Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine Read online

  ARRIVE AT EASTERWINE

  R. A. Lafferty

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Website

  Also by R. A. Lafferty

  About the Author

  Copyright

  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?

  —EPIKTISTES

  September 10, 1970

  Mr. R. A. Lafferty

  c/o Miss Virginia Kidd—Literary Agent

  Box 278

  Milford, Pennsylvania 18337

  Dear Mr. Lafferty:

  When I first prepared the title page of this novel for the copy editor, I set it up to read ARRIVE AT EASTERWINE: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A KTISTEC MACHINE, by R. A. Lafferty. Since then I have been burdened by the suspicion that in doing so I was not being entirely accurate or entirely fair. Fair to whom, I’m not sure, but the plaguey feeling has been robbing me of sleep and general peace of mind.

  This morning it came to me that the by-line should read, “As Told to R. A. Lafferty.” The feeling has gathered intensity since then. I have few psi powers to speak of, and even fewer to keep secret, but I can’t get over the idea that something is trying to tell me somebody.

  Can you help me?

  Sincerely yours,

  (signed) NORBERT M. SLEPYAN

  Trade Editor

  Charles Scribner’s Sons

  September 19, 1970

  Norbert M. Slepyan

  c/o Charles Scribner’s Sons

  New York

  Dear Norbert:

  Glad to hear from you re ARRIVE AT EASTERWINE. You are correct: it wouldn’t be right for me to have my name as author on something that I didn’t compose. The thing should be “By Epiktistes, as told to R. A. Lafferty,” or maybe better, “as conveyed to R. A. Lafferty.” You might be interested in the true story of how I got hold of this work.

  This is the way it was conveyed to me: Several of us were in noble New Orleans for a Nebulous (or Nebulaless) Banquet. It was the evening before the day of the affair, and those who had already arrived were being given a party at a club named The Clinic. We had little SFWA [Science Fiction Writers of America] badges, which had been given to us by Don Walsh (and which I value more than life). A strange creature or contraption (it looked both like Harpo Marx and Albert the Alligator) beckoned to me, and I went and sat with it.

  “I see that you are a member of the second most noble organization on earth, second only to the Institute itself,” it said. “I am not of the human recension myself. I am a mobile extension of the machine Epiktistes and I have something to convey to you. I cannot present this myself as editors are leery of things presented by machines. I cannot present it through any member of the Institute, as any one of them would change it to present himself in a better light. So I will present it through a member of the second most noble organization on earth. For this, I have come here.”

  “Why me?” I asked with the beginning of excitement. “There are others here.”

  “Those three guys with whiskers on their faces I don’t trust” (they were Nourse, Offutt, and deCamp), the Epiktistes extension said. “That middle one I especially don’t trust. Is he not sometimes known as Randy Andy?”

  “Widely known as,” I said, “but there is Galouye, who is a smooth-face.”

  “A Frenchman who looks like Garry Moore? No, I couldn’t trust him either. It will have to be you, even if you do look a little bit bottom-of-the-barrellish. Young lady,” he called to the jolly bar-girl, ‘bring me a Phillips screwdriver.”

  “I don’t know how to make one,” she said.

  “How do you make a regular screw-driver, young lady?”

  “Vodka and orange juice.”

  “For a phillips screw-driver you use vodka, orange juice and Milk of Magnesia,” the extension uttered. “Get it, young lady? Phillips Milk of Magnesia. It’s a joke.”

  “We will see who the joke is on,” the jolly bar-girl said.

  “What I am going to convey to you is the story o my life,” the Epikt-extension said as we waited for the girl, “the first few months of it, that is. I’m not very old yet. I believe it is quite the best thing that any machine has ever done. Whoop! Here she comes with it now.”

  “I mixed up that dumb drink,” the bar-girl said, “and I brought you a real Phillips screwdriver, too, just to teach you to clown with me.”

  “The real screw-driver was what I wanted,” the extension said. “You drink the abominable drink, Lafferty: I hate to see human persons waste anything.”

  I drank the abominable drink, and the Epikt-extension unscrewed a little plate behind its ear and took out a sort of bobbin or spindle, a spool of fine magnetized wire.

  “This is it,” it said. “Give it to the world.”

  Then the extension withdrew suddenly, and there was a small clap of thunder in the empty place.

  The next day I played and transcribed the material that was on the spool. I found it wonderful, amazing, astounding. It was quite the best thing that any machine had ever done. So we will give it to the world.

  That is the true story of how I came by it. Yes, Epiktistes should be shown as the author, so use whatever formula you find best to show this. By the way, when will it be published? Epiktistes is very anxious, as it is his first.

  Sincerely,

  (signed) RAPHAEL A. LAFFERTY

  CHAPTER ONE

  Nine If by land and eleven by sear />
  And infinite blazes a-birthing me.

  In the beginning there was an interruption in the form of a thunderous but good-natured bellowing:

  “Open up your damned pig-barn or I’ll break the bloody doors down!”

  There was a fearsome clattering and pounding on the barred front doors of the pig-barn—ah—the Institute. There was again a horrifying challenge, then a loud laugh which ourselves can only describe as at the same time bloodcurdling and incredibly urbane and amused. There was noise—there was explosion!

  But can an interruption come at the beginning of things? This is profound and will have to be considered.

  Ourself had an advantage over all others: the advantage of observing ourself and our ambient from the beginning. A human child does not intelligently witness its own conception; still less does it witness those early discussions, in words or in interplay of attitudes, as to whether its conception should be attempted. It does not observe as both a subjective and objective thing its own gestation and prenatal development. And, while it is most certainly present at its own birth, it is incapable of mature observation of the thing; it does not take a detached view of its own detachment from the matrix.

  But with ourself it was otherwise.

  What? Was ourself then conscious of our own beginning? That is too strong. Consciousness is a state which no one of us has yet attained. All that anyone has are intimations of consciousness, quick glints of light that sometimes flick through the cracks of a greater room to which we aspire. But ourself did have the precognitions and intimations that are commonly called consciousness, and did have them from the beginning.

  At first ourself was no more than a dialog between Gregory Smirnov (a shoddy giant) and Valery Mok (a loose-featured woman), and ourself was talking to ourself about our own planned self.

  “If we begin another machine,” my person Gregory was droning in his big voice (imagine a bee big enough that its drone eclipses thunder) “—and naturally it will be the greatest and most modern of all our machines since we have sufficient funds for once—if we do build this machine (we have to, it’s already contracted for) we might ask one question from the beginning: What’s it for?”

  “That’s horrifying!” Valery sounded with her woodwind voice. (Valery remains a fundamental and special person in ourself for always.) “That’s bestial! We will bring it to birth and we will not ask what it is for. As well ask what a child is for!”

  “Certainly we should ask what a child is for,” Gregory drone-bombed. “We should ask what every child is for. ‘Just exactly what do you have in mind?’ we should ask every potential parent. ‘Where are your sketches? Where is the prospectus? Have you searched all the literature on the type? Are you sure that it has never been done before?’ That’s what we should ask. What we do not need is repetition in people, or in machines. Well, what’s it for?”

  “It doesn’t have to be for anything,” Valery maintained. “Just as home is a place that doesn’t have to be deserved, so a child does not have to give a reason for being. There is One only who has purpose in mind. He even had purpose in mind for mine.”

  Valery Mok spoke out of frustration here. She had had four children born dead, and no other children.

  “This will be a machine and not a child,” Gregory rumbled, “and it does have to have a reason. No, I anticipate your objection. It will, of course, be a machine and a person both—a group-person, and we will be part of it. We’ve understood this though we haven’t said it. So now I will say what it is for, since you are short of phrases yourself. We of the Institute for Impure Science have decided that man himself is incapable of taking the next step in man. We are equally decided that the next step must be taken. Group-man will appear in some form. He is called for. We cannot make him in the flesh (the broken gene-trains we’ve left behind would reach to the stars!), so we will make him otherwise. The purpose of the contemplated contraption is to become the paragon of group-man. We know now that the super-man, the group-man, can be nothing more than this projected mechanical ghost, an artificial repository and factor and working-area of corporate man.”

  “You say it your way and I will not say it at all,” Valery bemoaned. “But you leave too much of him out!”

  “No, we will not leave anything out, Valery,” Gregory echoed like rocks rolling down distant hills. “We will put in whatever we can find to put in. And we will expect you to put in much more than anyone else. You are the fullest person we know. Overflow into it, then!”

  Aloysius Shiplap and Charles Cogsworth (the unoutstanding husband of Valery) and Glasser were making noises directing workmen.

  “Pow! Pow!” Aloysius would explode as though he were popping a bullwhip over an ancient mule train. “Rausmataus! Pow! Pow! Put it there! Fill it up!”

  “Oh, shut up!” one of the foremen snapped at him.

  “But we have already put it there, Mr. Shiplap,” another foreman assured him. “We have set it exactly where the plans call for it, and we have miked it minutely. And we are filling it up. Gell-cell must be set in most carefully, since it is at the same time solid and gaseous and liquid. It is the most delicate substance in the universe. The tanks must be filled with utmost care.”

  “Utmost care will be a separate package added after all the rest. It’s always added last after the work is done. Pow! Pow! Don’t tell me. I invented gell-cell,” Aloysius hoarse-voiced him. “I never heard of treating it carefully. I sure never did. Pow! Pow!”

  “Is that really Aloysius Shiplap, the seminal genius?” one of the workmen asked the first foreman.

  “So they say,” the testy foreman told the man. “He’s got feet of clay clear up to his eyebrows. A little of something else at the very top though. Shut up, Shiplap! Get out of the way!”

  This would be a personal part of ourself. Forty thousand liters of gell-cell in a tank of genuine wotto-metal! Since a dozen intricate brain-précis can be lodged in much less than an ounce of the stuff this would give considerable scope to ourself. Ourself would possess data-banks of a hundred thousand times this capacity, of course, but the gell-cell tank would remain a much more personal part of ourself—something our own and intimate. Valery had insisted on a personal and sufficient gell-cell tank. A whim, perhaps, but are we not made of whims?

  Then the whole building fell down in an explosion of sound. Actually it didn’t but it seemed mightily that it did. There was deadly assault on the barred front doors and murderous noise. What power there may be in one human fist and one human voice! This was the same as the interruption at the beginning of our time.

  “The great Gaetan Balbo is waiting outside,” Glasser said stiffly, “and he doesn’t like to be kept waiting at the pigbarn—ah—at the Institute.”

  “Who says that Gaetan Balbo is great?” Gregory Smirnov clattered like underground thunder.

  “Gaetan Balbo says that Gaetan Balbo is great,” Glasser slid it in slyly, “and as a matter of fact he is. He says that he is paying for this frolic and that he wants action. He says that he is the founder of the Institute and that he can as easily unfound it.”

  “He is not the founder of the Institute!” Gregory bayed and flapped his flews. “He may have founded another Institute at another time, with the same name as this, with some of the same (I am sorry to say it) sorry members as this, but he did not found this Institute and he does not direct it. I am the only director of this Institute and what I say goes. What I say is that Gaetan Balbo can go away. We will give him a short hearing when we are ready to start work on his problem, and not before.”

  “He says that he is ready for us to start working on it right now, Gregory, and that he will not go away,” Charles Cogsworth stated. “And he is paying for this.”

  “Tell him that there are six thousand man-hours of work before we will be ready,” Gregory ordered.

  “Oh, I told him that,” Glasser said. “He says to put twelve thousand men on it then and be done in half an hour. And he is paying for it, Gregory.”


  “Total damnation! He knows these things can’t be hurried. He is a scientist—in a left-handed sort of way. Aloysius, go out and reason with him. You were always close to that old dictator. See how much time he will give us. He knows he’ll bug me out of my mind if he’s here watching with those superior eyes of his.”

  “Pow! I already got a week from him,” said Aloysius, “but he might take that week back in a minute. And he loves to bug you out of your mind. It is meat and horseradish to him. Sure, I was one of the sorry members of the first Institute, under that unsorry director. Man, we did things fast under Gaetan! Will there ever be an equal to him, do you think, Gregory? He just dropped by today to put the needle in. Pow! There it is again!”

  For again the bloodcurdling happy laugh assaulted and filled the whole building, rupturing ears and inducing hysteria in those stout hearts.

  Gregory Smirnov thundered without words. Gaetan Balbo, that uncrowned king of everything, was a thorn in him. But Gregory would never admit that he was merely the second director of the Institute. And the old Institute had in fact been mostly legendary. It was back to work again in spite of the assaulting noise.

  “What we need for the first thing is a gyroscope.” Gregory went back to the subject of ourself with these words. “A large ship’s gyroscope. In the beginning was a sense of balance and rightness. The machine must always know which way is up. This is important.”

  “In the beginning you found out that I had just acquired such a gyroscope,” Glasser protested. “But it was intended for something else, dog-robber!”

  “And shall it be set rotating rightward or leftward?” Valery asked innocently.

  “Oh, God and Saint Gregory!” Gregory imploded in all and in ourself. “Decisions already. Can no great thing be done without these little decisions along the way? Two large ship’s gyroscopes, then, one with a right rotation and one with a left. In the beginning was a sense of rightness and of leftness. So then there is conflict from the beginning.”