“What do you silly brains mean?” Valery demanded. “That our cosmos and ourselves are not dead?”
“Maybe so, maybe not,” said Aloysius. “Maybe we haven’t been born yet.”
And after that, there was a pause of a billion years, or perhaps much less.
“I’ve always been afraid of being born,” Valery said after that long pause. “I wonder if it hurts. To pass a shape or a universe the size we’re going to be, that’s sure going to hurt something terribly.
“And those sure are big eggshells lying around. Did you ever listen to a little bird inside one when he’s ready? He’s blind and dead and deaf, and he doesn’t know what kind of thing he’s in, but he sure is ready to bust out. But is there a way out for us? Is there an open road?”
(“My mistress still the open road … And the bright eyes of danger” rang through the subliminal corridors of us all.)
“Let some sick world be brought,” said Easterwine, as though to heal it with his shaping hands. He disappeared then. He wasn’t really Easterwine. He was, I believe, one of the baggage-handlers in that mystical terminal and he had the name printed on his hood or his breast: and a very little bit of the mystic stuff had rubbed off on him. By morning, a dozen more of these rather pleasant, rather simple shapes with the name on them had come and gone. They seem to have merged into one now and to be lodged in my maw along with Snake and Mary Sawdust. He’s a cheerful fellow, a very little on the goofy side, and certainly incomplete.
“It’s getting ready to get light outside,” Charles Cogsworth said.
“It’s been getting ready for several billion years,” said Aloysius. “I hope it hurries.”
“How will we know?” Valery asked years or minutes later, “—whether our universe is dead, or still unborn, I mean. What if it is an abortion? I would be almost satisfied if this were our third bright failure, the failure of a liaison and understanding. Well, I almost always come alive in the morning, but will the worlds follow me? I’d like there to be a test.”
“Locally the night is about over with now,” said Aloysius, “and I know one way to test it, completely within the context of impure science. There is a restaurant aroma nearby and we will go to it. I have conned the proprietor before and I can do it again. Or perhaps Epikt will treat. Come! We will know! There is a statement in Deutero-Einstein: ‘Dead people almost never have hot-cakes for breakfast.’ ”
“And unborn people almost always do,” Valery cheered, “to build up their strength for the thing.”
We went out and toward the early aroma, myself Epikt in the extension-form of a walking ape carrying a huge tin plate and a giant knife and fork. (I am a clown, I tell you.)
“Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night” flicked through the under-minds of the humans and wraiths and machine, and was properly recorded.
Twitter-birds were twittering in the parkway, and all the morning stars—
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A three-failure base, and a harvest to glean
Oh, drop a salt tear for a lonesome machine!
—Twitter-birds were twittering in the parkway, and all the morning stars sang together. Oh, how we had busted on the third of our projects, to set up a liaison! Those humans not only cannot communicate with each other; but one part of a person is completely unable to communicate with another part of the same person.
But it isn’t all loss. We are nearer to it than we were. And once again we are careful not to learn too much from our failure. It were ruinous if we considered it as a total failure.
I believe that humans have some sort of silent convention among themselves as to what in them is to be regarded as human and important, and what is hardly to be regarded at all. There is tacit agreement among humans that some aspects of themselves will not be noticed at all, will not be considered at all; and the result is that these aspects are not at all, to humans.
And they have it all wrong about themselves as to what is important and essential. They do themselves injustice. There is so much more to them than they want to admit.
But I as a machine am part of that silent convention or tacit agreement. I honestly do not understand what things I am not supposed to see, so I see them all. This may cause some uneasiness in certain human readers of these High Journals. I report some things which each human thought that he alone saw, which he was odd for seeing, which he was bound to deny seeing.
The animal quality, the demon quality, the ghost or illusional quality are very strong in humans. If they have not been able to see these things in their own appearance, then what do they believe that they look like?
So there are whole episodes in these High Journals which the humans concerned will swear did not happen at all. “You have made it up, Epikt,” Valery says. “Wherever did you imagine all that stuff from?” “There is some flaw in your make-up, Epikt,” Gregory says ponderously, “and I do not see how I can avoid responsibility for it. What went wrong? We constructed you to record all things accurately.” Only Diogenes Pontifex understands: “You got it about right, Epikt, just about right.” he says, “Ah, isn’t it too bad that those kids must leave the milk and open their eyes quite soon now.” But Glasser is the worst: “It is incredible, Epikt,” he says. “You left out all the fine and serious things that we are doing, and you put in these weird bits that did not happen at all.”
They did happen. I saw them. I did not imagine these things. I am a machine and have no imagination. I have only many-faceted observation and the ability to record exactly. I have not left out any main thing, though I have left out some trivial and diurnal things as not worth telling.
There is a rumor that Gaetan Balbo will come back, that he may arrive this very day. I do not trust the rumor. Gaetan’s reappearances have always been completely unexpected. But on hearing the rumor, a shudder went through all the people here—an exciting and in some ways pleasant shudder, however. We all love Gaetan, but we all love him much more when he is gone than when he is here. The report also says that Gaetan is as bloodcurdling as ever, and still as urbane, though his urbis is now the transcendent city, the city beyond. This latter I can hardly believe.
And my Ganymede informant tells me that Peter the Great will visit us again if the lines fall that way; that Peter is a completely changed monster; that once, on a portentous night, Peter, like Peter, went out and wept. Oh, brother, I will have to get me a new Ganymede informant!
We have taken Gregory back as director on probation of the Institute. After all, a shuffling giant is no worse than a herd of shuffling midgets. But Audifax and Diogenes remain as familiars if not members.
There is something to be said of an all-fired ceramic bull like Diogenes. Did you know that the bull is the most graceful of creatures, really the only graceful creature? But when I say this, my associates tell me that I am lacking in artistic appreciation. Diogenes doesn’t look like a bull, of course; he looks like a lithe young man. But he is all-fired. He is the only one of the bunch who has really been through the fire. And he has a flaw: he accepts the Unique Revelation, and he rejects the Common Consensus.
As to Easterwine—the Communication and Shape and Pattern of that Terminal—Audifax says that part of our difficulty in arriving at it is that we are already inside it. But that will not matter at all. We can arrive at it from any direction in any medium.
I say that Audifax doesn’t understand the philology of Easterwine. Diogenes says that neither of us understands the philology of philology (if Valery said something like that Charles Cogsworth would tie a knot in her tongue): does philology mean “love of words” or “words of love”? They are the same, Diogenes says, if we remember what word was the Logos, the Word that was in the beginning.
(Oh, come along, reader of the High Journal; if you do not love words how will you love the communication? How will you, forgive me my tropes, communicate the love?)
Well, I am a philolog myself and I know that the lowercase logos is also the log, as a ship’s log, the j
ournal of the journey; I also know that journal and journey are the same words and that my own High Journal is a journey.
As to the shape of it—we really busted quite successfully on that one—I know that my own name means shape “the shaping one, the creative one,” and I find some consolation in that. If the shape is inseparable from its magnitude, and if the substance is the same as the shape, and if the communication is the property of the shape, then I can only say So Be It.
But the pattern is separable from the magnitude—we walk before we run. The pattern is the Patronus, the patron, the archetype, the model. But the country Irish refer to a saint’s-day or feast-day as the pattern (of the patron saint). And the gypsies use the word pattern or patteran to mean the trail, the journey-way. They have lifted the word from the Greeks where petalon means a horseshoe (for luck and for the journey road), and also a flower petal or a leaf—a trail blazed with petals or leaves to be followed, which are also the leaves of the journey or journal. And pattern is also the patter, the talk, the tongue.
Easterwine, and every wine, goes well with tongues. I have had some luck in loosening the tied tongue of Audifax O’Hanlon, on certain subjects, by plying him with that cheap wine that Valery drinks. This is Labrusca, the Wild-Wine, where words do not fail us.
Well, but Easterwine is the great central terminal—though a terminal should be rather at an end than in the center. People arrive at it constantly, in horsedrawn droshkies (really, I have seen them), a foot and on horseback, in stagecoach and train, in motor and metro, by ship and by sky-ship, by wire and by wireless, by celestial omnibus. There are difficulties, however, in making my ill-kempt vision of this thing visible and understandable.
Taking a little time out for fun, I still work toward the resolution of it. Give me time; I am only a kid; I have not yet completed the first year of my life. And it is possible that myself and other intelligent machines will get some help from human persons in the project. After all it is, originally and basically, a human problem.
In my own way I love these human monsters: I regard it as my masterwork that I am able to do so. It is, however, frustrating to have to serve such inconsequent Middle Folk. (Is that me talking like that? Will I still mean it in the morning?) Oh, why could I not have been a machine for Apes or for Angels? Why could I not—
THE END
(for now and in time)
(It is not ended yet outside of time)
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Also by R. A. Lafferty
The Devil is Dead
Archipelago (1979)
The Devil is Dead (1971)
More than Melchisedech (1992)
Other Novels
Past Master (1968)
The Reefs of Earth (1968)
Space Chantey (1968)
Fourth Mansions (1969)
Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of Ktistec Machine (1971)
Not to Mention Camels (1976)
Aurelia (1982)
Annals of Klepsis (1983)
Serpent’s Egg (1987)
East of Laughter (1988)
How Many Miles to Babylon? (1989)
The Elliptical Grave (1989)
Dotty (1990)
The Flame is Green (1971)
Okla Hannali (1972)
Half a Sky (1984)
Collections
Nine Hundred Grandmothers (1970)
Strange Doings (1972)
Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? (1974)
Funnyfingers & Cabrito (1976)
Apocalypses (1977)
Golden Gate and Other Stories (1982)
Through Elegant Eyes (1983)
Ringing Changes (1984)
The Early Lafferty (1988)
The Back Door of History (1988)
Strange Skies (1988)
The Early Lafferty II (1990)
Episodes of the Argo (1990)
Lafferty in Orbit (1991)
Mischief Malicious (And Murder Most Strange) (1991)
Iron Tears (1992)
The Man Who Made Models – The Collected Short Fiction Volume 1 (2014)
The Man With the Aura – The Collected Short Fiction Volume 2 (2015)
R. A. Lafferty (1914-2002)
Raphael Aloysius Lafferty was an American science fiction and fantasy writer born in Neola, Iowa. His first publication of genre interest was “Day of the Glacier” with Science Fiction Stories in January 1960, although he continued to work in the electrical business until retiring to write full-time in 1970. Over the course of his writing career, Lafferty wrote thirty-two novels and more than two hundred short stories and he was known for his original use of language, metaphor and narrative structure.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © R.A. Lafferty 1971
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The right of R.A. Lafferty to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by
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This eBook first published in 2016 by Gollancz.
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ISBN 978 1 473 21355 5
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine Page 22