East of Laughter

  CONTENTS

  Contents

  The People

  Chapter 1. Are We Dreaming?

  Chapter 2. Camel’s Nose

  Chapter 3. Strange Cargo

  Chapter 4. Monday at Sora

  Chapter 5. Tuesday at Gaire Castle

  Chapter 6. Wednesday at Oosterend

  Chapter 7. Thursday at East Sussex

  Chapter 8. Friday at Port Saint Mary

  Chapter 9. Saturday at Lecco

  Chapter 10. Sunday at Klavierschloss

  Chapter 11. At the Eighth Day of the Week

  Chapter 12. On the Ninth Day of the Week

  The People

  Hilary Ardri, the Computerized Fish Tycoon and his wife

  Jane Chantal Ardri, an artist in all the arts.

  Leo Parisi, Boy Wonder and Nuclear Scientist, and his wife

  Perpetua Parisi, the daughter of the Panteras.

  Gorgonius Pantera, the piano-maker of the German Alps, and his wife

  Monika Pantera, who doesn’t have to be anything except Monika.

  John Barkley Towntower, the second best mathematician in the world, and the best ventriloquist, and his much too close associate

  Solomon Izzersted, the best mathematician in the world and sometimes ventriloquist’s figure.

  Denis Lollardy, the most famous forger in the world.

  Caesar Oceano, the tycoon of the Strange Cargoes World-Wide Shipping Company, and his partner.

  Prince Leonardo, the Great the Golden Panther.

  Laughter-Lynn Casement, who was born twice, her births sixteen years apart.

  Drusilla Evenrood, an East Sussex Lady.

  Mary Brandy Manx, the Mayor of Port Saint Mary on the Isle of Man.

  Hieronymous Talking-Crow, a pan-scientist.

  These Fifteen persons are known as the Group of Twelve. Some of them are spares.

  Atrox Fabulinus, the Roman Rabelais, a Scribbling Giant.

  Countess Maude Grogley, mother of Laughter-Lynn Casement.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Are We Dreaming?

  ‘The people of the world have a partly correct idea of the Pillars Who Sustain the World but are in doubt as to the number of the Pillars. The people do feel, however, that when a Pillar fails or dies, the world will stumble a bit until his replacement is found. If two or more Pillars fail at once, the world will stagger and nearly fall. And the people correctly feel that whenever one aeon changes into another the world is in particular peril.

  ‘But I am one of the Pillars Who Sustain the World, so I am able to say that our full complement of Pillars is twenty-one, and they are in three groups of seven each. There are Seven Saints to insure the rectitude of the world, Seven Technicians to insure the technology of the world, and Seven Scribbling Giants to write the scenarios and histories for the world.

  ‘The Saints are the easiest to replace; there are always plenty of competent saints in the world. The Technicians are only slightly more difficult to replace; the difficulty is in selecting from an overabundance of them. But the trouble is with Giants. These must often endure in their onerous jobs for very many years, hoping in vain for replacements so that they may be allowed to die. And now there is a particular danger to the world, for we come to the Changing of the Aeons again; and the Giants will be in the ascendancy for the aeon that is now beginning, or (we pray that this is not so) the aeon that is not beginning. In particular will the Head of the Giants be difficult to find, and yet the world will not be able to survive without him.’

   — Der Alpenriese.

  “Atrox Fabulinus, in a very curious new chapter The Web of Validity, gives one-hundred-and-one tests to determine whether one is dreaming or not,” Hilary Ardri said to his wife Jane Chantal Ardri at breakfast one morning. “This may be a major new chapter from Atrox, but all of the recent ones seem to be major.”

  “Where are all these new chapters by old Atrox coming from?” Jane Chantal asked. “Did this one also arrive, just before dawn-light, in a plain brown envelope, delivered by somebody known and accepted by our savage dogs, with a covering note signed Concerned Circus for the Distribution of New Atrox Chapters, about which Circus we know neither the location nor the membership?”

  “Right, Jane Chantal. For a man who has been dead a little over fifteen hundred years, he has a lively group distribution here. Somehow I feel that this Concerned Circus is connected with the other Concerned Circus which notified our group of twelve that we had been selected to provide extraordinary and onerous service to the world without thought of our own personal comfort.”

  “Well, have you put yourself to the one-hundred-and-one tests, Hilary?” the fuzzily beautiful Jane Chantal asked out of her breakfast joy. “Are you dreaming or are you not, according to the tests? To me you always seem to be dreaming, Hilary. I only hope that you won’t wake up, that you won’t wake up from me.”

  “So also you always seem to be, Jane Chantal. So I hope that you won’t wake from me to my annihilation. A person who lives only in the dreams of another does not have any enforceable rights of his own. Of the one-hundred-and-one tests, I have put myself to thirty of them, the ones that can be performed easily and mentally. Others of the tests would require materials or devices that are not commonly to be found around the house in the hour before breakfast. Or, in other cases, I do not know the correct translations of the specified materials and devices; or the tests would require rather elaborate set-ups. Some of the tests seem to be spoofs.”

  “Yes, Atrox is full of spoofs, mixed in with what seems to be valid matter. Well, what were the results that you were able to give yourself, Hilary? What were the results of the thirty tests? Are you dreaming?”

  Hilary Ardri and his wife Jane Chantal Ardri were two persons who sometimes attained moments of almost total clarity (whether in this life or out of this life they did not know); so they had something to set the predominantly unclear moments of the world against. Hilary cherished his fuzzily-beautiful wife because he had several times seen her beauty in total clarity. He loved her fuzzily luminous mind because he had several times seen it in clear luminosity. “We know that there are things beyond,” these two sometimes told each other. “We have several times seen the things beyond.”

  And now Hilary said “I’m dreaming, Jane Chantal. By the thirty tests that I have applied to myself, I’m thirty times dreaming. The whole texture of my life is a dream. But will I know reality if I meet it? What if reality comes knocking at my door in the middle of the night? What if it knocks like a great stone hammer and splinters my door in?”

  “We had better take up the subject with the whole group then,” murmured Jane Chantal in her fuzzy voice that was like muted music. Was her fuzzy quality an aspect of her husband being always in a dream state and seeing things only as a dream? Or was she objectively fuzzy? “Yes, Hilary, to anticipate what you were about to say (is my so often anticipating what-you-are-about-to-say the result of my being part of your dream, or of you being part of mine?), yes, Hilary, I know that the subject has already been proposed for consideration several times by groups to which we belong. Leo Parisi has proposed that we look into just this matter. So has Monika Pantera and Caesar Oceano and Laughter-Lynn Casement. And possibly several of the others. Somehow I have not taken their suggestions or propositions very seriously. But I take your suggestions seriously, and I take mine seriously. We are two, in the biblical phrase of one flesh. And we are, in some other phrase or context, of one dream. We are the point of departure. When we talk, we had better listen.”

  So Hilary and Jane Chantal Ardri put the dreaming-condition up as a subject of discussion for a meeting of several of their group for that evening. They would put up The Dreaming Condition in General, and the Hundred-and-One T
ests of Atrox to Determine When One is Dreaming. In addition to the are-we-dreaming-or-are-we-not question, they already had set up such subjects of discussion as; The biological evidence for the invalidity of modern life in the world. Well, all biology seemed to be only a series of rough schematics of life, but it did not approach the problem of life itself very closely.

  The Group of Twelve had somehow generated at least fifteen shadows, persons, manifestations, or powers. The extra shadows may have been trailing hangers-on of the Twelve, or split person-parts of some of them. But mostly the group ignored their shadows or divisions or plastered over their apprehensions of them.

  The rough account of the twelve persons in what was known (to Hilary and Jane Chantal Ardri at least) as the Ardri Group were these:

  1. HILARY ARDRI, a rusty-colored man, red-haired all over his body (an Esau man). He stood an even two meters tall and was very thick in the arms and shoulders and chest. Like an earlier hero, he was blue-eyed when he gazed out over the land, and he was green-eyed when he gazed over the ocean. He was only moderately intelligent, but he had great mental stamina: he could stay with an argument for thirty-six hours and tire out his opposition. He had, for a while, been in politics where this quality of mental stamina was important. His inquiring mind had one restriction on it, and this was his old family motto: When you have a good thing going, don’t ask questions. He had a remarkable memory for details, and this made up for his not quite remarkable intelligence. And he did have one good thing going, and he didn’t ask questions about it. He had stumbled onto it by accident.

  Hilary had an enterprise on the shore of a recreational lake in eastern Oklahoma. This was the Computerized Lake-Fish Company. But Hilary did not have a Commercial Fisherman’s License to operate on Lake Tenkiller nor on any other lake, stream, river, pond, or reservoir in Oklahoma. Commercial Fisherman’s Licenses were quite rare and very hard to obtain. The only really good way to get such a license was to be born with it. And why should one bother? Those who did have commercial licenses seldom fished, for there were no longer any fish to be caught in the lakes, streams, rivers, ponds, or reservoirs of Oklahoma. Nevertheless, Hilary Ardri had become quite wealthy from his Computerized Lake-Fish Company. A man from the State Fish and Game Department spied on Hilary constantly to find out how it was all accomplished, but he could find out nothing at all. And the fact was that Hilary himself did not understand how he did it.

  “I do not break any of your thousand-and-one regulations,” Hilary always insisted to that man from the State F&G Department. “I do not fish at all, not with hook or line or net or jug or dynamite or gaff or harpoon or fish-line or fish-bane. I do not poison the waters to kill the fish. There is no smell of fish on my shore (my own shoreline is only ten meters long), and there is no debris of fish. I have no factory or processing plant. Where is my fish works if I am accused of engaging in commercial fishing without a license?”

  “I dunno, Ardri, where is it? That’s my own question,” said the man from the F&G Department.

  “It’s right there, on my table there, taking up only half a square meter of space,” Hilary said in a moment of candor. “That computer, small and efficient and personalized, is all the fish business that I have, is all the business of any sort that I have.”

  “You deliver packaged fish (excellent fish they are) to more than three thousand Oklahoma stores every morning,” said the man from the F&G Department (his name was Myron McMasters.) “How and where do you get the fish, and how do you deliver them?”

  “My computer there takes care of everything. It gets the fish without hook or crook, and it delivers them by driverless vehicles to the stores. It puts them in stock. It bills them and it collects for them. And it deposits all the profits (the profits are 100%) in my cash accounts and in my security accounts. Hey, these fish are good, are they not, Myron? They’re some of mine. The computer delivers them to me every morning too. And then it prepares and serves them however and whenever my whim desires it. And the driverless vehicle by which it delivers them, well, it isn’t anywhere when it isn’t in use. But I don’t know anything at all about fish.”

  “What do you know about then, Hilary Ardri?” Myron McMasters from the State F&G Department asked. He had a touch of irritation in his voice, but not too much irritation, for he loved Ardri’s fish and he also believed that one shouldn’t ask too many questions about a good thing.

  “Computers,” Hilary Ardri said. “I know about computers. I am not known as a big brain among the computer people, but I know a few things that the big brain people haven’t learned. One thing I know is that a happy computer can work wonders, and that a computer is most happy when it can indulge itself in a little bit of sociability. But computers don’t find the society of humans all that captivating. Some computer-owners stable a goat with each computer to keep it from getting lonesome. That’s the second best solution to the problem. But the best solution is to let the computer welcome the guest of its choice, and most computers are kept too clean and antiseptic by their owners to appeal to the special visitors. But I was never bothered by the fetish of cleanliness and over-maintenance. My computer has a poltergeist friend that lives in its maw and does not take up any physical space there. And my computer is happy by this circumstance. So it works wonders for me.”

  “You’re kidding, of course,” Myron McMasters said. “I’ll solve your mystery yet, Hilary. I’ll solve it yet.”

  There wasn’t much of a mystery to solve. Hilary Ardri did know about computers, and he knew about them by hard study as well as by sudden intuition. He studied things that other computer people didn’t bother about. He even studied a humorous chapter in an obscure computer operators’ manual, a chapter named Theoretical Things That Could be Effected by a Computer in the Ambient of an Unreal World.

  “Might as well try some of them,” Hilary had said.

  To take one example, the one that he did take, he learned that in an unreal world, the amount of fish that may be taken out of a lake has no connection with the amount of fish in the lake. The amount of fish to be taken out is related only to the amount of fish that the computer programs to be taken. It does not matter whether or not there are any fish at all in the lake. In an unreal world, the ambient is never restrictive. The fish will be processed as the computer programs them to be processed. They will be delivered, collected for, and deposited for as the computer programs them to be done. It is a little mental game that one may imagine for a computer. And it is safe, for it will work only in the ambient of an unreal world.

  But it worked for Hilary Ardri. That wasn’t the first indication that Hilary had that the world was unreal, but it was one of the most telling indications. So Hilary Ardri learned, quite by accident, that the world in which he lived was unreal. And hardly anybody in the world knew that.

  To be real is to be unique. To be unreal is to be common.

  And the odds in favor of the world being unreal are prohibitive. There is only one chance in all infinity of it being real. But there are a billion billion and ongoing billions of chances of it being unreal.

  And besides that, Hilary’s computer had an alter ego, or at least an inhabitant, who became a pleasant friend of all of them in the household.

  2. JANE CHANTAL ARDRI, the second person of the group.

  “No, no, I won’t accept that I’m second person of this or any other group,” she protested once. “I won’t accept it that I am the second at anything. Oh well, let’s say that I’m the second-named person of the group then.”

  Jane Chantal Ardri was an artist of all the arts. But she denied that her art was completely computerized art. Her personal computer, in the family room of the Ardri home, was invisible, except to the eye of another artist. It was housed in a hunting-horn that hung on a rafter (a computer-hewn hickory rafter) in that pleasant room. But every artist who came there, (and most of Jane’s friends outside of the circle of Twelve were artists) would say at once “Oh, how quaint, Jane Chantal, how cult! H
ow could anybody not put her computer in her hunting-horn! How could anybody not have a hunting-horn! And does it still sound like a hunting-horn?”

  And, in her programming voice, Jane Chantal would immediately order, “Sound, horn, sound, and mean it when you sound!” And lively and rousing (though computerized) hunting-horn tunes would immediately tumble out of the rafter-hung horn-computer. Jane was a huntress, of course, always and in everything, but she was a fuzzy and somewhat lazy huntress, one who was seldom in a hurry. She knew that her game would wait for her, that her prey would take only token (though colorful) flight. She was the huntress who was always in charge of the hunt.

  But Jane Chantal always maintained “I use the computer only for the tedious and difficult things in art, and in my hunting. Many of the things in art are hot and heavy, or they are cold and clammy, or they are back-breaking and finger-breaking. These things the computer does, but I do all the artistic parts, and all the really avid pursuits.”

  Yes, certain aspects of bronze-casting are hot and heavy, as is the carrying-in of a full-grown elk on the shoulders and hanging and drawing it. Certain aspects of massive sculpture in travertine-marble-limestone are rockdust-breathing and arm-breaking and unpleasant. So also are aspects of stalking a prey by the belly-crawl through frozen grass on a winter pre-dawn. And the whole process of writing and regaling of Heavy Drama is nerve-jangling and emotion-wrenching. So let it be the computer whose nerves are jangled and whose emotions are wrenched. And it is the business of the computer to find rimes for unrimeable words and to devise new meters, just as it is the business of the computer to find new Canadian Geese to rise from the lake in the morning and to make their turn-back when a furlong in the air to receive the shot. And the computer can gaze directly into the sun (directly by remote-control) and then record the after-images that result from that encounter. Or the computer can go, not physically itself, but in its probing processes, down into the bottom of the deepest well or aquafer and there record the curious poetry of the blind brooks and the blind fish. And, whenever Jane Chantal returned from one of her frequent trips to other parts of the world, she would find that her artistic production had gone on unabated in her own absence. Her joyous computer (it was named Joyeuse Vice-Reine and it was a female computer) never failed her. Her newest productions were always in the newest style, whether Jane Chantal was physically present at their production or not.