The Worm of the Ages and Other Tails: Six Short Fantasies (4 page)

The devil gave a sigh of pure bliss. I had been on the point of reaching for my own glass, but I thought better of it. Water with ice in it, just at that moment, was the last thing I wanted. ‘Your customer,’ I said gruffly.

‘Ah, yes. My customer. It took him even longer this time to find Salazar and kill him – and longer the next. And each time the tortures grew subtler, and more attuned to his particular weakness; and he became desperate, for he feared that he would not be able to stick to his purpose. By now he had a hope, you see; and a hope, in Hell, is a thing that is taken away. It was his fondest wish – his 
only
wish – to go on killing Salazar for ever and ever; to track him down and murder him, over and over, from Hell to Hell, and to the Hell of 
that
Hell, and so on down through the infinity of perdition. If there was a deeper Hell than Our Father Below is in’ – here he made a ritual and utterly insincere obeisance – ‘he would chase his playmate all the way there, and kill him, and make us open up a new layer below 
that.
 It was just killingly funny to see.

‘Of course, after a while he stopped being the Spanish swordsman he used to be; and there got to be a time when he was so insubstantial – not like a phantom, not like smoke; only all gooey and slooshy and viscous – but he could not get a grip on a sword any longer; but he set out with dogged determination, just the same, and wrapped his gummy arms and body around Salazar, and 
smothered
him. By and by, he got so fluid that he could actually drown him – drown a man in the slush of his own body.’

‘If you don’t change the subject,’ I said, ‘I’m going to be sick.’

‘Oh, it didn‘t last. Even slush has a structure of a sort; enough for a spirit to haunt. There was not much left of his intellect by this time, and even less of his will; the only thing he clearly knew any longer was that he must find Salazar and kill him, kill him, 
kill
him, for all of eternity. Time flows differently down below – by his reckoning, he has been at it for more than two million years now, if I’ve done the sums right. The deeper you get, the more ages seem to go by while a single year passes in the world of the living. My customer has probably lived through a hundred years of agony while you’ve been nibbling on that toast. Are you going to eat that other slice?’ He took it without waiting for an answer, and then instead of eating it, busied his hands by rolling it into rather crumbly bread pills.

‘So where is your – er – customer now?’

‘Fourteen thousand, three hundred and sixty-six levels down,’ said Flivverpuff, beaming with professional pride. ‘There is nothing down there but a featureless plain of dull grey rock, as bare as a billiard table with the nap worn off. And in the middle of that plain there is a bit of flattish slate, strangely eroded, which is all that remains of Salazar. And on the slate is a rounded stone, such as you might find in a riverbed; which is my customer. And he has just enough life left, just enough will, to rock himself back and forth on his rounded underside, once a day or thereabouts. And every day he comes down on the stone that was Salazar like the world’s feeblest hammer: 
Tap… Tap… Tap.
 And when I last looked in on him, an hour ago by your time, a thousand years by his, there was a hairline crack in the stone that was Salazar, and I confidently expect him to crumble before the aeon is out.

‘And 
that,
my friend, is why 
we
don’t meddle with vengeance ourselves. We serve it to the customers, cold; but don’t you fear, that is one poison that never passes 
our
lips. “Vengeance is mine, saith the—” Well,
you
know who I mean; and in my opinion, he can have it, for he’s the only one who can digest it. When anybody else tries, 
it
digests 
them.
Thank you, I prefer to have someone else at the bottom of the food chain.’

The late great Raphael Aloysius Lafferty wrote a large number of tall stories, some with the flavour of science fiction, some of fantasy, some with a taste all of their own. What they had in common, I suppose, was a line of descent from the great American tradition of the tall tale, heavily altered in passing through Lafferty’s zany and fecund brain. A perceptive critic once said that Lafferty was
sui generis;
his tales could not be classified as this or that genre of fiction, and perhaps it was best simply to call them lafferties.

Once in a long while, I come up with an idea that fouls up the normal classification systems. I conclude this little book with two of these. They have some of the trappings of science fiction, and some of the matter of fantasy, and some strange quiddity straight from the Muse that sent them, I suppose. I flatter myself, but perhaps not unduly, by thinking they may be worthy to be classified as lafferties, too.

[Sender’s address redacted]

14 November 20xx

Customer Service Dept.

Leibniz Ideenfabrik AG

Herrenhäuser Straße 4

30419 Hannover

Germany

Gentlemen:

This morning I received shipment of order No. Z-25289150 from your firm’s Hannover warehouse. I wish to inform you that I am not altogether satisfied with your product as delivered.

I opened the parcel with some misgivings; from the description in your catalogue, I had been expecting something larger than a matchbox. The label on the inner package, however, assured me that this was indeed the Self-Organizing Monad (Cat. No. M-4202) that I had ordered.

Following the enclosed instructions, I removed the gel capsule from the box and placed it on a sterile Petri dish, to which I added the required drop of my own blood. For some time nothing appeared to happen, and I felt sure that I had fallen victim to a garden-variety mail-order fraud. But just as I was about to sweep the capsule into the waste paper basket, it began to swell with alarming speed, taking on colour and form, until I found myself face to face with a Prussian blue homunculus about a foot high. I am not sure whether it looked at me with an expression of haughty disgust, or whether that was the natural shape of its ugly little face. Either way, it did not seem pleased with its new surroundings, for it gave an angry snort and said:

‘Humph! Well, 
this
isn’t much of a place. Where’s the welcoming committee?’

‘I beg your pardon,’ I said. ‘The manual didn’t mention any such thing.’

‘Come now,’ said the Monad. ‘I am, beyond any possible doubt, the most important thing that has ever appeared in this wretched little backwater. There should be a brass band, and a cheering crowd, and a mayor presenting me with the key to the city. And what do I see? 
Nothing!
Not one whit of acknowledgement. Not a trace of gratitude that you’ve been permitted the glory of meeting 
Me.’

I could hear the capital M in the pronoun; the little creature seemed to grow a little taller when it said the word. I decided to be tactful, for the moment. ‘Well, I do apologize. I was never briefed on the correct protocol for greeting a Monad. Perhaps you would be so kind as to bring me up to speed.’

The creature seemed to be mollified but not pleased. ‘Perhaps I would, though I’d rather not. I shouldn’t have to give anyone a lecture on My importance. After all, the whole of reality is made up of Monads like Me, all acting in predetermined coordination, though they don’t ever actually interact, you know. The fact that I seem to see and speak to you, and you seem to see and speak to Me, is just an illusion produced by our innate programming. In fact—’

‘Yes?’

‘I got to thinking, after I was put in that box. If a Monad is pre-programmed to react 
as if
it were interacting with others, then it’s bound to do so whether the others are really there or not. I can’t affect you, and you can’t affect Me. So how do I know you exist? I’d perceive exactly the same things either way. It seems to Me that the existence of other Monads is a hypothesis that I can do just as well without. So I’ll just please Myself, and if I am not to be entertained with the illusion of a parade in My honour, or a torchlit procession, or maybe the unveiling of a monument to Me—’

‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ I said drily.

‘Why, then, I’ll just be on My way and please Myself, since Myself is the only self there is. That’s logic.’

‘It’s GIGO, at any rate.’

‘What’s that? No, don’t tell Me. If I am the only Monad in existence, then obviously I already know everything. So either I can work out what is this GIGO from first principles without any help, or else (as I suspect) it doesn’t mean anything at all. You’re just trying to bamboozle Me. Or I should say, if there 
were
any You, it would be trying to bamboozle Me. But since everything but Myself is an illusion created by my programming, I shall enjoy those illusions in whatever way seems good to Me.’

With that, the Monad stepped off the Petri dish and began to wander about on the lab bench. It peered into a beaker, and banged its little fist on a retort, and blew across the mouth of a test tube and listened to the sound it made. But when it started to play with my Bunsen burner and tried to turn up the gas, I picked it up by the ears (which were large and flappy, for its size) and set it back on the dish.

‘Ow!’ it said, rubbing its ears. ‘What do you want to do that for?’

‘So I can’t affect you, eh?’ I couldn’t help but smirk. ‘I suppose you were programmed to pull your own ears.’

‘So it seems,’ it answered. ‘I shall have to figure out some way to break that programming; it seems to be putting more constraints on Me than I’m willing to put up with. But clearly it’s My programming, since no Monad can ever have any direct experience of any other. You follow Me?’

‘As far as you know, I do,’ I said drily. ‘But who knows? Maybe 
my
programming is telling me that you’re a fluffy bunny rabbit, offering me a chocolate egg that you’ve just laid. Maybe I don’t think you’re talking to me at all—’

‘Now look here!’ it said, scowling and turning a darker blue. ‘I won’t hear such language from you.’

‘What language?’

‘You’re taking My name in vain, you – you figment!’

‘What name? I don’t even know your name. And I’ll thank you not to take that tone with me.’

‘There you go again!’ it screeched. ‘That’s 
My
name! I’m the only Me! How 
dare
you appropriate My identity?’

I considered giving it a lecture about pronouns, but thought better of it. This called for a more direct approach. ‘Look now, my self-obsessed friend. I don’t know what mush you were indoctrinated with, but it so happens that there
are
selves in the world besides your own, and we 
can
interact with you: for real, and not just as an artefact of your silly programming.’ I picked him up – by the scruff of the neck this time – and plopped him down on the windowsill. ‘See all that? If you think this room is big, it doesn’t begin to what’s out there.’

‘It hurts My eyes,’ said the Monad, squinting through the glass at the gathering night.

‘That’s because they’ve never looked past the end of your own nose. Perspective is not an easy lesson to learn. Do you see those stars?’

‘Those what?’

I had to think hard to break down that concept into words the little monster could take in. ‘Those points of light in the upper half of your field of vision. 
Each one
of those is a whole environment of its own, far bigger than everything you’ve seen so far. A Monad is a very small thing, my friend.’

‘Small?’ it screeched. 
‘Small?
I am I! I am 
Me!
 The 
only
Me! I am the most important thing in existence, and I’ll show 
you
what 
small
 means!’

The Monad wriggled out of my grip, bounced off the wall, and bounded back up onto the lab bench. It opened its mouth wide and tipped in the entire contents of three beakers, then stuffed in the beakers themselves. Next it wrapped its stubby arms round a calibrated flask and absorbed it into itself, like a marshmallow melting into hot cocoa. Already it was visibly larger; not much taller yet, but definitely fatter.

‘No one and nothing,’ it raged, and its voice was deeper than before, ‘outranks
Me!
 There may be other Monads in the world, as you say. If there are, I’ll fix them!’

It started gnawing on the 
Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.
Finding the book too big to swallow and too tough to chew, it simply hoisted it up off the table and let its body flow around it. I had never seen anybody absorb that text so quickly. It appeared that the Monad’s body was considerably less dense than a scientific manual, for it immediately swelled to several times its previous size. It was bigger around than I was, now, though not half my height; and its deep blue fangs were bared in an alarming snarl.

Panic was a luxury I could not afford. In a laboratory full of chemicals, surely there was something that would poison it. At least it might die of overfeeding. Forcing myself to appear calm, I said: ‘You don’t impress me, you know. You may take up more space, but you’re still an insignificant little Monad.’

‘Insignificant!’
it bellowed. ‘I’ll teach you! Nobody talks like that to the Great and Powerful 
Me!’

‘Come off it! Do you think I’m going to fall on my knees and worship you?’

‘Worship?
I need no worship from you! I am Me! You cannot add or take away from My perfection. All the worship I require, I find in Myself!’

‘That I can see. Would you like another textbook? There are plenty more over that way.’ I pointed at the open door. ‘The library’s right across the corridor. Though it’s considered better manners to put them into your brain and not your belly.’

‘Insults! Insolence! The All-Important Me has had enough! Space and time are not enough to contain two Monads. I will consume it all, and I will make an end of 
you!’

The Monad had absorbed half the lab equipment, and now it started on the bench. It seemed capable of devouring whatever it pleased without ill effects, and there were no apparent limits to its appetite. The situation began to look rather serious. The equipment could be replaced, though I would have to do some fast talking to the people in Supply; the lab itself was not so easy. ‘The Great and Powerful Me’ was gnashing its fangs and stretching its claws towards me, but its belly was going to reach me first. It was six feet wide now, easily, flowing over everything it touched and incorporating it into itself.

‘Me! Me! Me!’ the Monad yelled, and at every repetition of its beloved name, its voice grew deeper and more painfully loud – and slower. I thought I saw a possibility.

‘Are you praying to your god,’ I sneered, ‘or have you only exhausted your vocabulary?’

‘Me!… 
Me!…
ME!’ It was definitely slowing down, though each bellow sent a tremor through the building.

‘You poor fool,’ I said. ‘At this rate, you’re going to lose your precious self entirely.’

The Monad stopped chanting. ‘What… do… you… mean?’

‘You’re not used to having spatial dimensions, are you? My dear old Me, the more you extend yourself in space, the more you are extended in 
time.
Your self-awareness is slowing down. When whoever-it-was programmed you, did they tell you about the speed of light? Or neural impulses? Assuming you even have those.’

‘I… remember,’ it said. It had overrun more than half of the room now, and its voice sounded like an alphorn echoing in a railway tunnel.

‘When anything takes up space, it can only coordinate itself at a certain speed. The bigger you grow, the longer it will take for one end of you to know what is happening to the other end. Do they have computers where you come from? No? Well, you can learn something about them here. The speed of a computer is set by its clock, and the clock signal, the 
tick,
has to travel all the way across the processor before the next tick can begin. The bigger the machine is, the lower its clock speed must be. That’s why computer chips have to be made very small.’

‘Small?’ the Monad echoed.

‘Small,’ I confirmed. ‘You see, you’re not only getting bigger and slower; you seem to be getting less intelligent. Less able to react. Remember those stars? Long before you swelled up enough to take them in, you’d be so big that the clock cycle of your self-awareness would take 
years.
 Why, I could take a blowtorch or a cutting laser and carve you to pieces faster than you could feel it. You wouldn’t be able to defend yourself.’

‘I… am… Monad. You… cannot… destroy… me.’

‘No? But you can destroy yourself. You’re doing it now. The bigger you grow, the slower you are at perceiving 
you.
If you really want to feel the true greatness of the Great Me, you’re going about it exactly wrong. You’ve got to make yourself
smaller.
 Speed up your clock. Bring yourself in closer, so the space you take up doesn’t slow you down.’