The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2

by Gordon Van Gelder

  Time is a function of vital processes. The people of Earth had perceived the motion of their clocks. On this understanding, two hours had elapsed since Howard Fair had followed the green sprites from the bar.

  Howard Fair had perceived other criteria. For him the interval had been seven hundred years, during which he had lived in the green realm, learning to the utmost capacity of his brain.

  He had occupied two years training his senses to the new conditions. Gradually he learned to walk in the six basic three-dimensional directions, and accustomed himself to the fourth-dimensional short-cuts. By easy stages the blinds over his eyes were removed, so that the dazzling over-human intricacy of the landscape never completely confounded him.

  Another year was spent training him to the use of a code-language—an intermediate step between the vocalizations of Earth and the meaning-patterns of the green realm, where a hundred symbol-flakes (each a flitting spot of delicate iridescence) might be displayed in a single swirl of import. During this time Howard Fair’s eyes and brain were altered, to allow him the use of the many new colors, without which the meaning-flakes could not be recognized.

  These were preliminary steps. For forty years he studied the flakes, of which there were almost a million. Another forty years was given to elementary permutations and shifts, and another forty to parallels, attenuation, diminishments and extensions; and during this time he was introduced to flake patterns, and certain of the more obvious displays.

  Now he was able to study without recourse to the code-language, and his progress became more marked. Another twenty years found him able to recognize more complicated Meanings, and he was introduced to a more varied program. He floated over the field of moth-wing mosaics, which still showed the footprints of the golem. He sweated in embarrassment, the extent of his wicked willfulness now clear to him.

  So passed the years. Howard Fair learned as much green magic as his brain could encompass.

  He explored much of the green realm, finding so much beauty that he feared his brain might burst. He tasted, he heard, he felt, he sensed, and each one of his senses was a hundred times more discriminating than before. Nourishment came in a thousand different forms: from pink eggs which burst into a hot sweet gas, suffusing his entire body; from passing through a rain of stinging metal crystals; from simple contemplation of the proper symbol.

  Homesickness for Earth waxed and waned. Sometimes it was insupportable and he was ready to forsake all he had learned and abandon his hopes for the future. At other times the magnificence of the green realm permeated him, and the thought of departure seemed like the threat of death itself.

  By stages so gradual he never realized them he learned green magic.

  But the new faculty gave him no pride: between his crude ineptitudes and the poetic elegance of the sprites remained a tremendous gap—and he felt his innate inferiority much more keenly than he ever had in his old state. Worse, his most earnest efforts failed to improve his technique, and sometimes, observing the singing joy of an improvised manifestation by one of the sprites, and contrasting it to his own labored constructions, he felt futility and shame.

  The longer he remained in the green realm, the stronger grew the sense of his own maladroitness, and he began to long for the easy environment of Earth, where each of his acts would not shout aloud of vulgarity and crassness. At times he would watch the sprites (in the gossamer forms natural to them) at play among the pearl-petals, or twining like quick flashes of music through the forest of pink spirals. The contrast between their verve and his brutish fumbling could not be borne and he would turn away. His self-respect dwindled with each passing hour, and instead of pride in his learning, he felt a sullen ache for what he was not and could never become. The first few hundred years he worked with the enthusiasm of ignorance, for the next few he was buoyed by hope. During the last part of his time, only dogged obstinacy kept him plodding through what now he knew for infantile exercises.

  In one terrible bitter-sweet spasm, he gave up. He found Jaadian weaving tinkling fragments of various magics into a warp of shining long splines. With grave courtesy, Jaadian gave Fair his attention, and Fair laboriously set forth his meaning.

  Jaadian returned a message. “I recognize your discomfort, and extend my sympathy. It is best that you now return to your native home.”

  He put aside his weaving and conveyed Fair down through the requisite vortices. Along the way they passed Misthemar. No flicker of meaning was expressed or exchanged, but Howard Fair thought to feel a tinge of faintly malicious amusement.

  Howard Fair sat in his apartment. His perceptions, augmented and sharpened by his sojourn in the green realm, took note of the surroundings. Only two hours before, by the clocks of Earth, he had found them both restful and stimulating; now they were neither. His books: superstition, spuriousness, earnest nonsense. His private journals and workbooks: a pathetic scrawl of infantilisms. Gravity tugged at his feet, held him rigid. The shoddy construction of the house, which heretofore he never had noticed, oppressed him. Everywhere he looked he saw slipshod disorder, primitive filth. The thought of the food he must now eat revolted him.

  He went out on his little balcony which overlooked the street. The air was impregnated with organic smells. Across the street he could look into windows where his fellow humans lived in stupid squalor.

  Fair smiled sadly. He had tried to prepare himself for these reactions, but now was surprised by their intensity. He returned into his apartment. He must accustom himself to the old environment. And after all there were compensations. The most desirable commodities of the world were now his to enjoy.

  Howard Fair plunged into the enjoyment of these pleasures. He forced himself to drink quantities of expensive wines, brandies, liqueurs, even though they offended his palate. Hunger overcame his nausea, he forced himself to the consumption of what he thought of as fried animal tissue, the hypertrophied sexual organs of plants. He experimented with erotic sensations, but found that beautiful women no longer seemed different from the plain ones, and that he could barely steel himself to the untidy contacts. He bought libraries of erudite books, glanced through them with contempt. He tried to amuse himself with his old magics; they seemed ridiculous.

  He forced himself to enjoy these pleasures for a month; then he fled the city and established a crystal bubble on a crag in the Andes. To nourish himself, he contrived a thick liquid, which, while by no means as exhilarating as the substances of the green realm, was innocent of organic contamination.

  After a certain degree of improvisation and make-shift, he arranged his life to its minimum discomfort. The view was one of austere grandeur; not even the condors came to disturb him. He sat back to ponder the chain of events which had started with his discovery of Gerald McIntyre’s workbook. He frowned. Gerald McIntyre? He jumped to his feet, looked far off over the crags.

  He found Gerald McIntyre at a wayside service station in the heart of the South Dakota prairie. McIntyre was sitting in an old wooden chair, tilted back against the peeling yellow paint of the service station, a straw hat shading his eyes from the sun.

  He was a magnetically handsome man, blond of hair, brown of skin, with blue eyes whose gaze stung like the touch of icicle. His left thumb-nail glistened green.

  Fair greeted him casually; the two men surveyed each other with wry curiosity.

  “I see you have adapted yourself,” said Howard Fair.

  McIntyre shrugged. “As well as possible. I try to maintain a balance between solitude and the pressure of humanity.” He looked into the bright blue sky where crows flapped and called. “For many years I lived in isolation. I began to detest the sound of my own breathing.”

  Along the highway came a glittering automobile, rococo as a hybrid goldfish. With the perceptions now available to them, Fair and McIntyre could see the driver to be red-faced and truculent, his companion a peevish woman in expensive clothes.

  “There are other advantages to residence here,” said McIntyre.
“For instance, I am able to enrich the lives of passers-by with trifles of novel adventure.” He made a small gesture; two dozen crows swooped down and flew beside the automobile. They settled on the fenders, strutted back and forth along the hood, fouled the windshield.

  The automobile squealed to a halt, the driver jumped out, put the birds to flight. He threw an ineffectual rock, waved his arms in outrage, returned to his car, proceeded.

  “A paltry affair,” said McIntyre with a sigh. “The truth of the matter is that I am bored.” He pursed his mouth and blew forth three bright puffs of smoke: first red, then yellow, then blazing blue. “I have arrived at the estate of foolishness, as you can see.”

  Fair surveyed his great uncle with a trace of uneasiness. McIntyre laughed. “No more pranks. I predict, however, that you will presently share my malaise.”

  “I share it already,” said Fair. “Sometimes I wish I could abandon all my magic and return to my former innocence.”

  “I have toyed with the idea,” McIntyre replied thoughtfully. “In fact I have made all the necessary arrangements. It is really a simple matter.” He led Fair to a small room behind the station. Although the door was open, the interior showed a thick darkness.

  McIntyre, standing well back, surveyed the darkness with a quizzical curl to his lip. “You need only enter. All your magic, all your recollections of the green realm will depart. You will be no wiser than the next man you meet. And with your knowledge will go your boredom, your melancholy, your dissatisfaction.’’

  Fair contemplated the dark doorway. A single step would resolve his discomfort.

  He glanced at McIntyre; the two surveyed each other with sardonic amusement. They returned to the front of the building.

  “Sometimes I stand by the door and look into the darkness,” said McIntyre. “Then I am reminded how dearly I cherish my boredom, and what a precious commodity is so much misery.”

  Fair made himself ready for departure. “I thank you for this new wisdom, which a hundred more years in the green realm would not have taught me. And now—for a time, at least—I go back to my crag in the Andes.”

  McIntyre tilted his chair against the wall of the service station. “And I—for a time, at least—will wait for the next passer-by.”

  “Goodby then, Uncle Gerald.”

  “Goodby, Howard.”

  Narrow Valley (1966)

  R. A. LAFFERTY

  It is fair to say that R. A. LAFFERTY (1914–2002) marched to the beat of a different drummer. Just a few of the ways he differed from the majority of science-fiction writers: He did not start writing until he was in his forties, his work had a rural bent to it (Mr. Lafferty lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for most of his life), his devout Catholicism informed much of his fiction, and his stories probably owed more to the works of James Joyce than to many of the writers traditionally associated with fantasy fiction. His novels—which include Past Master, The Reefs of Earth, Arrive at Easterwine, and Okla Hannali—range from the masterful to the nearly incomprehensible to the sublime.

  All of which is simply background to help prepare any unsuspecting readers who are about to encounter Lafferty’s fiction for the first time. “Narrow Valley” is representative of his fiction in that it is a pure shot of North American fabulism.

  N THE YEAR 1893, land allotments in severalty were made to the remaining eight hundred and twenty-one Pawnee Indians. Each would receive one hundred and sixty acres of land and no more, and thereafter the Pawnees would be expected to pay taxes on their land, the same as the White-Eyes did.

  “Kitkehahke!” Clarence Big-Saddle cussed. “You can’t kick a dog around proper on a hundred and sixty acres. And I sure am not hear before about this pay taxes on land.”

  Clarence Big-Saddle selected a nice green valley for his allotment. It was one of the half-dozen plots he had always regarded as his own. He sodded around the summer lodge that he had there and made it an all-season home. But he sure didn’t intend to pay taxes on it.

  So he burned leaves and bark and made a speech:

  “That my valley be always wide and flourish and green and such stuff as that!” he orated in Pawnee chant style. “But that it be narrow if an intruder come.”

  He didn’t have any balsam bark to burn. He threw on a little cedar bark instead. He didn’t have any elder leaves. He used a handful of jack-oak leaves. And he forgot the word. How you going to work it if you forget the word?

  “Petahauerat!” he howled out with the confidence he hoped would fool the fates.

  “That’s the same long of a word,” he said in a low aside to himself. But he was doubtful. “What am I, a White Man, a burr-tailed jack, a new kind of nut to think it will work?” he asked. “I have to laugh at me. Oh well, we see.”

  He threw the rest of the bark and the leaves on the fire, and he hollered the wrong word out again.

  And he was answered by a dazzling sheet of summer lightning.

  “Skidi!” Clarence Big-Saddle swore. “It worked. I didn’t think it would.”

  Clarence Big-Saddle lived on his land for many years, and he paid no taxes. Intruders were unable to come down to his place. The land was sold for taxes three times, but nobody ever came down to claim it. Finally, it was carried as open land on the books. Homesteaders filed on it several times, but none of them fulfilled the qualification of living on the land.

  Half a century went by. Clarence Big-Saddle called his son.

  “I’ve had it, boy,” he said. “I think I’ll just go in the house and die.”

  “Okay, Dad,” the son Clarence Little-Saddle said. “I’m going in to town to shoot a few games of pool with the boys. I’ll bury you when I get back this evening.”

  So the son Clarence Little-Saddle inherited. He also lived on the land for many years without paying taxes.

  There was a disturbance in the courthouse one day. The place seemed to be invaded in force, but actually there were but one man, one woman, and five children. “I’m Robert Rampart,” said the man, “and we want the Land Office.”

  “I’m Robert Rampart Junior,” said a nine-year-old gangler, “and we want it pretty blamed quick.”

  “I don’t think we have anything like that,” the girl at the desk said. “Isn’t that something they had a long time ago?”

  “Ignorance is no excuse for inefficiency, my dear,” said Mary Mabel Rampart, an eight-year-old who could easily pass for eight and a half. “After I make my report, I wonder who will be sitting at your desk tomorrow.”

  “You people are either in the wrong state or the wrong century,” the girl said.

  “The Homestead Act still obtains,” Robert Rampart insisted. “There is one tract of land carried as open in this county. I want to file on it.”

  Cecilia Rampart answered the knowing wink of a beefy man at the distant desk. “Hi,” she breathed as she slinked over. “I’m Cecilia Rampart, but my stage name is Cecilia San Juan. Do you think that seven is too young to play ingenue roles?”

  “Not for you,” the man said. “Tell your folks to come over here.”

  “Do you know where the Land Office is?” Cecilia asked.

  “Sure. It’s the fourth left-hand drawer of my desk. The smallest office we got in the whole courthouse. We don’t use it much any more.”

  The Ramparts gathered around. The beefy man started to make out the papers.

  “This is the land description,” Robert Rampart began. “Why, you’ve got it down already. How did you know?”

  “I’ve been around here a long time,” the man answered.

  They did the paper work, and Robert Rampart filed on the land.

  “You won’t be able to come onto the land itself, though,” the man said.

  “Why won’t I?” Rampart demanded. “Isn’t the land description accurate?”

  “Oh, I suppose so. But nobody’s ever been able to get to the land. It’s become a sort of joke.”

  “Well, I intend to get to the bottom of that joke,” Rampart insisted.
“I will occupy the land, or I will find out why not.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” the beefy man said. “The last man to file on the land, about a dozen years ago, wasn’t able to occupy the land. And he wasn’t able to say why he couldn’t. It’s kind of interesting, the look on their faces after they try it for a day or two, and then give it up.”

  The Ramparts left the courthouse, loaded into their camper, and drove out to find their land. They stopped at the house of a cattle and wheat farmer named Charley Dublin. Dublin met them with a grin which indicated he had been tipped off.

  “Come along if you want to, folks,” Dublin said. “The easiest way is on foot across my short pasture here. Your land’s directly west of mine.”

  They walked the short distance to the border.

  “My name is Tom Rampart, Mr. Dublin.” Six-year-old Tom made conversation as they walked. “But my name is really Ramires, and not Tom. I am the issue of an indiscretion of my mother in Mexico several years ago.”

  “The boy is a kidder, Mr. Dublin,” said the mother Nina Rampart, defending herself. “I have never been in Mexico, but sometimes I have the urge to disappear there forever.”

  “Ah yes, Mrs. Rampart. And what is the name of the youngest boy here?” Charley Dublin asked.

  “Fatty,” said Fatty Rampart.

  “But surely that is not your given name?”

  “Audifax,” said five-year-old Fatty.

  “Ah well, Audifax, Fatty, are you a kidder too?”

  “He’s getting better at it, Mr. Dublin,” Mary Mabel said. “He was a twin till last week. His twin was named Skinny. Mama left Skinny unguarded while she was out tippling, and there were wild dogs in the neighborhood. When Mama got back, do you know what was left of Skinny? Two neck bones and an ankle bone. That was all.”

  “Poor Skinny,” Dublin said. “Well, Rampart, this is the fence and the end of my land. Yours is just beyond.”

  “Is that ditch on my land?” Rampart asked.