The Neander Ifrit

Illustration by William R. Warren, Jr

Dear Stan[1]:

This may be a long sort of letter, so sit back.

New York (to start where everything starts) is a very strange place, and commuters like you never really get to know it. The place has everything, including a pile of stories that are flatly unbelievable; if I told you about Little North Evans Boulevard, for instance, you’d accuse me of inventing the whole thing, and there are even people who refuse to believe that there is a spot in Manhattan where Waverly Place crosses Waverly Place and goes charging off in all directions, as the man said—and they can see that one for themselves. All you have to do is find Sixth Avenue (which is easier to do if you remember not to call it Avenue of the Americas) and where it crosses Waverly Place walk west along Waverly, and when you come to the old Infirmary you’re there. The sight left a permanent neurosis in an old friend of mine, I’m afraid, who happened across it one very drunken night.

And of course the town has a positive farrago of Institutions of Learning, from Columbia and Pace and God knows what-all to, say, the State University of New York (SUNY) and the City University of New York (CUNY), the whole rickety pile of them teaching God knows what to God knows how many eager young minds. There’s one more institution, I find—whose computer is really responsible for this letter, I suppose. I’ve just run into the Local University of New York (LUNY).

LUNY is a private university—very private. They don’t want any sort of government funds, being a little afraid that the government would then jump in and tell them what to do, which textbooks to use, and so on; as it is, they may be the only university anywhere that uses Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass as primary math texts, and Gordy Dickson’s Dorsai novels as basic sociology’. They want no interference, and my guess is that, if government were allowed in, they’d have some.

LUNY has a lot of ties to science-fiction, come to think of it, not the least of which is that the place sounds like science-fiction. They’ve only been open twelve years so far, but some of their early graduates have already found places for themselves in private industry; that plan to bury people in space and sell advertising linage on their coffins, if I have it right, was a LUNY project.

And, as I say, it’s their computer that is at the root of all this. I ran into it because I was fiddling with an amok-computer story, and ran into a very full professor at an Italian place over here on the Medium West Side (I think New York may have more Italian restaurants than Florence, though I am certainly not going to go there and check), and he talked things over with me the next day in his offices, inside the LUNY Main Building. (By the way—they’re keeping the computer sort of quiet so far, and I hope this letter doesn’t injure that privacy any—but what the hell, it’s just between the two of us, right?)

Part of the computer—what they call the interactive array—is named Daisy (because the name occurs in “A Bicycle Built for Two”, though it is not, damn it, the name of the bicycle), since the computer is built around the idea of two full cycles. That is, every operation goes through two cycles, with a third cycle (which the computer-lab people here have christened the Training Wheels) on call in case of disagreement.

Yes, I know: nearly all computers have an I-tell-you-three-times system, more or less. This is something else. Every operation goes through two such triple plays, and maybe a third, with each individual sheaf of commands checked at interruption points. It slows things down some, though not as much as you’d think because some radically new notions are a part of the configuration, but it does, they tell me, give added assurance and added power somehow or other.

The computer as a whole doesn’t seem to have a name, and so far has refused to accept one. Whether or not the thing is alive or conscious has been the subject of several ongoing LUNY investigations, and two honors courses, and I’ll keep you posted. But it is certainly the damnedest thing of its kind I have ever run across.

It keeps reminding me of a phrase from one of those novels Fred Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth wrote back in the Peculiar Old Days—the one set in a low-calorie society (which is an exact description) and involving a heroic group called Sons of the Wolf, which I assume was their way of getting Sons of Bitches past what censorship then existed.

This low-calorie society was full of people who meditated, and the prize form of meditation was “meditation on connectivity.” This made a certain amount of sense in the novel, and it makes much more sense if applied to the LUNY computer, because Connectivity, so to speak, is most of its business.

It’s set up to connect every fact it’s ever been fed with every other fact it’s ever been fed, which makes for a total number of connections that staggers the mind. Anyhow, it staggers mine, though as I grow older I find I stagger more easily. There did come a point at which the sheer number of discrete connections started the computer losing information (go see a topologist if you don’t believe me; what do you think I’m doing, making stuff up here?), but by treating the information in ad hoc bunches for purposes of preliminary definable connection they got things back into what they apparently think of as line. And as the LUNY staff has fed the computer every datum a wildly assorted staff could get its hands on (including fiction—so labeled—music, paintings and sculptures as encoded systems, and dictionaries in 170 languages, give or take a dialect) it is making a very great many connections by now.

Their idea is, of course, that material in one area can contribute to work in a whole different area—not exactly a novel notion, but they’re leaning on it a little. I asked my tame professor for an example, and he said that material common to the manufacture of shatterproof glass, the understanding of cattle stampedes, and some oddities involving fractured spines in camels is about to make a breakthrough in that grey area between the quantum-physics world and the Newtonian world in which all of us used to live so happily. I’ll write you more about that when I understand it a little better. But the report for the moment starts with all those dictionaries the thing has digested.

It seems (according to the computer) that all known languages do have a few big things in common, though some languages have tried to eradicate these ancient influences. The fact that German has no nonsense words (I mean no deliberate nonsense words), says Daisy, is evidence that German is one such language. Don’t ask me, for heaven’s sake.

I actually talked to Daisy, of course—the interactive array—in her office, down in a sub-basement of the Main Building. (Incidentally, everything is in the Main Building, because LUNY only has the one building, though it is a large one; it was named after a Charles Freidrich Main, and if I ever find out who he is or was I’ll tell you.) Daisy insists that there are common sub-roots in all languages, that provide a sort of Rosetta Stone not only for written language in general but—and very specifically—for hieroglyphic writing and picture-writing in particular.

In fact, Daisy says, she has examined all the seven-hundred-odd cave paintings available for remote examination, and she claims that they are a form of language, a neat oxymoron: a written prehistory.

There are (Daisy says) five possible positions for each leg, including “invisible or not drawn,” six possible positions for the head, and so on, and combinations allow for a great many “basic roots” for words or even, in a way, sentences. Most of the possible positions do turn up in what are labeled later on, as a couple of positions began to be used as “shorthand” for longer but very common expressions.

When all this is to be made public I do not know, but Daisy and LUNY do seem to be on to something here. There is a real prehistory, apparently, that can be read—and some of it, I am very much afraid, doesn’t look like anything in the least plausible. Von Daniken, an entire endless Philip Glass score lull of New Age vapors, and eleven Luddites a-leaping, all put together, look a great deal more plausible than some of this stuff does.

One story in particular...

It seems there was this cave man.

As a matter of fact, it does. He was a Neanderthal fellow, all aspirations and no forrid if you remember the limerick, and one afternoon by the shore of whatever sea it was that he was near, he stubbed one of his hairy toes on a Thing.

(I can’t tell you what sea he was near, or where the hell this all happened; the cave-painters and Daisy and I don’t share anything resembling a coordinate system. Neanderthals are named for the Neander Valley, but they might turn up almost anywhere even remotely plausible, and I’d rather like it to be the Arabian Gulf, and what the hell, it was the Arabian Gulf.)

The thing was a large “extended circle”—apparently some sort of vaguely cylindrical form—made of something harder than seashell. It didn’t break when the cave fellow tried to wrestle with it, and it didn’t bend either.

He seems to have spent some time and some energy on it, either because he thought it would make a good dish, weapon or hat, or because curiosity was alive in the caves, which seems a lot more plausible. (Oh, let’s give this fellow a name. In the records, he doesn’t have one, so we’re entirely free to christen him as we please. How does Dave sound?)

Standing or squatting there by the shore of the Arabian Gulf with this Thing in his hands, he finally tried the right set of motions, and there was a hell of a cloud of smoke, and an even larger and more dangerous-looking Thing appeared.

It was, say the records, nine feet tall (roughly “twice me” for a Neanderthal), comparatively hairless, and possessed of that sort of menacing mien which doesn’t bother to boast or crow or threaten because it knows it is better than you are.

Remember that Dave had a language, at least “on paper” or “on cave,” and therefore, almost certainly, existing as sound too. Language seems to be innate among human beings anyhow, and when we go to the animal experiments... but let’s not. Let’s just remember that he had a language—which enabled this nine-foot-tall Thing to communicate with him.

It said it was an Ifrit. It said it was older than humanity (“humanity” at the time being Neanderthal, but let’s not quibble; if the Ifrit didn’t, and was there at the time, what standing have we?), and had been cursed into humanity’s service.

This did not make a lot of sense to Dave. None of it, from “older” to “cursed.” “Humanity’s service” made a little sense, maybe—the Thing was offering to become his slave.

It was an exceptionally tall and powerful-looking Thing, and as a slave it would be beyond price, so to speak. Dave was, of course, a little suspicious, AKA just plain scared; in his experience big powerful-looking Things, human or otherwise, did not rush up to you with heartfelt offers to serve you; nor is it any different today (“I’m from the Government and I’m here to help you”).

But after a little wrangling, things began to become clearer. A great Mage of some sort (and you can translate “Mage” as anything from “Shaman” to “Ancestor Ghost”) had laid a curse—a set of orders unpleasant to the recipient that could not be disobeyed. These orders involved fulfilling three demands made by any human being who got him out of his container.

You might at this point go and look up “Ifrit” somewhere. A dictionary might do for that, and a dictionary of mythology certainly will. I’ll wait.

OK? Stan, I want to tell you as clearly as I can that I am not responsible for this; I am describing translations received of cave paintings by a computer. Things cannot possibly be more scientific.

So this genie offered Dave three wishes.

Dave, once he got the idea, did not hesitate very long. The first wish he made, the records say, was for a fresh haunch of meat, big enough to feed Dave and his family for a long time (your guess is as good as mine, but it had to be small enough for Dave to lug from the shore back to wherever nearby this particular cave man was living, so “three or four days” looks about right when we remember that there were at least two others in Dave’s family—wife and son—and possibly more). No trouble, says the genie, just wait a second or two, and he snaps his fingers (or whatever it is he does; the translation is anything but specific on this point, and I am not an Ifrit expert—and try saying “Ifrit expert” three times with your mind full of Scotch) and there is the haunch of meat.

Dave gives a cry of joy and starts off with it, and is called back by the genie, who wants to know about the other two wishes. He asked Dave, it seems, if so small a thing as a single set of good meals is all he wants.

It doesn’t seem so small a thing to Dave, of course, but genies don’t miss meals and have no idea how important the one you didn’t get comes to be. All the same, Dave thinks things over.

He would like, he says, to be invulnerable to other cave people and large animals. Is there something that would ward off hurt no matter how big and strong the threatening Thing might be?

(This may in fact have been Dave’s high reach for sheer cleverness; could he get the genie to make him invulnerable to the genie?)

Sure and I’ll do that, says the genie, and r’ars back and makes some passes in the air (or whatever it is he does), and there is an occult flash of light and the genie says: “There you are, now. Diseases, hunger and the thousand natural shocks will still do you in, singly or in battalions, but your specifications have been carefully observed; manufacturer is not responsible for defects due to sheer inadvertence.”

And it’s the genie who suggests they test the new spell, though Dave is a bit reluctant; maybe this has all been a setup so that the genie could kill him and laugh at his stupidity. But at last he is willing that the genie swing at him, and the genie’s fist bounces off and the genie makes a most convincing owoo sound and Dave feels invulnerable, and deserving of it, too, for did he not expose himself to awful pain from the genie’s fist just to test it?

And the genie stops Dave as he is again about to run off, and asks about the third wish. And Dave wonders about the biggest things in his world. And he wonders, and he wonders.

And finally he makes his wish.

He is a family man, after all. And among the Neanderthals he has known there are leaders, and leaders-of-leaders, and once, a long dim time ago, he has heard of a leader-of-leaders-of-leaders.

His son might become such a one. Dave knows that he himself does not have the Right Stuff; he fears things, and one can see from the way leaders act, after all, that they fear nothing whatever. But his son is still sort of new, and changes might be made.

Says Dave: My son shall be the leader of all leaders-of-leaders-of-leaders and shall rule over all humanity, and his seed after him, as long as humanity shall exist.

And says the genie: It is so, and it is done. That is a wish of some size, and I do not mind saying that its fulfillment cost me no little exertion and indeed a fair amount of eldritch cunning; but it is done, and you shall be content. And now, says the genie, if you’ll hand me that container I’ll be on my way, and if I am lucky I will not have to be granting any more wishes for a few millions of years, because it can get to be a terrible strain, this taking orders like a waiter from all these newcomers upon the Earth.

And Dave handed him his extended-circle of a container that wouldn’t break or bend, and the genie went out the way lightning disappears, leaving a bright stain on Dave’s eyes for a few seconds, and far out in the Arabian Gulf Dave saw a splash and figured that the container was seaborne out there somewhere.

Heading, I am driven to suppose—and after a good deal more time, to be sure—for Aladdin.

Now, all this is strange enough, Stan, but it is not the end of the story. The end of the story is a praiseful, even worshipful description of Dave’s son, Dave the Leader-and-then-some.

It is a description of a Cro-Magnon man.