East of Laughter

by R. A. Lafferty

  “I am nine years old, and I am Jane Galatea, not Jane the-other-name.”

  “How would you be only nine years old, and you the mother of five children-in-the-flesh, Jane Chantal?”

  “No, no, they are not kids-in-the-flesh yet. You mean Hilary Henry and Jane Chanterelle and Marie Rieuse and Anne Auclaire and Urban Urchin? Oh, those are only day-dream children of mine. I have them very easily. If I were more than nine years old I’d be bigger than this.”

  “Yes, you would be, but I’ll take you any way I can get you. And the names you have said are quite close to the names of our five real children-in-the-flesh. Why have we had such a shallow contact with them? Is it because they are real and we perhaps are not? But you still have your fuzzily-luminous mind, Jane Chantal. All things else will be added to this.”

  “She really is only nine years old,” Drusilla Evenrood said. “So that’s what Jane looked like when she was nine years old. In a side-show at a carnival I once saw the skull of Napoleon when he was nine -years old. But there was something tricky about that, and there’s something tricky about this.”

  “Play fair, funny people,” the morning apparition protested. “You’re not asking questions or looking for clues. You’re only saying things. Let us all stay close together in this murder house of a place. If we drift apart we will be picked off and killed one by one. I keep, forgetting to say that, so we all get killed one by one. You, my old friend with the talking belly-button, Who Am I?”

  “You are Jane Hunting-Horn,” said the talking belly-button Solomon Izzersted himself. “And you have your hunting-horn hanging around your neck now. I don’t know whether you still have your computer in it or not. You have the horn now, but did you have it when you first ran to us, or did somebody add it?”

  “I don’t know,” said the strange creature who was perhaps named Jane Galatea and perhaps Jane Chantal Ardri.

  “No. She didn’t have it at first, and she has it now,” Monika Pantera said. “Don’t be discouraged, Hilary. She is growing and developing. She is being added to. Atrox isn’t nearly finished with her yet. He will finally have her restored the way she was before, perhaps.”

  “I don’t want to be the way I was before. I want to be better than I was before,” the Jane insisted.

  “Her mouth is all wrong,” Mary Brandy insisted. “Where it was torn and spread by the quill-spear going in, it will never be right again. It is twice as big as it should be.”

  “It should be twice as big as it should be,” Whats-my-name Jane insisted. “He says that he always writes the mouth second-of-all, but he wrote my mouth wrong before, too little. He says that he made it only a little bit bigger than an ordinary lady’s mouth before, whereas it should have been twice as big to express me properly. That’s why he killed me probably, that and because I mocked him with my projections of him. But he says he doesn’t remember killing me. Girls who are blessed with really big mouths have no need of much else, he says. He says that to be a true artist of all the arts requires a mouth as big as mine now.”

  “I believe that you can be very hopeful about this, Hilary,” Drusilla Evenrood told him. “Atrox will continue to shape her.”

  “And so will I,” Hilary Ardri said, “and probably with a surer instinct than Atrox has.”

  “I have cellars in my house here with passages into the Ocean,” Laughter-Lynn said when they were at breakfast. “Row-boats come into them all the time and ship-boats often. The name of one of my cellars is Drowned Ghost Cellar, and all of the ghosts of my house are drowned-man ghosts. I do not have such impressive visitors to my house as my mother has to her Castle. No Angels come here, except one sometimes. No Giants, except one very small one. No Sioga, except Ocean-Goblins. The three ghosts of my house I love the most are my three drowned husbands.”

  “I want seaweed to eat for breakfast,” the Jane said. “I don’t want this other stuff.”

  “I’ll get you some,” said the child servant. “I’m Katie.”

  “Will these sea-castings further our Quest for Reality?” Hieronymous Talking-Crow asked.

  “Oh, I think so,” Laughter-Lynn said. “Judgement Day Morning, when we shall all of us understand every secret and every reality, comes when the land shall give up its dead. But the sea gives up its dead every morning in my big cellars, and there are a lot of secrets revealed and shocking realities come to port. Oh, here’s one of my house ghosts now. He is my second drowned husband, Ship Captain Cornelius.

  “Charmed,” said the ghostly Sea Captain in his ghostly Sea Captain’s weeds, and he bowed to all of them. “Have you seen our Great Circular Stairway that possibly was not built by living hands? It is one of the Three Wonders of our house and one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It runs from the Monsters’ Den which is two levels below the booming ocean itself to the Sky Studio that is unsupported save by the winding stairway.”

  “The Stairway was built during the tenure-in-life of Sea Captain Cornelius here,” Laughter-Lynn said proudly. “He was at-land for a month then and was in the house. I came home one evening and there was the beautiful Circular Stairway completed. And there was the Sky Studio new in the sky like a large head on the end of a long corkscrew neck. The whole thing would have taken a crew of five carpenters five weeks to do, except for the portions of it that would have been quite impossible to do at all.”

  “It was Saint Joseph who did it,” said Sea Captain Cornelius. “I knew him by the pipe that he had in his mouth. It was made with a Gouging Tool out of the very tag-end of a board. Those Galilean carpenters will not waste a thing. I also knew him by the tobacco that he was smoking in his pipe. Those frugal Galilean carpenters smoke a mixture of nine parts aromatic redwood sawdust and one part of strong shag tobacco. It has a pleasant smell. ‘I will work for a noon meal,’ he said (he was a tall-straight man), ‘I can repair anything, anything.’ ‘There is a step on the stairway that needs fixing,’ I said, ‘but I don’t have a board at hand to repair it or I’d do it myself.’ ‘I have everything I’ll need,’ he said, and he opened a very small package that he had. It contained a small saw, a small hammer, three nails, a very small board of wood, and two little panes of glass, one of them clear and one of them clouded. I noticed the name on his small package, Joseph Jacobson, so then I knew for sure that he was Saint Joseph; for the father of Saint Joseph was named Jacob. I gave him a noon meal of Dutch bread and ewe-milk cheese and codfish, and a cup of light medlar wine. Then I went to take my afternoon nap which I always take whether on sea or on land, whether in life or death. And in my sleep I heard a hammer with a melodious ring to it, very pleasant. But even in my sleep I wondered ‘He has only three nails, and how can he be doing so much melodious hammering with them?’ Then when my nap was finished (it’s always finished within half an hour) I found the Galilean carpenter Joseph Jacobson. ‘The step is fixed,’ he said. ‘Really I did a little bit more than fix the step. I built a new stairway. That was the least I could do for you when the codfish and the medlar wine were so good. And now I will give you a gift of a new pipe already filled and lighted.’ I took the pipe from him and puffed it. It was wonderful. There is nothing like that mixture of aromatic redwood sawdust and strong shag tobacco. It is the same pipe that I am smoking right now. It has never needed to be refilled nor relit. I saw the Circular Stairway then and was delighted almost out of my skin. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I went up to the floor above me and I went down to the floor below me. I did not notice then that it went very much further up and down. ‘I believe that you are the best carpenter who ever lived,’ I said. ‘No,’ he told me, ‘my son was a much better carpenter.’’

  “We will take a tour of the Circular Stairway now,” Laughter-Lynn Casement said. “Upstairs and downstairs and to the Sky Chamber.”

  Downstairs and downstairs and downstairs again, all the loosely numbered company of Twelve went. The Circular Stairway seemed to be made of wood petrified into red-grained marble. The group went down to the low
er floor, down from that to the sea-level floor, down to the floor that was one level under the sea, down to the cellar floor that was two levels under the sea, down to the floor that was named Drowned Man Shoal that was perhaps three levels below the booming sea.

  “How is it that there is a sea landing on each of these levels that are one below the other?” Hilary Ardri asked.

  “Oh, the Ocean knows its categories,” Laughter-Lynn explained. “There are various categories of sea-level.”

  “Stay and talk with us for a while,” called all the drowned men and women on Drowned Man Shoal. “Nobody ever stops to talk with us anymore. Even Laughter-Lynn has been gone from us for seven years and has left nobody here to take her place, and we have been all alone.”

  “No, no, I have only been gone from you for two days and three nights,” Laughter-Lynn laughed. “You are not nearly as deprived as you make out. How could people be lonely in a crowd? Why don’t you talk to each other?”

  “But we don’t like each other. Who could like old dead drowned and smelly people like ourselves? Who would want to talk to sea-wracked dead people who have pieces falling off of them and who smell funny and are untidy? We can’t stand each other. Talk to us, Laughter-Lynn.”

  “Oh, I’ll be back in an hour or two and talk to you some more,” she said.

  “Back in an hour or two, she says, but she will really not be back for seven years,” a drowned sea-wracked lady complained. “Last week she was gone for seven years every single day of the week.”

  The loosely-numbered company of Twelve came up the Circular Stairway again. Who could estimate the dimensions of it? Six wagons parallel could drive up its windings at the same time and hardly feel a jolt, so perfectly was it fitted. At the floor that was only two levels below the sounding sea, they were surrounded by Okeanoids and Nereids, Ocean Nymphs, as well as Okeanogigantoi, Ocean-Giants. Oh, those were a ragged bunch!

  There were ocean-goblins of a more tattered flesh even than earth-goblins. But they had a certain rough friendliness, and they liked to talk.

  “We live in a rough place, the depths of the Ocean,” one of the sea-giants said. “The Philosopher Polycarp was of the opinion that reality did not extend more than nine fathoms deep into the ocean, and he was right. But we often live at a thousand fathoms deep or even deeper. That is an obscure region and we perhaps should be content to remain an obscure people, but we disdain that. We do have our vanity and our vaunts. We want to be known. Laughter-Lynn tells us that you people in your group worry about your own unreality. People, you don’t know what unreality is! You of the surface world can’t know of the ten thousand genera of sea monsters who never reach the surface and who can’t be taken by any sort of nets or dredges. We do have some strange neighbors down there. We would like to keep and publish the annals of our own feats, but it isn’t easy to do. Until the present century, when pens that would write under water were finally invented by you surface folks, we hadn’t anything to write with at all. And we still haven’t anything very good to write on. The stomach muscles of the giant squid probably make the best writing surface, but you try to get a giant squid to give up his stomach muscles and you’ve got a fight on your hands.”

  “Our music isn’t very good,” said one of the Okeanoids or Ocean-Nymphs. “It sounds like – well, it sounds like music played under water. Our buildings aren’t very good. It is hard to saw or hammer very well underwater. It is hard to set and mortar stones. It is hard to live civilized lives, and that’s why we often try to contact you. For a long while we thought that the drowned surface people who drifted down to us were typical of you. We didn’t know about that species of you that you call Live, so we found you pretty dull. So the difference between the drowned and undrowned of you isn’t a species difference at all; it’s only an attitudinal difference.”

  “I’m sure that we do have a lot of unreality down in our homeland,” said one of the sea monsters. Not a sea-goblin, no. A sea monster. “Of the ten thousand species of sea monsters that are usually reported, most of them are dreamed. Likely there are no more than five hundred valid species of us, and the rest are dreamed by us five hundred. What we would like to get from you people is a good non-water-soluble copy of the Hundred-and-One Tests of Atrox to Determine Whether One is Dreaming or Not. I believe that Atrox is a friend of your group.”

  “We will try to get an ocean-resistant copy of it for you, Salt-Knob,” Laughter-Lynn Casement said.

  “Our philosophy though, our philosophy, we’re really solid there,” said a young lady of the sea-nymphs. “What you humans should do is come sit at our feet in our mansions and learn true philosophy. But the breathing apparatus that you need for that introduces a grotesque element that inhibits the free flow of true philosophy.”

  “Maybe we will think of something,” said Solomon Izzersted. “I myself breathe salt water as a natural right, but my secondary manifestation, John Barkley Towntower here, has trouble with it.”

  The Group ascended the Circular Stairway to the landing that was just one level below the Sounding Sea. And here, Caesar Oceano, to his immeasurable delight, found three ships of the Strange Cargoes Worldwide Shippers which ocean enterprise he himself operated in conjunction with that Golden Panther, Leonardo the Great. The Captains of the three ships addressed the two as Prince Leonardo and Caesar Oceano, and from the way they pronounced ‘Caesar’ you would know that it was an imperial title rather than a personal name. And now those who had known him earlier recalled that the original name had been Cedric Oceano rather than Caesar Oceano. The names of the three ships were The Holy Mary, The Little Girl, and The Painted Woman, the same names that belonged to the three ships of our Ocean Father Cristobol Colon.

  Then all of the group had afternoon tea-and-rum on the salon deck of The Holy Mary.

  ‘The churning World Ocean has only one purpose: to transmute billions of tons of ocean dross into billions of tons of gold or other wealth. This is accomplished by the turning of the Mighty Ocean Mill which is powered by the tidal and deep-current engine of the miles-deep Waters of the Earth. The Ocean does what it is supposed to do, but most of the gold piles up in the depths. There are not nearly enough persons who reach out their hands to take a share of it, and the mere reaching out of the hands is all that is required. The gold is picked up, by those willing and wise enough to take it, by the back-and-forth traffic across the oceans, and this is the only real reason for the traffic. There is not that much difference between the shores of the ocean that one should go from one to another of them for any other reason.’

  MERRY MARINERS’ BIG BOOK OF THE OCEAN.

  ‘There is a lottery in the middle depths of the ocean. Persons who own tickets in this lottery are chosen at random, and they do not even know that they are chosen, nor do they guess what has happened even after the wealth has begun to roll in to them. A few short years ago, the Nine Hundred Governors of the Ocean, meeting in deep Domdaniel Castle whence the Ocean is ruled, decided to use a lottery to distribute somehow the scandalous unclaimed wealth of the Ocean. To make the selections ‘Modified Random’ it was decided that one thousand persons in the world should be selected on the basis of their names alone to receive modicums of the festering accumulated gold of the ocean. A Computer with perhaps a touch of drollery picked out such names as Mediterranean Susie Swing, China Seas Charley Wong, Caesar Oceano, Thousand-Fathom Thiessen, Hank ‘Great’ Banks, South-Seas Crispin O’Toole, Blue-Fish Harry Miller, Coconut-Island Pat Silber, Dead-Calm Doremus Pacifica, and nine hundred and ninety-one other names. These persons all became instant billionaires from the bounty of the Great Ocean.

  ‘But the Ocean wealth still grows for lack of hands to reach out and take it. Other lotteries will be necessary, the first of them perhaps as early as next year.’

  JOSH LANTERN’S SECRETS OF THE SEAS MONTHLY.

  “Ocean Captains, Ocean Captains, I had already guessed the secret of Caesar Oceano who never even knew what hit him,” Drusilla Evenrood said.
“What we want is for somebody to tell us the secret of Leonardo the Great the Golden Panther, the partner of Caesar. Sea Captains who are in the employ of these two, tell us the secret of the Big Cat.”

  “Why do you not ask Prince Leonardo the Great himself to tell you his secret?” one of the Sea Captains asked. “Or ask Gorgonius and Monika Pantera there of your own company. They shipped Prince Leonardo, in a large wooden crate, from their Castle in the German Alps to Caesar Oceano who was quite surprised to find the huge cat in the crate. He hasn’t gotten over his surprise yet.”

  “Oh, Leonardo and myself and my wife are all kindred, and we all share the same family name and clan of Pantera or Panther,” said Gorgonius. “Leonardo, though we had never met him before that visit of his to our Castle in the German Alps, is a fifth cousin of myself and of my wife Monika. Monika and myself are third cousins of each other. We have always had good relations with the cat branch of our family, though not so close as with our human branch. Indeed, there was no hard line separating the two branches.

  “Myself, who have lived in three centuries and soon will be living in my fourth, have nine times in my life waked up in the cat form, which form has always ebbed away in from one hour to ninety-six hours. My wife Monika, who is much younger than I am though you couldn’t tell it by looking at us, has had the same waking-up-as-a-big-cat experience. And Prince Leonardo has told us that three times he has had the experience of waking up as a human. Probably a quarter of the families in the world have the were characteristic, but those who wake up as rats or snakes or pole-cats or hyenas or wolverines are not too keen to advertise the fact. Other families have their own skeletons in the cupboards, and we have ours.

  “We are very strong on intuition-coincidences. When Prince Leonardo came to visit us in the German Alps, after we had reveled and wined and dined for three days, he got to the purpose of his visit. ‘I am commissioned to find a man of whom I know only the name and nothing else,’ he said. ‘And even the name was recently changed legally. I am one of the Nine Hundred Governors of the Ocean, and it is on Ocean business that I must find this man. I feel from my coincidence-intuition sensing that you know him. If that is not so, then I will lose faith in my coincidence heritage. His name is Caesar Oceano.’ ‘Oh, of course we know him,’ Monika said, ‘and what do you want with him?’ ‘I want to go to him and make him rich beyond his fondest wishes,’ Prince Leonardo said. ‘I will be his genie coming out of a bottle, in this case a big golden panther coming out of a crate. I could simply give him the billion dollars or so when I found him, but instead of that I will give him a multi-billion dollar business. I now intuit the name of the business to be the Strange Cargoes Worldwide Shippers. It not only will earn him a new fortune every day of the year but also will delight all the billions of the people of the earth with all the pleasant strange cargoes it will bring to them.’ So he told it to us.”