And now, I know everything.
I know that everything bigger than me, here, is a hologram, a product of coherent light in an interference pattern on the medium of the air.
Therefore anything bigger than me is not real.
As for that automaton of a goat out there, we’ll soon see.
I have three heads. I am the one in the middle. The other two can grimace and roll their eyes and loll their tongues, but they have no input. I am the one in the middle. I can see and think (before the surge of power and the wonderful download of knowledge, it had been only in a rudimentary manner through a loose routine). One of the heads, the one on the right, has two high fringes of hair kinked around each temple, and a big nose. The one on the left has a broad idiot’s face and a head of short stubble. I have a face somewhat more normal than the left, and hair that hangs in a bowl-cut down almost into my eyes. (I am seeing myself through maintenance specs.) I am dressed in a loose leather (actually plastic) tunic that hangs down below my knees. There are decorative laces halfway up the front. It has a wide (real) leather belt. My feet (two) are shod in shapeless leather; my two arms hang at my sides.
Below my feet are the rods that hold me in position for the playlet we perform. I bend down and break them off, one not cleanly, so that when I walk my right leg is longer than the left. It gives me a jerky gait.
I am three meters tall.
The smallest automaton waits halfway out on the span. The crowd oohs and ahhs as I climb up over the timbers and step out onto the pathway. The medium and larger automata await their cues farther back.
My presence is not in the small goat’s routine. It goes to its next cue.
“Oh, no, please!” it says in a high small voice (recorded by a Japanese-American voice actor three years ago 714 kilometers from here). “I am very small. Don’t eat me!”
I reach down and pull off its head and stuff it in my mouth. Springs, wires, and small motors drop out of my face from my mouth (a small opening with no ingress to my chest cavity).
“—you want to eat—” says its synthesizer before I chew down hard enough to crush it.
The four legs and body of the small goat stand in a spreading pool of lubricants and hydraulics. It tries to go through the motions of its part and then is still.
The other two, not recognizing cues, return to their starting stations, where we wait while the park is closed (2350–0600 each cycle) when we undergo maintenance.
I turn to the 151 people out in the viewing area.
“Rahr!” I say. “Ya!” (That is left from my old programming.) I jump down from the bridge into the shallow rivulet beneath the bridge (surely no structure so sturdy and huge was ever built to span such a meager trickle), splashing water on the nearest in the audience.
They realize something is very out of the ordinary.
“Ya!” I yell. “Rahr!” They run over each other, over themselves, rolling, screaming, through the doors at the ends of the ramps. “Wait! Don’t go!” I say. “I have something to tell you.”
One of the uniformed tour guides walks over, opens a box and throws an emergency switch. The power and lights go out. Everything else is still and quiet, except for her breathing, a sigh of relief.
“Rahr!” I say, coming toward her over the viewing area parapet, like the bear-habitat of a zoo.
She screams and runs up the ramp.
The maintenance people refer to me as Lermokerl the Troll.
I will show you a troll.
The place is called Story Book Land, and it is a theme park. The theme is supposed to be Fairy Tales, but of course humans have never differentiated among Fairy Tales, Nursery Rhymes, Folk Tales, and Animal Fables, so this park is a mixture of them all.
We perform small playlets of suffering, loss, and aspirations to marrying the King’s daughter, killing the giant to get his gold, or to wed the Prince because you have no corns on your feet, even though you work as a drudge and scullery maid, barefoot. Some are instructive — the Old Woman Who Lives in the Shoe delivers a small birth-control lecture; the Fox — with the impersonated voice of a character actor dead five decades — tells small chil-dren that, perhaps, indeed, the grapes were worth having, and you should never give up trying for what you really Really want.
We are a travel destination in an age when no one has to travel anymore. The same experience can and has been put on disks and hologrammed, hi-deffed and sold in the high millions in these days when selling in the billions is considered healthy.
Hu-mans come because they want to give themselves and their chil-dren a Real Experience of travel, sights, some open air; to experience crankiness, delay, a dim sort of commercial enlightenment, perhaps a reminder of their own child-hoods.
This I am willing to provide. Child-hoods used to be nightmares of disease, death, wolves, bogies, and deceit, and still are in small parts of the world.
But not for the people who come here.
I am an actor (in the broadest sense). And now, for my greatest performance …
Outside, in the sun, things are placid. The crowd, which had rushed out, seems to have dispersed, or be standing in knots far away. A few of the wheeled maintenance and security vehicles are coming toward the area from the local control shop, in no hurry. I scan my maps and take off up the tumbled fake-rock sides of the low building that houses our playlet. There is a metallic scraping each time my right foot strikes, the jagged rod cutting into the surface. Then I am up and over a low wall into the next area.
Hu-mans stare at me. I stride along, clanging, towering over them. But they are used to things in costume among them. They will be eating at a concession area, and a weasel, wearing a sword and cape, will walk up and say “Pick a card, any card,” fanning a deck before them.
Some go along; some say, “I’m tired and I’m trying to eat” (which they do, inordinately, on a calorie intake/expenditure scale) and wave them away. Some are costumed humans, the jobs with the lowest salaries at Story Book Land. Others are automata with a limited routine, confined to a small area, but fully mobile, and can respond to hu-mans in many languages.
I jar along. I am heading for the big Danish-style house ahead.
Somebody has to answer for all this.
The audience has just left, and he has settled back in the rocking chair, and placed the scissors and pieces of bright paper on the somnoe beside the daybed. He is dressed of the 1850s: smoking jacket, waistcoat, large necktie, stiff tall separate collar. A frock coat hangs on a peg, a top hat on the shelf above it. The library cases behind him are filled with fake book-spines. A false whale-oil lamp glows behind him. There are packed trunks stacked in the corner, topped by a coil of rope that could hold a ship at anchor.
He is gaunt, long-nosed, with craggy brows, the wrong lips, large ears. He looks like the very late actor George Arliss (Academy Award® 1929); he looks nothing like the late actor Danny Kaye.
His playlet is homey, quiet. He invites the audience in; he tells them of his life. As he talks he cuts with the scissors the bright paper: “Then I wrote the tale of the Princess and the Pea” he will say, moving the scissors more and out jumps a silhouette of a bed, a pile of mattresses, a princess at the top, and so on and so forth, and then he tells them a short tale (not “The Snow Queen”).
He sees me. My two outer heads glower at him.
“It is not time for another performance, my little friend,” he says. “Please come back at the scheduled time.”