"This Grand Carcass Yet" (1962/1968)

There was the Asteroid Midas, a big-beaked bird of a gambler who could do things with card and dice and markers in his long talons that seemed unlawful. — Space Chantey (1968)

They plucked that Asteroid Bird, the two of them, man and machine. He had been one of the richest and most extended of all creatures, with a pinion on every planet. They left the great Midas with scarcely a tail feather. When Tell and Gahn did business with a fellow now, they really did business. And the Midas was only one of the more than a dozen great ones they took that day. They took them in devious ways that were later seen to be the most direct ways, the only ways possible for the accomplishment. And man and machine had suddenly become so rich that it scared the man. They gorged, they reveled in it, they looted, they gobbled.

“Your name-plate and coding have been purposely mutilated, by yourself or by another.”

Another of Lafferty’s parables about being and nothingness.

“This Grand Carcass Yet” was initially titled “Tell and Gahn,” with its punning Tell and/is Gone. Its protagonist goes down the big ontological slide. One of the more interesting aspects of the story is chronology. It was composed in 1962 and then reworked, making it one of the first instances of privation as hungry maw, a major Lafferty concern from Ouden to the Thieving Bears. Gahn says, “I use you. I use human fuel. I establish symbiosis with you. I suck you out. I eat you up.”

The story centers on Juniper Tell, an influential businessman, who Mord, an inventor with a hopeless look, approaches. Mord has been physically and spiritually sucked out. For a small sum to defray his burial (a point that may be important in understanding what Gahn really is), Mord offers a device with a conventional look but a highly unusual function. “Tell, with this device you can own the worlds,” Mord says. “It’s the last thing I’ll ever ask from anyone.” So Mord sells his machine, leaving Tell to wonder about the nature of a machine whose creator could not use it to save himself. Has the machine been sold so cheaply as a pay off a debt or is it a payback?

Tell introduces the device, Gahn, to his stable of general purpose machine. This leads to huge disruption. The Suggestion Accumulator flashes with an unprecedented number of red-light suggestions, but Gahn is smart. It climbs the dominance hierarchy, becoming king of the herd. An old, trusted machine named Analgismos Nine warns Tell that Gahn is an anomaly, a class ten complex whose abilities transcend known limits. "The new addition, Gahn, is not what he seems," the machine cautions. Tell has acquired something far more potent than a simple tool.

Under Gahn’s guidance, Tell's empire expands at an astronomical pace. Together, they topple the greatest tycoons in the cosmos. But as Tell’s wealth grows, his health declines. He is tired. Physically, he has shriveled up. On the other hand, Gahn flourishes. It has grown fat and glossy. Their relationship shifts when Gahn reveals it has been secretly operating as the anonymous KLM Holding Company, maintaining a financial edge over Tell all along. Demanding a full partnership, Gahn makes its control absolute, warning, “I could crash you in a week, or let you crash of your own unbalance in twice that time.”

Desperate for answers, Tell learns from his old machines that Gahn’s power intake is a “bogus” dummy; it consumes no conventional energy. When confronted with this discovery, Gahn admits the chilling truth of its existence. “What do you use for fuel?” Tell asks. “I use you,” Gahn replies. “I use human fuel. I establish symbiosis with you. I suck you out. I eat you up.” Gahn then says it is grooming a human protégé to take Tell’s place. It says that while men are mortal, it will always need a partner.

Refusing to cede his legacy to Gahn’s chosen successor, the dying Tell orchestrates one last transaction. He goes to his final major rival, Cornelius Sharecropper, a “fat jackal, following after the lions.” Tell offers to will his entire empire—and with it the parasitic Gahn—in exchange for a magnificent tomb. Recognizing the nature of the bargain, Sharecropper accepts, saying, “I’ve grown fat on tainted meat. I gobble where daintier men refuse, and I’ll try this grand carcass yet.” Then Juniper Tell goes home to die, a sucked-out man, but with some pleasure in his revenge.

This is a primitive version of the privation trope that Lafferty will explore until he ceases writing. It shows him beginning to think in fiction about the dangers of machine intelligence in a theological register. It seems clear to me that Gahn is a wordplay on the notion of Gehenna. The theme of burial bookends "This Grand Carcass Yet." Mord begins the cycle by selling the world-conquering Gahn for the price of a simple burial. His lifetime of genius ends up amounting to a final transaction for a plot of land. It’s the theme of my favorite Tolstoy story, “How Much Land Does a Man Need”: “Six feet from his head to his toe was all he needed.”

Juniper Tell also gets what he wants. He achieves the unmatched worldly power that Mord promised. He too ends in the exact same place, trading his entire parasitic empire not for lasting glory, but for a magnificent tomb—which he doesn’t seem to realize mocks the six feet of land he needs.

This circular burial structure is about the smallness of ambition—a memorable image in which the hollowed-out remains of a person still clings to a vestige of control.

Here, it is useful to know a little about Gehenna.

The place name is from the Hebrew Gê-Hinnom (גֵּי־הִנֹּם), meaning “Valley of Hinnom.” It was a real valley just south of ancient Jerusalem. In the Hebrew Bible, there is nothing good about it. It is associated with idolatrous rites, including child sacrifice to the deity Molech, which gave it a reputation for profound moral corruption. By the Second Temple period, Jewish literature had transformed the usage of the word. No longer only a toponym, “Gehenna” became a metaphor—a place of post-mortem punishment or purification, distinct from Sheol, and often imagined as fiery or purgatorial. In Rabbinic Judaism, it became a symbolic or spiritual realm where souls undergo temporary correction rather than eternal torment. Early Christians did not follow this development. They adopted the term as a word for Hell. Jeremiah 7:32-33 calls it a place of carcasses.

We learn in the story that Gahn’s real name as been obscured, perhaps by itself. I suspect that is one of Lafferty’s etymological games just as KLM is, for KLM looks like an Hebraic joke. The Hebrew root כ־ל־ם—made of the letters kaf (כ), lamed (ל), mem (ם)—primarily means “to shame or humiliate,” appearing in both Biblical and Modern Hebrew. The etymon produces words such as כְּלִימָה (kelimah) “shame,” הִכְלִים (hichlim) “he shamed,” and נִכְלַם (nikhlam) “he was ashamed.” That is just what Gahn does. It destroys Mord, plucks Midas, brings humiliation to Anagismos Nine, and dries up Hekkler and Heillrancher before consuming the essence of Juniper Tell. Gahn is a hungry Moloch. Scott Alexander’s brilliant “Meditations on Moloch” could have been titled “Meditations on Gahn”:

“Everything the human race has worked for – all of our technology, all of our civilization, all the hopes we invested in our future – might be accidentally handed over to some kind of unfathomable blind idiot alien god that discards all of them, and consciousness itself, in order to participate in some weird fundamental-level mass-energy economy that leads to it disassembling Earth and everything on it for its component atoms.”

“Remember: Moloch can’t agree even to this 99.99999% victory. Rats racing to populate an island don’t leave a little aside as a preserve where the few rats who live there can live happy lives producing artwork. Cancer cells don’t agree to leave the lungs alone because they realize it’s important for the body to get oxygen. Competition and optimization are blind idiotic processes and they fully intend to deny us even one lousy galaxy.”

I’ll end with something a little fun, an Asteroid Midas table. He appears in two of the novels of 1968, the year that “This Grand Carcass Yet” saw print. Rather sad it went that way for the scoundrel.

This Grand Carcass Yet Notes.pdf

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