Archipelago

by R. A. Lafferty

  Hans and Henry and Finnegan (the last survivors) shook hands solemnly in a queer three-way handshake. Henry said something about Three Against the World. Hans quoted ‘where three men stand together are kingdoms less by three’. It was a serious rite as though a mystic trio had been formed in the heart of the Dirty Five.

  Henry was the last one awake and he finished the bottle. Then he talked, and not to himself:

  “This also I will give up if You will have it. If You are not inexorable. I will give up many things if You will have them in exchange. But, after all, it is up to You.”

  He was talking about his vocation. He lay back and went to sleep.

  The six of them lay in the high grass in the little pasture on the edge of the jungle, and the two white horses were sleeping standing up nearby.

  15.

  Stein had recently read the New Testament. He read it through without stopping as he did all books. He had meant to read it before, as he had long ago set himself the task of reading everything. “I am surprised that this has been ignored,” he told himself. “It is an important book. It should be right up there with Marx and Freud. All great books, of course, were written by Jews. But I bet this got rough treatment in its day. Christ was born into a very literate and urbane world, and this book is rough-hewn. It is actually more primitive than the Old Testament. A lot of it has an unworldly air about it.”

  It interested him, but he had reservations about it. He still has most of them today.

  16.

  A week later, on New Year's Eve, just after supper, they loaded on trucks and went into Manila. And just after midnight, their group started to load on ship to come home.

  Chapter Three

  Think of a Name

  1.

  “Salvatore.”

  “Henry F.”

  “Schultz.”

  “John G.”

  “Solli.”

  “John A.”

  (There was a little confusion along about here.)

  “Stranahan.”

  “Vincent J.”

  “Szymansky.”

  “Kasmir W.”

  We are not sure that the response went just like this, but this is the way they should have gone. This is the way they were down on the checklist. Nobody was sure what had happened. Often another boy got into the alphabetical order of the Dirty Five. Soldiers with intervening S. names were sometimes with the battery. In the present case, though, there seemed to be one too few rather than one too many.

  The checking officer would call the surname. The soldier would reply with his first name and middle initial, then shoulder his bag and go down the catwalk to the barge, being checked off as he passed. But someone was not with them on the barge. One of the soldiers had been flagged out of line.

  The M.P. Sergeant groused at him for a while, then one of the lieutenants standing by, then a corpsman, then the battalion dentist who was serving as medical officer. Then there were so many of them that they had to pile into two weapons carriers and go back to headquarters.

  “This is the silliest thing I ever heard of. Isn't it the silliest thing you ever heard of, Colonel?”

  “Damned silly. If he was going to blow his top, why didn't someone know it. Why did he have to wait till the last minute just when everything was going so smooth?”

  “You got jungle fever, boy? You nuts? What's your name? There some reason you don't want to get on that boat? What's your name?”

  “It's because I forgot my name that all the fog's being raised.”

  “Boy, nobody forgets his name.”

  “I know. It's odd. I never did it before. I'll think of it in a little bit if you'll stop dogging me. I must have always known it until now.”

  “Are you tired, Sergeant?”

  “Not real tired. Don't feel real bad. Not quite real. Not quite bad.”

  “Would you know your name if you heard it?”

  “I'm not sure that I would. I must have heard it and not known it down at the dock when the ruckus started.”

  “Here are some names. Is yours one of these?” He recited half a dozen names.

  “Yes sir,” the Sergeant said.

  “Yes sir what?”

  “It is one of those names, sir.”

  “Well, dammit, which one? Are you playing a game?”

  “No sir, I'm sure not playing a game. I'm more interested in this than you are. I am one of those names, but I don't know which one. They all seem to be part of me so much that I could as easy be one as another. If you let me get on the boat with the others I'll be all right. I can tell who I am by the one that's not there, and nobody will know that I slipped for a minute. Just let me on the boat with the rest and I'll be all right.”

  “You're going to stay right here till we find out what's the matter with you. You were close to a group, were you? What was the group?”

  “It was called the Dirty Five. We were always together. We were unique in the world.”

  “Yes. If you are a sample, that's so. Do you speak Italian?”

  “Alquanto.”

  “What?”

  “Somewhat. I can get along in it.”

  “Polish?”

  “Niedobrze, not real well. I can't tell by that. We were all of us educated and we liked to kick the dialects around. On one of the islands we had the Jojos talking Polish. They thought that it was English, and the Gorgios thought that the Polish the Jojos talked was some kind of Malayan dialect.”

  “The what thought?”

  “The Gorgios, non-Romanies, outsiders, that disorganized part of the world not included in the Dirty Five.”

  “What would you teach the Jojos to say?”

  “Oh, ‘Jak sie masz, Joe.’ Things like that.”

  “Let me have a try at this, Colonel. You know, boy, what's likely to happen if we don't solve this damned quick?”  — it was the Captain and he was not a likeable man.

  “I probably won't get to go home on the ship.”

  “You think there is some hidden reason why you don't want to go home?”

  “No. I think, doctor, captain, that psychiatry is for somebody else and not for me, and that my forgetting my name doesn't mean that I don't want to go home on the ship. You'll never know how I want to go home! I don't know why I forgot what my home is. I don't know why I forgot what my name is: I think I can learn it again. I'm very good at learning names and it isn't as though it were completely strange to me. Let me get on the boat and I'm sure that I'll know it tomorrow.”

  But they did not let him get on the boat. They put him in the hospital, and they tried him again the next day. He knew his name then, but the Captain said that someone had briefed him on it.

  “That's a crock,” the Sergeant said. “I remembered it last night. I forgot it again, and then I remembered it just as you asked me. If you give me a chance I'll get where I can remember it every time.”

  The Captain stuck to his point that the Sergeant had been briefed. Then the Captain mixed him up and he forgot his name again. It was much worse than the day before. The Sergeant became worried and agitated. He looked as though he would crack if pushed hard. The Captain was an evil man and he smelled blood. He pushed him very hard. The hair rose on the back of the Captain's neck and his nostrils dilated as he went in for the kill. In five minutes he broke the Sergeant completely.

  The Sergeant sobbed for a few seconds, and by that time the hatred and excitement in the Captain's face had been covered by a mask again. The Sergeant lifted his head and grinned crookedly at the Captain.

  “I may not remember my own name, sir,” the Sergeant said, “but I'm never going to forget yours. I'll remember it no matter what. Someday, Captain, after you die and go to Hell, you're going to hear somebody call your name. And it'll be me. And it will be as if you had only seemed to be in Hell before. I'll know your name, and the address will be easy, and I'll come down there and get you.”

  “I'll have you for that! You can be court-martialed!” the Captain shrille
d.

  “Court-martialed, Captain?” asked the Colonel. “For the kid saying he'll see you in Hell?”

  “But he means it. Yes, court-martialed. He is threatening me, an officer. No, not threatening. He is showing disrespect for an officer.”

  “That's enough, Captain. The boy is sick, and I'm not so sure about you.”

  They took the Sergeant back to Station Hospital; he felt pretty good after he slept.

  But the Captain worried unaccountably over the threat that the boy had made, and this worry never left him. And years later, after he had died and gone to Hell, not the least of his discomforts was the dreadful waiting for his name to be called by the boy who said that he would not forget.

  2.

  There should have been a way to test it here, for it seemed a perfect test plot. Were the soldiers in Ward Fourteen different from the soldiers and people elsewhere? And if different, did the difference consist of a defect or unbalance of any sort? Were the inmates of Ward Fourteen kin to gooney birds, and what was the degree of kindred? Was there really a silent wall between them and others? The Sergeant thought about it but he couldn't decide. He himself was sane, and yet a misunderstanding had risen concerning him. Howell was moderately sane, but he suffered from logorrhea and he ignored whole aspects of the world. Gregory was sane except upon one point. If that one point about himself were allowed (and he should know more about it than anybody), then he was perfectly sane. George Buckram was sane except upon two or three points; Martin Benning was sound except on three or four; Green was off on less than half a dozen and these half-dozen held together logically. And none of them was really wide off.

  And now consider the rest of the world. Consider it and be silent. Should Ward Fourteen be built to a length of a hundred miles on each side would it still be large enough to accommodate all the goonies in the world? The Sergeant figured on a piece of paper. No, it would not be large enough. That would figure out to more than a quarter of a million gooneys per square mile, too many for comfort.

  The Sergeant decided that the soldiers in Ward Fourteen were not much different from soldiers and people elsewhere. They were held there because of misunderstanding, not because they were really different.

  In Ward Fourteen, conversation was King. There was little else. All small things had been taken away, like the chessboard and the pieces. “ — for who knows what form hyperphagia may take among these demented?” the evil Captain had asked.

  “And all because one man swallowed one piece; no, not even a piece, a pawn,” said Howell. The Captain was not well liked.

  Howell talked a lot, as did Private Gregory. George Buckram liked to talk, and Martin Benning, and Green, and the Sergeant also.

  “This is a contingent, a conditional universe,” said Green. “Oh, it's real enough for the moment, and the moment is always given freely. It is like a closed-circuit electrical system. It is all held in being by a momentary-contact switch. Should the pressure on that switch be relaxed, then the closed circuit would be broken and would disappear; all the worlds would disappear. We have no guaranteed existence. God holds us in being from moment to moment. If God nods, we vanish. Be careful that we do not bore Him overmuch or He will nod.”

  “Can you prove this?” Martin Benning demanded.

  “Of course I can prove it,” said Green who was God. “I will relax but slightly, for the veriest instant, and all the stars will stagger; and the lights will dim here in Ward Fourteen.”

  “What? Are you God?” George Buckram asked with some unbelief.

  “You did not know it? That accounts for the casual way you treat me.”

  “Go ahead, Green. Relax a little. Let us see you dim the Cosmos. Go ahead.”

  “Man, do not rush God! In a moment I do it, in a moment. Ah!”

  The lights dimmed in Ward Fourteen, and perhaps all the stars staggered. And then the lights brightened once more.

  “You saw the ward-boy go out to cut that compressor on,” Private Gregory charged. “You know it dims the lights for a minute every time it comes on.”

  “That is true,” said Green who was God. “Should I create new furniture for every act of mine, or should I not employ the furniture I have already made? For I made both the compressor and the ward-boy and I will employ them as I will.”

  3.

  “My case seems odd to them,” said Private Gregory. “They won't admit it, but they don't know what to make of me at all. I can't start at the beginning. I don't remember the beginning of my own story. The mind can recall only so much even of its own past. But the act is that I never seem to age. And after a few years in one identity it becomes embarrassing to me. I have no idea how long this has been going on.” “Like the Wandering Jew?” asked Howell. “My six hundred and twenty-third subject of conversation, as you may have already guessed, is ‘The Wandering Jew, are there Others?’ I take it that is the case with you.” (Howell maintained that there were exactly one thousand subjects of conversation in the world, and he alone had them catalogued completely and correctly.)

  “That is the case with me,” said Private Gregory. “I am glad that you understand. Well, I made one change in 1907. They had kept pretty careless records before then; and whenever anyone became suspicious about my age I explained it by a mix-up. Besides, my papers were lost twice, and each time I managed to lop a few decades off my proper age. During the Indian War my papers were lost, and during the Civil War.”

  “That puts you quite a ways back,” the Sergeant said.

  “I had been a Sergeant in the U.S. Army for a little over one hundred years continuously when I made the change in 1907,” Gregory told them. “In some ways, they were the happiest years of my life. I had been an army irregular several times before this tenure. The Army is a handy cloak for an affliction such as mine. If you can get transferred around every few years your non-aging is not noticed. And before that, I had gone to Sea for some centuries. Before that again I had my troubles, for it was hard to find a trade that allowed change and movement. Everyone had his place in the world. I was often under suspicion.”

  “Let's come back to 1907. Maybe we can understand it better from this end.”

  “That was the last time before the present episode that I changed my identity. I then sloughed off my hundred-odd years sergeancy and went AWOL. I made myself to be a boy of twenty years and some months. I picked several men of political color to curry and in a year's time I had an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy. I was a good student. I have always been a good soldier. And I had studied quite a few books in the thirty thousand evenings of barracks, garrison, and field of my sergeancy, not to mention what I had picked up in previous centuries.

  “Besides, I had a background of personal experience that few could equal. It was too easy. I had no wish to be prominent. I was commissioned in due time. My specialty became Army History; certainly nothing could be more obscure. I was an archivist. I passed many years so. I taught classes; I was the foremost expert in this most obscure fiend; I gave them verity. My monogram on the caltrop may be the least-known classic in the world. But I was the only man who had ever flung an old-style caltrop. By old-style I mean pre-Civil-War. Yes, yes, I was eminently obscure. It was almost perfect, almost.”

  “Then, in your career of sorts you began to run into trouble?” Green prodded.

  “Yes, even in such obscurity as I had it began to close in on me. I would gray my hair, but it was always black to the roots. I cultivated a frown and put on weight but I could not age myself. I finally drew the attention of a cursed army doctor who was interested in aging.

  “He was going to make some exhaustive studies of me. It would have been bad. I wouldn't have liked it. I know how these things work. If he had published that my true age was only twenty, after my being an officer in the army for nearly forty years, they would not look askance at him; they would look askance at me. They would not think that he was crazy. They would think that I was crazy.”

  “So at an ag
e of fifty-seven you made your escape again?”

  “Yes. And almost got away with it. As an Aussie private of twenty I could have gone along for several decades, not necessarily remaining an Aussie. I can with equal facility be many things. But to be trapped in an army booby-hatch is too confining. They may keep me under observation for years.

  “I have tried telling them the truth; I have tried various sets of lies; but they will not let me go. When they discovered (how, I do not know) that the fingerprints of a young Aussie Private were the same as those of an elderly American Colonel who had disappeared, there was bound to be some questioning.

  “There is also the fact that they found among my old papers an unpublished monogram ‘Cycle of Subversion: the Hidden Hand in the Various Military Intelligences’ and this has roused the fury of those it uncovers. They would hunt me down. And they have found me but they not believe that it is me. It puzzles me that I should live life after life. I do not believe that it happens to many others.”

  “It puzzles me also,” said the Sergeant, “that you should string them out, live them one after another. Myself, I always live several lives simultaneously. I don't know which way is best, or worst.”

  4.

  The Parakeet was also a phoney, for it called itself malaki ibon, big bird, but it was quite small. To call it maliit ibon, little bird, always brought from it an angry ‘hindi,hindi’ — ’no, no, no’. It was a conceited bird too. It called itself maganda and it was not at all beautiful. It told stories, but Ignatius Ti had to translate them. Ignatius was a Christian Chinese of a family that had been in the islands for centuries. He was employed as a ward-boy.