The Artifact

Lasar Tarrell was not a happy man. As he sat in the head office of Galacticon Publishing, Inc., he stared glumly through the window giving him a view of the humming activity, and brooded. A thick, black cigar was clamped between his teeth, enfuming the office thoroughly with thick, foul-smelling smoke. Nobody ever complained, however. All of the whirr was completely mechanical. A millennium ago this place would have been a hotbed of tom hair, small intrigues, cigarette stubs, budding romances, gripes about the boss, harried editorial assistants munching their way through the ever-present slush pile, worry about deadlines…. As Tarrell surveyed the smoothly functioning office, he thought how much things had been improved since the Terran Collapse and subsequent Galactic Amalgamation.

Of course he missed having nobody to chew out except his placid Editor in Chief, sole other human occupant of the office, but that wasn’t the real problem. The slush pile was bigger than ever, but it had lost its old savor. The usage and grammar were invariably polished, and there was a distinct lack of silly spelling errors. All manuscripts were flawlessly formatted and printed, submitted on discs which Tarrell simply fed into his own computer for preliminary screening. Nobody ever sent in a ragged pile of yellow lined sheets written by hand. Tarrell, in fact, had never heard of either pencil or pen.

Long ago, when computer first met typewriter, the result had been dubbed the word processor by some prophetic genius. This new creation lived up to its name. It allowed writers to write, re-write, edit, add, delete, polish, and eventually print out their masterpieces. A spelling checker was added, and later made automatic. Authors made prematurely bald by desperate head-scratching over synonyms that refused to come had a computerized thesaurus to aid them. This had expanded to include several thousand phrases and, like the spelling checker, had become automatic. Grammatical aids had likewise been built into the increasingly wonderful machines, with the result that awkward sentence structure, with overly punctuated, convoluted (though often somewhat surprising), and hard-on-the-eyes sentences, along with a whole host of mixed metaphors, vague allusions like vaguely floating clouds, dangling participles and sentences ending in prepositions became something no longer heard of. Sadly, somewhere along the way, the spark had been lost.

On publication day, the Galaxy was filled with subspace signals flashing under space between the stars to Galacticon’s planetary receiving stations. As the encoded signals arrived from Earth, the smooth whirring of well-kept machinery commenced on thousands of worlds, leading to neatly wrapped piles of periodicals mechanically decanted at all distribution points. Galacticon Publications put out a slick, highly colored, holographically illustrated periodical, much too elegant to be a mere magazine.

To add to the wonder, it was cheap. Still, Tarrell had the uneasy suspicion that low price was all that kept his magazine in circulation. The multispecies Galactic Federation was spreading, but growth in sales was minimal. The bottom line was that Terran authors were producing technically flawless creations, but the raw element of creative surprise was lacking. The rest of the Galaxy was not excited.

As Tarrell gloomily pondered the threatening second derivative in the sales figures his door burst open. Tarrell’s sigh, pinched lips, and slightly narrowed eyes fell rather flat. Not only was their intended target oblivious, but the rest of the picture Tarrell presented didn’t fit. He had been so surprised at the sudden intrusion that he had gone about a foot vertically, as the cigar had shot roughly horizontally. After brushing cigar ash off of his vest, nipping a wastebasket conflagration in the bud, and locating the actual cigar under the desk, where it had skittered after ricocheting from the wall, Tarrell faced the only other human working in the huge complex with an expression of long-suffering patience practiced in private for years.

Daigle Freelander was not the sort of assistant to give a boss much chance to show off a long-suffering expression. He seemed like a professor with his lanky frame, preference for tweedy jackets and habit of communing silently with his pipe for a while before delivering himself of an opinion. His work had been efficient, and he had not made a practice of dashing dramatically into his superior’s office, accounting for Tarrell’s lack of practice in long-suffering. The two men faced each other over the wreckage for a few seconds, then Tarrell inquired gruffly, “Well?”

Wordlessly, Freelander handed him a manuscript. It was yellow, dogeared, dirty, and illegible. Smudges alternated with blotches which could have been, and probably were, peanut butter and mustard. Pages were ripped and taped back together. Tarrell, wondering where Freelander had found such an object, stared at it in disbelief. The old slush pile had been gone through centuries ago and the often regrettable contents long since dispatched hastily back to the hopeful originators or their descendants.

“Something out of some pre-Collapse back corner?” asked Tarrell, who had read of the horrors of the old slush pile.

“No,” Freelander answered. “The author’s in my office.”

Tarrell knew what he had to do next. He sat down and read—heavy going. Moving his lips, spelling out words, and backtracking with endless patience, he slogged through the barely legible pages. As he labored his eyes began to glitter, and a vein in his neck to pulse visibly. A half hour later he put it down, still only partly finished, and looked in awe at Freelander.

“My God! Where did he get his machine??”

“I don’t know.” replied Freelander. “He just said to take a look, and if we considered it publishable, he’d try to see if he could clean it up a little.”

“First, I’m going to talk to him about that machine of his.” Suiting the action to his words, Tarrell lunged hugely through the door to his office, and proceeded with surprising swiftness down the corridor.

Tarrell had been practicing his Grand Entrance for at least as long as he had his Long Suffering Look, and he used it now. His portly frame loomed in the doorway, temporarily casting a shadow on the hopeful author. On first sight, the author of the story that had so electrified the entire human work force of Galacticon Publications didn’t seem particularly prepossessing. He was one of the rare non-robots who worked at construction sites, fixing and adjusting the numerous construction robots. Grease was still evident under his fingernails as well as in the creases of his hands, although they were scrubbed nearly raw. His face had the slightly scuffed appearance of someone who has just shaven off a growth of hair which simply accumulated out of neglect rather than a desire for a beard. The suit he wore was out of fashion, wrinkled, and worn in spots. His eyes, however, drew Tarrell’s attention at once. Lively and intelligent, they twinkled with good humor.

Tapping the manuscript in his hand, Tarrell began.

“Mr. Jeppard,” he said, hoping that he had managed to decipher the scrawl on the title page, “Have you ever written anything before?”

“Oh, no, sir! It wasn’t till this latest construction site that I wrote anything at all!”

Jeppard’s shining eyes seemed to beg to pour forth his whole story, probably starting with the “Baby’s First ’Puter” that he had as a child. It was obvious, however, that he had the good sense merely to tremble on the brink of further revelations, and not plunge on.

“Oh, I see,” said Tarrell, not quite seeing. “So this is your first effort, then.”

“Yessir. If you think I need more practice, I’ll just be on my way. I know you are busy men, and it was probably silly of me to show you my very first thing.” He reached for his manuscript as he spoke, but Tarrell held it close, and let loose a barrage of “harrumphs” from the back of his throat.

This throat-clearing exercise was another of Tarrell’s treasured but seldom actually used Perfect Boss effects, and the results were striking. Jeppard leapt like a startled deer, and turned pale. Tarrell became soothing.

“Oh, no, Mr. Jeppard. I didn’t mean to give you that idea. I would just like to study your manuscript for a little longer, if I may. I see some possibilities here. Of course, parts will have to be reworked considerably, and the story line cleaned up, and so forth but, yes, we may have a place for your story. By the way,” he added in an attempt at a casual afterthought, “where did you get your word processor??”

Jeppard blinked, his face glowing.

“My… my word processor, sir?”

“Yes, your word processor. The thing you used to write your story.”

“Oh, that was what I was going to tell you, but I didn’t want you to think I was going on. You see, I found it at the site.”

“Is it a big machine?” Tarrell asked, remembering that some of the early word processing equipment had been quite bulky.

“Oh, no, not at all. It isn’t really a machine at all. It’s a sort of stick, and it makes marks. I have to cut down the end from time to time.”

Fascinated, the two most important Terrans in science fiction publishing stared at the small object which Jeppard drew from his pocket. It was bright yellow and pointed on one end, with something black and greasily shiny at the point. The other end was flat, with a ridged ring of brass striped with the scratched, fading remnants of black paint. The words EBERHARD-FABER MONGOL 482 were printed by some ancient process, likewise in black, on one of the sides of the yellow stick, which was hexagonal in cross-section. A Numeral 2 appeared as yellow in a black lozenge, at right angles to the other letters and numbers. The men stared at it for a long time, and then back at the battered, vibrant manuscript in Tarrell’s hand.

“I can’t tell you just exactly how it works, sir. I just picked it up, and pretty soon I was writing a few words, tracing the letters my pocket jotter prints and… Well, you see what happened.”

Freelander pulled for a long time on his pipe, exhaling at last a long, fragrant cloud of smoke. Finally, he voiced an opinion. “Well, there is a lot of information we have lost about civilization before the Collapse. They probably had technology of which we cannot even begin to dream.”