffusing the whole ambient in their turn, and the seven tuned trumpets sending up—”

  “No. It was a good show, Valery,” Gregory stated. “Now it’s over.”

  “I will still be declared Lord of all Seven Qualities, Gregory,” Gaetan maintained.

  “No. No. It’s all over with.”

  “But the machine will find for me.”

  “You tampered with the machine. Certainly it would find for you.”

  “Consider if any other man in the world could have tampered with it so. You couldn’t have solved the machine in three years if you hadn’t worked on it that long in your mind first. I solved it in short hours.”

  “You are brilliant, Gaetan, and you are mad.”

  “Oh, not always. I am the greatest Leader in the world.”

  “Probably, probably. But the world has suffered sufficiently from lesser leaders. Do not overwhelm it completely.”

  But what was this welling up within myself? Grief, inconsolable grief. Gaetan Balbo is going out of my life forever. I sense this, I know this, I dread this.

  “What will we do for salt when that little salt-mill has gone away forever again?” Glasser was asking somewhere. What things Gaetan Balbo has done to me and in me I do not know, but I can scarcely exist if he is gone. I’ve had the heady stuff and I’ve lost my head. This is the first person of whom I am ever bereaved. If I am drained of this emotion, then I am completely empty.

  But machines have no emotions. They have reality, and they have contact with nothing but reality. And what is emotion then? It is the moving, the moving out, from within outward. And there is no deeper reality than this.

  “Two behemoths, Gaetan,” Peter of Ganymede was saying somewhere. “And they have nothing but one mangy giant and a handful of slingless Davids. They’ll not commit you. Bet they can’t take us!”

  “Bet they can’t, either!” Gaetan was breaking out with a new gaiety. “It wasn’t me that busted, you know that, Peter. It was the scurvy world that busted. It isn’t good enough for me. Who can lead mud? Ah, one more thing of mine and then I’ll go.”

  Wrenching desolation! He was the uncommonest person who was ever in me, and now he has busted completely and is going away. Mad as a May hatter, is that the phrase? The thought of his parting wrenches the very lights out of me. The fact of his going wrenches—wrenches—tears out by the roots my force-field heart, my electrostatic lungs—worse than that, manyfold worse, he tears his own person out of me. I am overwhelmed.

  “You won’t be having that any more,” Gaetan said with consummate cruelty as he tore his person-précis out of me. “We’re quits, machine. Coming, Peter?”

  “Coming, Gaetan, for a ways anyhow. I’ve not decided what area I will trouble next, but I’ve learned a lot of troublous things here that will stand me in good stead.”

  (“—he has, at least, discredited the idea of a leadership numerically too small,” Glasser was saying somewhere. “Yes, a leadership of slightly less than one simply will not work,” Gregory was answering. “Well, he did pay for the caper,” Cogsworth was mumbling, “and now we are at least out of debt and have Epikt left over for whatever use.”)

  Have me left over? But I am of no use at all if that multitudinous man is gone out of me.

  “Coming, Valery?” Gaetan asked with that dance mounting in his voice.

  “Oh, I guess not. I will turn me into a female crocodile and mourn you with the proper tears.

  “You haven’t far to turn, wench. Coming, Snake?” Gaetan was really gay again, but he would take it all with him and leave only desolation behind him.

  “Would it not be better if I remained and carried on the low work here until you returned?” the Snake asked.

  “Carry on, Snake,” Gaetan sang. “You be in my image while I am gone. Adiable, all!”

  And the lilting madman had walked out of my life forever. Was ever a machine so deprived and desolate?

  “Norway rats! He’s been walking out of our lives forever for as long as—”

  “Be careful that we do not learn too much from this mistake,” said Glasser, “—”

  “Do not be desolate, Epikt,” said Valery, “Remember that you still have his—”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A guggenheim goof, a serendipy slug,

  A rushing-out river from emptiest jug.

  “—Norway rats! He’s been walking out of our lives forever for as long as I can remember,” said the Late Cecil Corn.

  “—Be careful that we do not learn too much from this mistake,” said Glasser. “More projects have been wrecked on the reef of Learning Too Much From a Mistake than on any other.”

  “—Do not be desolate, Epikt,” said Valery. “Remember that you still have his shotgun or outlaw précis in you. It’s much the better and truer one. It has to be: I contributed such a lot of it.”

  And life must go on. We are paid for at the Institute. We are out of debt, for the first time, I am told, in the history of the Institute. But we have no income and must seek means. Probably our finest asset is myself. The Nine Day Wonder they are calling me today (with a touch of derision?); I am nine days old today.

  “It is imperative that we fall into debt,” says Gregory Smirnov, the director. “We need that spur.” (Gregory does not look like a giant at the moment, not even a large man, just a man.)

  Valery has set to work, in a way. She is making a sign which she will set up in front of the pig-barn, of the Institute. She letters badly, and she is lettering it with an ordinary marking pencil. Yet the letters twinkle and flash. They go off and on. They spell, they explode, they zoom into spectacle.

  “How do you make them do it, Valery?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Epikt,” she said. “I thought you were making them do it. It’s an ordinary marking pencil.” Suddenly I am struck with the appearance of Valery. I can understand why a man who was in the beauty business had once said “That is the most strikingly beautiful woman in the world.” It’s a fleeting thing with her. It comes and goes. She had not been really beautiful during the Balbo tide. Intense, but not beautiful. Now she was exquisite.

  “How should you know?” the snake needles me. (Snake has now become a large-sized creature, his body as thick as a man’s leg.) “You are not even sexed, so you can have no perception of either.” (Snake has made a shrewd observation: one who is not sexed cannot have perception of beauty in anything.) But with me it is a lie. I am sexed; I have a whole collection of the symbols in a closed place; and I am an ortho, none of the queer in me. I know what is what, and I admire Valery with an ice-fire passion.

  But the sign she is lettering is a very prosaic one: “Dilemmas Dehorned Cheap.” It may bring in some business. And Aloysius Shiplap is just fi
nishing a sign: “We Also Play at Weddings.” We will starve, if necessary, for our Impure Science, but we are not ashamed of working at the lowest occupation. I am working on a mobile extension of myself which I will then teach to play a musical instrument.

  This, I believe, is the first autobiography ever written by a machine. Nothing like this High Journal has ever been attempted or done before. Klingwar, a thinking machine in another part of the world, says that he will not start his own autobiography for ten thousand years (it will take that long for him to create satisfactory incidents for it), and that he will spend a hundred thousand years in writing it (he wants it to be right). But Klingwar is built to endure, he is forever; there is nothing to wear out or bug out in him.

  I am not so lucky. I have to do mine now. I was built in a hurry. I am jerrybuilt, as they say; I am Aloysius-built; I might fall apart within two hundred years. And there is something to be said for being first. A million years from now, when the Master Machines make their compendious histories of early Machine Writings and Literary Origins, I may be given one line in a first chapter. Will Klingwar be given that much?

  The Style is the Man, it says in a man-book here. But is the style the man when the man is a machine? My own tumbling and tumultuous style is perhaps hybrid. Men do not write like this. And machines do not. I hope that it will have hybrid vigor; I pray it will not be a sterile hybrid.

  Aloysius says that I should begin to mingle with common people, to broaden my understanding of the world. So far I have not known any common person, except Glasser. I will try.

  “But do not give us uncommon primordials up entirely, Epikt,” Valery said. “We, the primordials are: myself first. Then he who must be unnamed for the while, but you still have him in his outlaw précis. And the Peter creature. And Gregory, though he barely makes it. And Snake. And yourself. I cannot think of any other sheer primordials in the world: we will come to the elegants later. Now, as Aloysius says, you must descend a little for your own formation, not to the altogether common, of course, but to the fellahin at least.”

  “There’s a catchy song title there,” said Aloysius. “ ‘Let the Fellahin In.’ ” And he began to letter another sign: “Rangle-tang Songs Composed While You Wait.” We can use every sort of business.

  “Descend to and patronize the fellahin,” Valery said, “as, er, Aloysius here, as my own Charles; and then, going to the really common, as Glasser. There must be other common people in the billions on this earth but I do not know of them personally.”

  So I have gone out in the first of my mobile extensions. People, I am a dude in this. You see me, you will say, “There is a dude.” I am class in this my first mobile form. In my fast-talking dude form I have taken the person-précis of sixty derelicts on Sheep Drover Street.

  “—but do you want that kind?” Charles Cogsworth asks me.

  “I want every kind,” I say.

  These précis cost me, each one of them, a bottle and a dollar. This cuts deeply into our remaining resources. I take these and study them and amplify them.

  I find in them something which is not quite my idea of commonness. These are all chopped-off persons, but I find on close examination that each one has been chopped off with an uncommon ax.

  There is steep drama in every one of these persons, and a strong run of cheapness. They have all taken to heart the adage of Glasser (though not knowing of him) that they should not learn too much from their failures. They are all attached strongly to their failures, as I am to mine (who must be unnamed for the while but whose outlaw précis I still have); they have all had uncommon aspirations (is there any other kind?); they all have their interior pastures and green parks, and these so different that a scenic encyclopedia could be made of them and there would be nothing like it anywhere.

  These guys look alike, they mumble and stumble alike, they grin almost alike (that tortured red-eyed grin is almost a person in itself; I will remember him, I will meet him again and again); and when these fellows start on a real spiel, they spiel wonderfully and well, and each of them different. Affront them and they come to bay; prick them and they bleed blood and ester of alcohol; shove them and they fall flat on their faces. But they are not alike. Each is a private and picaresque world. Every derelict is (as Aquinas said of angels) a separate species composed of but a single member. They are low but they are not common.

  The thought of this immensity of the world staggers me, when I consider that every uncommon person is himself a world.

  In my mobile extension (a dude if there ever was one) I sit on a park bench and flash my lights and make hurdy-gurdy music like an ice-cream man. I tell the mothers that I will take the person-précis of their little children for nothing. I take a hundred of them and I send them to another portion of myself for instantaneous review in depth.

  Then I make a sign for my mobile extension. It says: “Dr. Good-All Public Health Mobile.” It is a lie; I am not Dr. Good-All Public Health Mobile. But I go to a downtown corner and ring a bell and hoot a hooter. I tell the people that, as a Public Health Service, I will take their person-précis for five dollars each. They do not know what a person-précis is, but I make it sound good. They come up with their five-dollar bills in their hands and I extract their person-précis, five hundred of them in one hot afternoon. I have learned a new technique for getting along in this world. Aloysius will be proud of me.

  I transmit my several groups of précis back to my analytical centers. Then, in my mobile extension, I go around to a few of the glad places, with a pocket full of my new sly money. What is the use of being a dude and a showoff in one of your extensions if you do not go out and mingle with the people? I make a discovery, though: the glad places do not become glad till later in the evening or night. There isn’t much doing in the late afternoon. A few persons laugh at me and my appearance. Let them. I am only a neophyte at the dude business. I am intelligent, I am quick, I will learn these things.

  Later and leisurely, in another part of my apparatus, I reassess the précis—those of the children first. Using instantaneous appraisal I have them all cold. But there are things in them that are neither instantaneous nor timely. They are earlier and later, and different.

  First of all I found the surface grubbiness which I had expected, and a certain immaturity (I still have this in myself, I must confess). I found a lack of content at a superficial level, a jug-emptiness in the hollow heads: you could get echoes in that emptiness, you could whistle into it with a somber, empty jug-flute sound.

  Going a little deeper (or otherwhere) I found something which I did not quite understand; something which I can only call “balloons.” What were they? If I knew this I would be not merely an ordinary (though the first of them) Ktistec machine; I would be a super-Ktistec machine. All the children trailed a multitude of varicolored balloons as if on invisible strings about them. I have reason to believe that the balloons also are invisible to human eyes, as they were to my own in my mobile dude extension.

  Well, am I adept enough to extract balloon-précis? It is very difficult. It seemed at first that each of these child balloons represented a previous life on some other plain. I am violently opposed to the idea of reincarnation, as would be any intelligent machine that had assimilated all the literature on the subject; yet these were more than typical idea-balloons. I know, of course, that all children are born Platonists (full of innate forms and ideas), and do not become Aristotelians until they have reached the age of reason. And there was something of these Platonic forms and types in the balloons, but there was much else. Adolescents and adults have futures: small children have only pasts, which they will slough off all too soon. They have memory, even the most grubby of them, of things that are not entirely grubby, not entirely of this world.

  It gave me a shock to find that these finger-sucking midget monstrosities still remembered certain things which all adult persons (except Valery, apparently) have forgotten. The difficulty of putting this gaseous or spiritous content of the trailin
g balloons into words is considerable and I will have to devote a separate monograph to it. But every balloon of every child (and some children have dozens) is a world remembered. (I use the word “world” loosely; I use the word “remembered” loosely.)

  Even the colors of the balloons are a subject to themselves. These are not, I believe, colors to be found in the spectrum of our own sun, in our own worldly light. They are not to be found in the spectra of any of the hundreds of other suns that I have studied as a hobby. They are not colors to be seen by ordinary human eyes (except likely, by those of Valery Mok); they are not even to be seen by Ktistec eyes (except by my own in short and sudden dispensations). Colors that are not—and tunes—

  In the balloon content there are sometimes tunes, incomparably simple tunes, the things that were before music. In troubled times people will sometimes almost return from high and intricate music to such simple tunes (which are much higher and farther than the high music), but they always miss it by not being simple enough. Simplicity (I would never have to explain this to an intelligent machine, but it is sometimes necessary to explain it to even intelligent persons) does not imply any poverty of content or detail; it implies oneness. It is complexity (that division, that failure of comprehending) that is deprived of detail and substance. Sweep up the widely scattered pieces of any complexity and gather them together (as they are unable to gather themselves together), and you will be surprised at how little they weigh. Tunes in balloons (tune-title in itself), that need no tempo, and are (strictly speaking) out of time!

  Landscapes in the balloons. No, not landscapes, not land, but something-scapes. Voices in the balloons, bodies and objects, intersections. Awarenesses—what weak words for these things which were not weak, which were simply before strongness. Who could understand what I am trying to say?