Space Chantey

by R. A. Lafferty

  Well, at least the shells of the hornets were still there, but there was a great amount of the works scattered around on the rocky ground.

  “I couldn’t see any use for a lot of that stuff so I left it out,” said the boy Hondstarfer. “They will both fly now, but one of them will break down again after a little while. This one here is perfect and will fly forever. On the other one I made a lot of mistakes. You’ll have more room in them now if you ever use them. Those long things I took out were what was taking up all the room.”

  “Those are the main drives,” said Crewman Boniface.

  “Ah well, the ships are fixed,” the boy said, “but one of them will break down again.”

  “They will fly?” asked Crewman Humphrey. “Men, men, let’s go then! I’ve had enough of this place where they stuff you full of bull and then hunt you down and kill you every day.”

  “No, of course they won’t fly,” said Roadstrum. “How could they fly without their main drives?”

  “Oh, they’ll fly,” the boy Hondstarfer said. “I fixed the clumsy things. Did my father Bjorn not tell you that I was mechanically inclined?”

  “However could you fix such intricate machinery with nothing but those seven stone hammers there?” Captain Puckett asked.

  “I didn’t, I couldn’t, I only thought that I could. I had to go get that.”

  They hadn’t noticed it before. They’d thought it was a tree. Hondstarfer hadn’t fixed their hornets with those seven little stone hammers. He’d used a big stone hammer. Was it ever big!

  “Hey, I want to be a hobo,” Hondstarfer cried as Deep John the Vagabond fluttered down on his favorite slab. “How do I go about it, Deep John?”

  “It isn’t like it used to be,” said Deep John. “It all seems much smaller and narrower since we took to the skies. The spacious days of it were on World in the old railroad time. But you’d need a time machine to get back there, Hondstarfer.”

  “Oh, I’ve got a time machine,” the boy said, “also a space-racer. I think I’ll go to World and turn myself back and be an old-time railroad hobo.”

  “Well, what is the choice?” Puckett asked. “Do we try to fly in something that can’t possibly fly? Or do we stay to be killed again and again and again?”

  “Wait, wait,” called Margaret the houri. “I’m going with you. Those giants aren’t as much fun as I thought they’d be. You get tired of them after a while.”

  “That’s true, that’s true,” said Roadstrum. “We have our choice. Let’s make it. I was a giant for my moment. I can be one again if I’m called on to be. Shall we say that Hondstarfer could not fix these things to fly? Shall we say that the stone slabs of this world could not fly? Load in whoever wants to go! We fly! We fly! We’ve flown on less.”

  And to their own amazement they began to load in.

  “Wait, wait,” big Bjorn called coming down to them. “Will you not stay to the breakfast?”

  “We will not stay to the breakfast,” Roadstrum said.

  “You will do better today,” Bjorn stated. “You begin to be giants. Today you will be able to eat a whole bull, Roadstrum.”

  “I am able to, yes, Bjorn, but I do not want to eat a whole bull. I can be the giant whenever I wish, and I am afflicted with the heroes’ disease that smites me every third day about sundown. But we will fly! There are skies we have not seen yet! There are whole realms still unvisited by us. We will not be penned in even a giants’ pen. We fly!”

  “In that case, Roadstrum—ah—it is an embarrassing thing to say—in that case there is one thing we must do before you leave.”

  “Do it then,” said Roadstrum.

  “We do not want to be overrun with amateurs,” the giant Bjorn explained. “If everybody knew how much fun it was here, then everybody would come. We want only such fine farers as yourselves who come by high chance. You must promise never to tell anybody how much fun it is here.”

  “We promise,” said Roadstrum. “We will never tell anybody how much fun it is here.”

  “And there is one small thing that we must do to make sure that you keep your promises,” Bjorn added.

  “And what is that?”

  “CUT YOUR BLOODY TONGUES OUT!”

  Two of the Laestrygonian giants grabbed each man and threw him down; and a third, stepping on his man’s throat to force his tongue out, grabbed it and pulled it out still further to its absolute extent, and then cut it out with a stone knife, roots and all.

  Here was the creamingest pain ever. Here was utter frustration. Who may battle and defy and get revenge when deprived of tongue and voice? And besides, they were near dead from the loss of blood, near a more final death than that of the night before.

  But they crawled and dragged themselves in, gagging and green, and loaded dying into their crafts, with Roadstrum going last.

  “Here is one final thing beyond the final,” said Bjorn. “—Ah, I am truly sorry to see you looking so green and puny—one very last surety you must give before you tumble dying into your boat. You must write on this paper that my little boy has here, for my boy Hondstarfer, as you may not know, can read. You will use your finger and the blood from the roots of your tongue. You will write ‘I will never tell anyone how much fun it is in this place.’ ”

  And mighty Roadstrum wrote with his finger and his tongue’s-roots blood “I will never tell anyone how much fun it is in this place.”

  They took to air all bloodily and retchingly,

  They made new tongues, but didn’t make them fetchingly,

  And flew through chartless skies where none had fled before;

  Whatever came, at least they’d all been dead before.

  But one thing worked, whatever else might nix the things,

  That hammer-handling kid had really fixed the things.

  All bloody luck they ever got away like that,

  They sure did never want another day like that!

  And Roadstrum shucked another layer fretfully:

  One gives up giantizing most regretfully.

  Ibid

  CHAPTER THREE

  All lost in space, the hide-bound inner side of it,

  With roaring rocks that gave them quite a ride of it—

  Ah better Dobie’s Hole than such vortexicon

  That stoned them all and spooked the cowboy lexicon!

  They guessed wrong guess and reveled in unheedingly

  (Where clashing rocks turned strange and roared stampedingly),

  And ate High Cow, and fell beneath the curse of it,

  And bantered suns, and ended up the worse for it.

  They had the horns and hump and very prime of it,

  And rather lost themselves about that time of it.

  Ibid

  THEY CAME AMONG the clashing rocks, “the rocks wandering.” It was a thick asteroid belt moving at a respectable speed, and it was necessary that the hornets match its direction and speed for safety. Besides, since they were lost, they might as well go where the rocks were going.

  The wandering rocks were mostly about the size of the hornets themselves, rounded and not too rough. They were thickly clustered, one every thousand meters or so. “And we called that thick!” the men said later. They were gray bumbling things in the gray twilight, and some of the men got out and rode on them.

  “They’ve got eyes on them,” said Crewman Oldfellow.

  “Probably the mica glint,” said Captain Roadstrum.

  “No, no, not like that at all. Eyes like a calf, like a buffalo calf that I saw at a World zoo once. I look sideways at one of them, he looks sideways at me, and we see each other’s eyes. But when I look at one of them directly, his eyes disappear.”

  “Ah well, maybe your eyes disappear also,” said Roadstrum. “You’d be the last to know.”

  The clashing rocks kept their distances and positions pretty well; and yet it seemed as though they became somehow more numerous, as though they spawned when the men were not looking.

  Roadstrum sent
his men out to mark and number the one hundred nearest rocks. And then they rode along and studied the traveling rocks for an equivalent day.

  “There are two forty-nines,” Crewman Lawrence reported then, “and we numbered only one of each number.”

  “Then I have bumblers for men and they are not able to count to one hundred,” said Roadstrum angrily.

  “That is not so,” Crewman Bramble protested. “I made the dies myself and I made them true. But now there are three number nines each bearing my genuine and original die of that number.”

  “There are five number sevens at least,” said Crewman Crabgrass. “It sure does get crowded now.”

  “Do you hear snorting, Roadstrum?” Captain Puckett called from his hornet. (“False tongue, false tongue,” warned the communicator.)

  “Space noises, Puckett,” Roadstrum called back. (“False tongue,” warned the machine.) “And they become even noisier,” said Roadstrum. “But would you call it snorting? Well yes, I guess you would. Puckett, where in glare-eyed space are all these rocks coming from? And what is the excitement and fear that seems to be running loose among them?” (“False tongue,” the communicator warned again.)

  The communicator always gave this warning now, whenever a man spoke from one hornet to another. The “False Tongue” sensor had been built into the communicator from the beginning as guard against space things that may counterfeit the human voice and so interfere and subvert. But now all the crewmen had false manufactured tongues in their heads, and their communicators warned them against themselves.

  All except Deep John the hobo. Deep John had in some manner escaped the attention of the Laestrygonian giants at that time. “I was the only one able to keep a civil tongue in my head,” Deep John liked to say.

  Margaret the houri had also kept her own tongue, but the communicator called “False tongue” at her nevertheless. The machine read her as something not quite human, and her tongue also.

  “It is snorting, Roadstrum,” Captain Puckett called again. “It is snorting and bawling and trampling. Hear the heavy hooves of it!” (False tongue,” said the thing.)

  “We spooked them, Captain Roadstrum,” Crewman Threefountains said mysteriously. “Some of these breeds spook easy. Man, are we ever going to have a rumble!”

  “They are perverse roaring rocks,” said Crewman Bramble, “and I do not believe that the spherical is their real form. And the closest one, rubbing on our very windows there and threatening to break in, bears the number three and five-eighths, and we made no fractional-number dies; and yet it is a die made by my own hand; no one could counterfeit me there.”

  They went another equivalent day, and the churning rocks were like to crush them all. “Each of the pawing rocks has a brand as well as a die number,” Crewman Trochanter said then. “It’s a sun-brand, but I don’t know what sun.”

  “There’s dust,” said Roadstrum, “prairie dust, but how could there be dust out here? And our scan-can reads that there is a break in the thing, half an equivalent day ahead. We’ll break out of this then, no matter what we break into.”

  “The way out of one known fusillade of rocks is Dobie’s Hole,” said Crewman Crabgrass, “and the hole is not bad. But the way out of the other known congress of clashing rocks is the Vortex. It apparently leads to sure death; nobody has ever come out of it again.”

  “It’s death here,” said Roadstrum. “We will take the side break when we come to it. We are lost, and we will not know whether it is Dobie’s Hole or the Vortex. Hey, what curious things are you men doing with the ropes there?”

  “We don’t know,” the men said. “We just found ourselves doing it. We have a compulsion to form the ropes into such running loops as these. There is something we must do with them when the time comes.”

  “Roadstrum,” Captain Puckett called from his hornet, “the jostling rocks have gone insane! What’s the name of this madness?” (“False tongue,” warned the communicator.)

  Deep John the hobo took the communicator and called from Roadstrum’s hornet to Puckett’s:

  “The name of it is stampede.”

  “I think so too,” Puckett answered. “Roadstrum, my men are making running loops in ropes, and they don’t know why.” (“False tongue.”)

  “So are mine, Puckett,” cried mighty Roadstrum. “It will offend someone when it is done; but what is another measure of trouble added to what we already have?” (“False tongue,” cried the machine.)

  It was as though they were coming to a great river, and the stampeding stones were filling it up and running over it on the backs of their bogged comrades. But at this river in the sky (for half an equivalent day had passed), there was a second ford breaking off hard to the left. The hornets took the branching, coming into a region where the rocks pressed them less hardly. But now the men broke out of the hornets and began to do things clear outside of reason.

  Crewmen Crabgrass and Clamdigger went for the horns of a little calf-rock they had selected, a rock even smaller than a hornet, not above five times the size of a bull elephant. And they had the thing by the horns, but how will a small asteroid have horns?

  Then all the mad crewmen from both hornets were outside, shouting and making ritual motions with their ropes. They flew flying loops around that calf-rock, more than a dozen of them. They jerked it along their own new way, both the hornets dogging it. The men all gave voice to varieties of barking and hooting, and the calf-rock was bawling. The dust was deep and stifling and smelled of flint sparks.

  “It’s a thing too tall for my reason,” Roadstrum slung out, “but I get the high excitement myself. We are pulled along at a great rate on our new course, but we will not let the doggie go! Onto it! Kill it! Skin it! Break it down! Devour it!”

  They were out of the concourse of rocks now, except for the calf-rock whose neck they had broken and which died. They had escaped from one of the known fusillades of rocks, and their way of escape was not Dobie’s Hole. It was the Vortex.

  Nevertheless, the men, working dangerously, had begun to dismember the calf-rock, and some of them had lit space-primus fires to roast it.

  “The horns and the hooves to Captain Roadstrum,” Crewman Threefountains roared, “and the fat of the hump to Captain Puckett.”

  “What is it all, Roadstrum, what is it?” Puckett called.

  “False tongue,” warned the communicator.

  “Oh shut up!” Roadstrum told the communicator. “Crew man Bramble, disassemble the bogus-intrusion safeguard. It drives me crazy.”

  “All right,” said Bramble, and he quickly disassembled it.

  “I don’t know what it is, Puckett,” Roadstrum called then, “but there’s something about the aroma as they begin to roast the meat. A space-primus fire really has no odor, so how should it smell to me like sage-brush and buffalo-chips? Why should the meat smell to me like buffalo meat roasting, when I never smelled buffalo meat? The closest I ever came to it was my grandfather telling of eating it when he was a boy, at a rodeo on the Fourth of July at the old Hundred and One Ranch. And how is it that the men have got such magnificent horns and hooves off a round rough rock?”

  “It’s one of the sacred cattle of the sun we have killed,” came the voice of Puckett. “We knew before we were born that this was forbidden. Now we must die the fiery death for the offense. You have the lead hornet, Roadstrum. Turn into the near sun with it, and I will follow. Let us be consumed by fire. There is no more hope for us.”

  “You’re out of your wits, Puckett. What cattle of what sun?”

  “The sun so great that it is known as the sun, Roadstrum. It is the nearest sun to us. Let us turn into it at once and be consumed for our sacrilege!”

  “Puckett, if I had one of Hondstarfer’s stone hammers here I’d fix your head for you. You’re gone daft!”

  “What, Roadstrum? I was outside for a moment trying to figure this thing out. Holy cow, it’s an odd one! I heard you talking as I came back in.”

  “Puckett,
you were giving me a balleyowl about the cattle of the sun and telling me we must turn into this nearest sun and be consumed.”

  “I was not, Roadstrum! Curse that sleazy little sun! Someone is trying to call us to our deaths. We’ll not go into that little sun, and we can’t go back through the stampeding rocks. It was the other sort of false tongue talking to you, not me. We’re into the Vortex for good, so let’s provision for it. Come out and feast, Roadstrum! Ten men couldn’t eat the bull-hump of this calf, a hundred men couldn’t eat the loins. Bring out a few kilos of pepper and a firkin of Ganymede hot-sauce.”

  “Curse that sniveling little sun, Puckett. For time out of mind and belly I’ve never seen such a thing as this!”

  Did they ever carve up that big young bull! They were into the Vortex itself, going at unlawful and unnatural speed, caught by a force that none had ever broken, but they weren’t going hungry into it.

  They feasted on that big carcass that had seemed to be a rock. They questioned nothing. They were going at a speed where all the onrushing stars appeared violet color (“Lavender,” said Crewman Crabgrass. “Lavender world laughs with you,” said Crewman Trochanter), where all sequence was destroyed, where any answers would have to come before the questions.

  The space-primus fire had become a pungent campfire. Crewman Threefountains played on his harmonica as the crewmen still gorged on the offworldly beef. Then they had branding-iron coffee from somewhere, and horse whisky. They had left the sniveling little sun and were going into a vaster black sun that had gobbled up its own light. It was night now, but it wasn’t an ordinary night.

  And then they all fell to singing old campfire songs, whether this should be the end of them or not. They sang such old songs as “Eight-Eyed Lucy Jane” (it’s plain she isn’t plain), “I Lost My Heart on Wallenda World” (to a woolly Woomagoo), “The Green Veronica,” and “The Grollanthropus and His Girl.”