Sindbad, The Thirteenth Voyage

by R. A. Lafferty

  “The fountain yonder is the famous Fountain of Life-Bubbles. Though the New Caliph Mamun the Great says that there are other fountains of Life-Bubbles in Central Asia, yet I have never heard of them. You have heard, perhaps, that when a criminal is about to be executed in Baghdad, he will usually be given one of these ninety-year-long pleasant lives to live in exchange for the unpleasant life that is being taken from him. We will soon give the Harun person one or several of these convincing surrogate lives to live, just as soon as his japing and jibing have stirred both people and dogs against him to the point of murder. Harun suspects, and I suspect also, that this life of his which is coming to an end is the last life that he will have, that he will be born no more. I am almost sure that his present life is his seventh and last, though his history is very difficult to reconstruct.

  “I am convinced that he will demand one or several of the Life-Bubbles when he comes abruptly up against the moment of his death. I understand that he has always refused them before with the confidence that he will be reborn again. These Life-Bubbles or surrogate-lives may satisfy him more than they satisfy other persons, and a deeper life would be wasted on him.

  “The sad secret of the bubble-lives is that they are Dogs’ Lives, in all senses of that term. Oh, they are happy enough lives, for most dogs and for some people. But they would not satisfy any deep person, not even a deep dog like myself.

  “There is a secret about Harun's heart also. I don't know what it is, but we will have his heart out of him by the time his last breath leaves his body. And then we will see what the secret is. The Dog Doctor has always said that Harun's heart is nonfunctional.”

  Well, the Harun was busy provoking outrageous riots to his own delight. He was busy all the afternoon and evening with his outrages.

  The hangers-on of Harun had been with him as an audience for his demeaning jokes. But in the early hours of the night another sort of human came down Dog Lane and through the Dog Gate to the deep Dog Country. These people were sorrowful and sullen, and perhaps they were bent on revenge. They did not applaud the Harun jokes. They began to growl against Harun even as the dogs were growling against him.

  “Harun, you Boy-Caliph,” one sad woman said, “you killed my daughter just to get laughs from such vermin as are laughing at your jokes now. You had them take my daughter and   —  ”

  “I remember! Ah, I remember!” the Harun hooted. “I remember the look on her face when she realized that it was an all-the-way joke. And I remember the look on your face. Oh, no matter what happens to me now, they can never take away such fun as that which I’ve had! I wish you had another daughter here now and we could go through the all-the-way joke again. Oh, the very stars giggled at that!”

  Other sullen persons accused Harun of other deaths and damages, and he chortled with laughter as he recalled every one of those jokes with his unfailing memory. He laughed, he yowled. His green wig was askew, and he dribbled green spittle in his laughter.

  But his end came quickly when it came.

  “Evil Harun,” one woman said. “You had my husband killed by wild and savage dogs.” The sad woman was carrying a bucket. “You had an essence which when spilled on a person would attract savage dogs to attack that person and tear him to pieces.”

  “I remember, I remember,” the Harun giggled. “Oh, I wish I had some of that essence now! Then we'd see some action and fun!”

  “You have it, Harun, you have it now!” the sad woman shouted, and she poured the whole bucketful of the essence over the head of the Boy-Caliph Harun al-Rashid. And then there was indeed action, if not fun.

  The savage dogs by the dozens began to attack Harun and tear him to pieces.

  “Life-Bubbles, Life-Bubbles!” Harun screamed, and the tongue that wobbled in his mouth was green. “At least two of them. I must have at least two of them.”

  The Dog Magician delivered two of the strange Life-Bubbles to the dying Harun, two pleasant lives of ninety years each. And he lived them fully as sequence in the last ten seconds of his regular-irregular life. But they were dogs’ lives. Then the dogs killed him.

  The Dog Magician managed to get Harun's living heart out of his breast just before he drew his last breath. He gave it to Scheherazade.

  “For you are his widow also,” he said. “You are the widow of both the dead Caliphs here.” Harun's heart was transparent, and it was full of a clear liquid in which a small gold fish swam.

  “Can this be all of his heart?” Scheherazade asked in amazement. “Is this thing all the heart he had?”

  “Yes, all of it,” the Dog Magician assured her. “It's been that way with each of his seven lives: some small or miniaturized creature in a transparent sack every time. The first one was a small and everlastingly barking dog. The second one was a coral snake. The third one was a pig. The fourth one was an alligator, the fifth one a weasel, the sixth one a blue bird, and this seventh one the gold fish. His hearts have always been non-functional as hearts. The Harun bodies themselves have always been mere contraptions indwelt by various grubby devils. Dog Devils, they have been called, but we dogs do not like that term.”

  “Whatever will I do with it?” Scheherazade asked the whole of Dog Country in an exasperated voice.

  “Keep me,” the gold fish chirped-whistled in a cricket-like voice. “You will find me a pleasant companion and a good conversationalist. And the stories I could tell you of the boundless deep!”

  “Have you always been a gold fish?” Scheherazade asked the creature.

  “No. I am a golden whale. I have always been a golden whale, though now I am miniaturized in this damnable little bottle. I was the greatest of whales, and I leapt in the oceans of the world for centuries. I leapt, I dove, I sounded, I lived. Oh, the stories I could tell you, girl. Nobody else could ever tell you such vasty stories, and you do need a change in the palaver you have been putting out.”

  “You'd just be one more thing for me to carry around,” Scheherazade said.

  “Oh, have me installed along with my bottle. You can have me installed parallel to your functional heart. There is a Dog Surgeon here who can do the job in a matter of seconds. Then you will always have me to talk to. You will always have me as an unfailing friend. Oh, I reveled in all the oceans of the world, but I'd been warned not to swim in the Arabian Ocean. I did it anyhow. And I got taken by the cheapest of all Arabian tricks, the bottle trick. But take me and have me installed, and we'll get along.”

  Scheherazade had the Dog Surgeon install the clear vial with the miniaturized golden whale in it. It was installed parallel to her own functional heart. And she hardly knew it was there.

  At midnight the bunch of us went back through the Dog Gate and up Dog Lane to attend the lively bashes of the New Caliph Mamun the Great.

  The 999th Night Of Scheherazade

  This is Essindibad Copperbottom Master Mariner back as captain of his own journal again. We were joined at the Mamun-the-Great Bash at about midnight by John Thunderson and his mechanical bride Blue Moon, by Damsel Scheherazade, and by two upper-crust or lace-curtain dogs, the Dog Magician and the Dog Surgeon both of whom wrote declarations into the Royal Archives on the matter of the death and burial of Harun al-Rashid, and on other matters.

  “Thunderson, there are artisans waiting on you,” Mamun the Great called. “I want them to construct one hundred Open-Ended-Analytics Almost-Anything Space Ships like yours, and I want them to do it within the present hour. The ship-scooting devils now believe themselves beyond pursuit, and they will be less wary than they were a few hours ago as they move to spread themselves to the various worlds in the various ships. Of course, it would not be possible to overtake them, but I understand that such a thing is not necessary. With one of your Almost-Anything space ships, a pilot could simply posit that he will be ahead of a fleeing space ship, and he will be there. He can posit that he has the capacity to destroy it, and so he will be able to destroy it. Will there be any difficulty about the artisans building one hu
ndred space ships within the hour and deploying them wherever they are needed?”

  Scheherazade placed a sort of uncorked flask against an outer wall of the plush palace room where we were reveling. I am sure I am the only one who saw her do this, though she did it openly. She has the trick of doing quite open things and not having them noticed.

  “Oh, there's a thousand things that I'd have to consider,” John Thunderson stammered, “and I will begin at the beginning and go over it all thoroughly, and then   —  ”

  “No, there will not be any difficulty,” Thunderson's mechanical wife Blue Moon interrupted firmly. “When John begins to consider things, he's lost. So I will not allow him to consider things, only to do things quickly. It will all be done, Caliph. Consider it already taken care of. Come along, John Thunderson my love, and we'll set those Almost-Anything Space Ships to blossoming like sudden stars in the various skies.”

  The uncorked flask that Scheherazade had placed against the wall had grown to a hundred times its former size, but still nobody noticed it except myself the sharp-eyed Essindibad Copper-bottom.

  “Let a Master Mechanism-Winder go along with them to be sure that Blue Moon does not run down,” the Caliph Mamun the Great decreed. “When she is well wound up she is as competent a person as there is in the whole Caliphate. Well, that's one worry off my mind. Scheherazade, the escape of the Devils has taken a sharp turn in our favor, a turn such as not even your fictionizing could have conceived of. The fellows have always lacked discipline and dedication. If I were in charge of them I'd straighten them out. Well, they’ve gone horseback-crazy and dromedaryback-crazy after their thousands of years long confinement, and then   —  ”

  “  —   and then they race their stolen horses and dromedaries like crazy,” Scheherazade cut in. Well, that flask against the wall, it that had increased in size a hundred or a thousand times, now seemed to be a mysterious room with a round doorway in it. “  —   and they bet more money than there is in the world on the races. They’ve set up a whole town just East of Baghdad and thrice as big. They’ve named it ‘Carouse Town’, and the fixed horse-races and dromedary-races are only a small part of it. There's ten thousand crap games going on there, and all the dice are loaded. Citizens of Baghdad are rushing there by the thousands to get in on the fun, and they’re being rolled by the hundreds every minute. Knock-out drops are flowing like oceans there. When they run out of money and are still unrolled, they sell their souls to an exchequer devil for a thousand gold pieces each. And then they’re broke again after ten minutes at the gaming tables. Then they are garroted and their bodies are thrown into a quicksand pit on the South edge of Carouse Town.”

  “I know the pit,” Mamun the Great said. “And I'm glad it's being filled up with something. But my reports give only about half of that stuff as happening yet.”

  “Only about half of that stuff has happened yet,” Scheherazade said, “but the rest of it is in the process of happening. I have it all detailed out in my fictions, and the facts always follow my fictions pretty quickly. I have some pretty detailed things planned out for you also, Royal one.”

  “It's perfect!” Mamun rasped. “It puts us ahead of the devils. You have found work for the idle hands and hearts of the devils to do. They will be so busy raising hell in Carouse Town that they'll have no time left to cause mischief.”

  “Mamun the Great, there is one doorway in this great palace that you must on no account enter, that circular door over there,” Scheherazade said. “Those two locksmiths who have just come are going to put a door and a lock on it. And I will have the only key. A lady has to have a secret room of her own.”

  “Not in my palace she doesn't!” Mamun exploded. “Damsel, don't do anything dangerous. This is the 999th night of your stay in Baghdad, and you have received 998 stays of execution from the previous Caliphs because of your story-telling prowess. Well, you may not receive that 999th or 1000th or 1001th stay of execution if you give me that smart talk. Remember that it is only in your fictional outline that you live to the end of the affair. Be careful!”

  “Once I have total control of that secret room over there, I'll not have to be careful,” Scheherazade stated pridefully. “My power will be unassailable then. In just two minutes the locksmiths will have put a door in that doorway, and I will be the only one who can open it. Then, for reasons too subtle to try to explain to you, I'll have total power here. Oh, Um, Um, Um! I'm going to love that!”

  “Guards!” Mamun the Great called out. “Cut the ears off those two locksmiths standing by that circular doorway there. That's just to show them that I mean business. Good, good, well done! Why do grown men make such an outcry when their ears are cut off? They can get along almost as well without their exterior ears. Rattle my brains if I can remember what is in that room, but then I haven't been in this particular palace since my boyhood. But there wasn't any circular doorway there. And the only thing on the other side of that wall is the Outdoors. Damsel Scheherazade, I'll find out what you are up to with your trickery. I'll find out pretty fast.

  The New Caliph Mamun the Great rushed through the circular doorway in his wrath. And the circular doorway seemed to be greatly diminished as soon as he had disappeared through it. Scheherazade hurried over and popped the cork in the opening, and then she laughed as she held the bottle in her hands.

  No, there hadn't really been any room there, nor any circular door. There had been only the circular opening in the little bottle or jug. And the New Caliph Mamun the Great now found himself a prisoner in this bottle which the laughing Scheherazade held in her hands.

  “Mamun my love, you will have to put a rein on your temper,” Scheherazade gurgled. “Those weren't locksmiths. I was just having fun when I said they were. You should have known the difference between locksmiths’ frocks and barbers’ frocks. They were two barbers who came to see whether they couldn't do something about that atrocious beard of yours. You yourself sent for the two best barbers in Baghdad, and when they came you had their ears cut off. The joke wasn't worthy of you. It's like a joke that Harun would have pulled.”

  “Scheherazade, damnable woman!” Mamun the Great thundered (but his thunder was muted because of him being reduced to less than a hundredth of his former size). “Scheherazade, are you cheesy enough to pull the oldest of all tricks on me, the Genie-Bottle-Trick? Thy head will roll this night, wench. Besides, it won't work. It's illegal. I am only one sixteenth Ifrit-Genie by blood, and a person must be one eighth of the gullible blood for it to work.”

  “Thou’rt one sixteenth Ifrit-Genie and one sixteenth dolt,” Scheherazade said with a fine edge of merriment in her voice, “and the two bloods are added together in this. The trick will work on you, and the proof of it is that it is working. We will negotiate now. You will negotiate from weakness and I will negotiate from strength.”

  “No, wench, no! I am the Caliph of the World!”

  “There is one thing that a Caliph cannot survive, my love, and that is the derision of the people. Oh how they will laugh and deride if I show you imprisoned in a little bottle in my hand!”

  “Let us negotiate from equality then, beloved wife of my bosom and beard of my chin. I tell you that I find you the most charming woman of the world. And I tell you that by the law of the Caliphate, enacted by my own pseudo-father, the Scheherazade Person is always the wife of the reigning Caliph so long as they both shall live. But if I'm imprisoned in a bottle, there's no way I can show you what a loving husband I really am. Let me out of here at once, and your head will have a little less likelihood of rolling tonight.”

  “Oh, I intend to let you out of the bottle quite often, Mamun. But I have a mechanism (it's based on the open-ended-analytics of John Thunderson) to bring you back into the bottle whenever I decide that you’ve been free long enough. For a starter, you will be allowed out for one hour of every twenty-four to fulfill your loving-husband duties to me. We will be thousands of miles and hundreds of years awa
y from here, but I think you'll like your new where-and-when, once you stop beating your head against the inside of the bottle.”

  “But how will I perform my duties as a Caliph here if I'm thousands of miles and hundreds of years away from here?”

  “Oh, I'll have John Thunderson teach you about open-ended-analytics so you can make instant voyages of the time-and-space. But I can still call you back across that time-and-space when your hours as Caliph are over with for the day. How long will it take you to discharge your daily or nightly duties as Caliph?”

  “I don't see how I can do it in less than three hours out of twenty-four, Scheherazade.”

  “All right, three hours a day to be Caliph. Anything else?”

  “A Caliph is expected to be married to a princess of one the old Baghdad families. It will not hurt that I have a wife on each end of the line since the ends will be so very far apart both in time and space. You cannot object to my being married to somebody who died more than a thousand years before you were born, and who will be clear on the other side of the world from you anyhow. It will take about three hours out of twenty-four, and this includes both public appearances and private romping.”

  “All right, that's fair. I suspect that your royal bride here will be Princess Fatima Mara Nar Moudi Soukar. She cloys a little, and I'm jealous of her. But I'll just keep telling myself ‘why should I be jealous of a dumpy little fat girl who's been dead for fourteen hundred years and the worms have eaten her?’ All right, Mamun. What else do you need?”

  “Will we be living in the City that has those ‘Old Time Classical Monster Movies’ that you told me about? What was the place where they had them four times a week?”

  “It was the ‘Old Time Classical Monster Movie Emporium’ on Blackwater Street in Chicago. And if we come up with a little extra cash for them, we can have monster movies run seven nights a week. And they love such sponsors and donors as we will be. They run about four hours a night (it's always a double bill), and then I believe you'll want to strut around in a monster costume in front of the theatre for about an hour before and after the show. All right, Mamun. We'll assign six hours out of twenty-four for that. What other times-out will you need?”