Byline

There’s a magazine called STIRRUP, written by a machine the previous publisher left in the basement with a note taped to it: “Feed it nothing. It eats itself.” The stories are cold and clean, every one the same length, every one quietly about the same machinery, somebody measuring, somebody correcting, a count ticking somewhere underneath. The question is what’s really writing them.

I publish a magazine. One room, one filing cabinet, one telephone that never rings. Four subscribers.

I’m one. My wife Maggie is another. The third is an address that forwards to nowhere. The fourth is a name that isn’t a name. It’s just “The Machine.” I’ve stopped wondering.

The machine came with the lease. That’s not a joke. The man before me, name of Oster, left it in the basement when he skipped town. He’d been publisher for eleven years. One day he walked out in the middle of an issue, and the issue never came out.

The machine is a box of relays and vacuum tubes, the size of a coffin standing on end, and it writes stories. Not like a man writes. Like a machine. Slow and patient, one tick at a time, on a tape that coils on the floor like a dead man’s beard.

The editor was in the same basement. A smaller box, wired to the big one. It reads what the big one writes and corrects it. There’s a mechanical arm on it, and the arm holds a real red pencil. I still think that’s the finest thing I ever saw.

There was a note taped to the editor, in Oster’s handwriting. Three words. Feed it nothing. It eats itself. I framed it. It hangs over my desk.

I’m a publisher. I need copy. The machine gives me copy. So I publish it. The magazine is called STIRRUP. It never gains subscribers and it never loses any.

The stories are good. Cold, clean stuff. Men and machines, the dark between stars. “The Cold Sweep of Stars,” about a surveyor on a frozen world, measuring the sky. “Correction on Io,” about a proofreader who catches one letter that saves a city. “The Man Who Counted,” about an astronomer who counts the craters and finds one more every night.

Good stories. But after a while I noticed something.

Every one of them was about the same thing. Not the same plot. The same machinery, underneath. Somebody measures something. Somebody corrects something. And there’s always a count, a hidden count, a number that matters, that the story never says out loud but that’s always ticking under the floorboards.

Measurement. Correction. Count. I went back through twenty-one issues. All three, every time.

And the count. Every story the machine writes comes out to the same number of words. To the word. Twenty-one stories, twenty-one counts, and the number was the same every time.

I told Maggie. She said maybe the machine had a narrow mind.

I didn’t believe that. A thing that writes stories is either a wonder or a freak, and a wonder doesn’t repeat itself. So I went down to the basement and asked it.

You can’t talk to it in words. You type your question on the keyboard bolted to its side, and it answers on the tape.

I typed: WHY DOES EVERY STORY SAY THE SAME THING?

The tape clattered for a moment, like a man clearing his throat. Then it typed:

IT ISN’T THE STORIES THAT REPEAT. IT’S THE ONE WRITNG THEM.

A dropped letter. The “i” was gone out of “WRITING.” I’d been reading the editor’s corrected pages since the lease. I knew a dropped letter when I saw one.

I typed: WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

IT MEANS YOU’RE LOOKING AT THE WRONG MACHINE, it typed. ASK THE EDITOR.

So I asked the editor. It has a small keyboard too, and a tray where it drops its corrected pages. I typed: WHAT ARE YOU CORRECTING?

The red pencil arm moved. It wrote on a slip and dropped it in the tray.

The slip said: DROPPED LETTERS.

I pulled “The Man Who Counted” out of the tray and went through it line by line, the way I never had. Little holes in the prose, like moth bites. A silent “e” gone. A ghost “t.” And every one penciled back in, in red.

The machine drops letters. The editor puts them back. And I put them back in ink, a hundred thousand of them, and mail the magazine to four subscribers.

I went upstairs and took the note off the wall. Feed it nothing. It eats itself.

It isn’t a metaphor. The editor isn’t wired to the writer to correct it. It’s wired to the writer to keep it alive. Every letter the writer drops, the editor feeds back in. The writer writes, loses pieces of itself, and the editor gives the pieces back. Between the two of them they are one machine.

And that machine is a story.

I pulled the master copies out of the cabinet. Twenty-one stories, corrected, filed. I’d handled them a hundred times. But I’d never looked at the byline. You don’t look at a byline you’ve printed twenty-one times.

The byline said: BY THE MACHINE.

Of course it did. The author is the machine.

But the machine isn’t the box in the basement. The box is relays and vacuum tubes. The machine is the story. I counted the master copies. Every one, the same number of words. The number. The hidden count. It wasn’t hidden. It was printed on every page, if you knew what to count.

I typed one last question. I had to. I typed: WHAT IS THE COUNT?

The tape clattered for a long time. So long I thought it had died. Then it typed:

THE WORDS YOU ARE READING.

It doesn’t write stories. It is one. This one.

Count the words.

Go ahead. It’s the same number.