Land of Unreason

by L. Sprague De Camp

  “I’ll concede that for the moment.”

  “Fine. Now I’m sure you’ll admit that Oberon is not perfect. He quarrels with his wife and keeps winged fairies in the bedroom while she’s away.”

  “I suppose you could hardly call that perfection.”

  “Aha! Then since perfection is worth striving for, Oberon, being imperfect, is not worth striving for. He is corrupt and should be swept away. Q.E.D.”

  “But will the kobolds produce perfection?”

  “Far more of it than Oberon. They outnumber him, a thousand to one, d’you see? Even if the unit quantity of perfection per individual were far lower, the total mass would work out higher.”

  “Listen,” said Barber, in some exasperation, “I’d like to stand here and split hairs with you all night, but I’ve got a job to do. Which way to the Kobold Hills?”

  “Then you admit I’m right?”

  “I’ll admit anything if I can be on my way.”

  “Then,” said the inverted person calmly, “by admitting I’m right you admit implicitly that you are wrong. Therefore you don’t want to go to the Kobold Hills.”

  “All the same I’m going. Which way?”

  The remaining eye closed wearily, and the voice sank to a mumble. “Either one you like—or—perhaps both—yes, I think—you’d better take—both.”

  Barber turned away and trudged resolutely down the left-hand fork, reflecting that he had taken the right at the last choice. Since there seemed no rules of sequence in this experience, he would probably come out nearest correct by doing exactly the opposite of what had been successful before. The way seemed clear enough in this direction, though a little beyond Three-eyes and his fork hedges closed in from both sides again and it wound round in the familiar involutions. Barber followed it around a sweeping curve, up a slope—and found himself approaching a fork whose center was occupied by a flower bed with trees behind. In front of the flowers an individual was standing on his head.

  “I told you it was no use,” he remarked as Barber came up to him. “You don’t really want to go to the Kobold Hills.”

  “Oh, yes, I do. I took the wrong fork last time, no thanks to you, but I’m going to take the other one this time.” Barber stepped resolutely to the right.

  Two of the green eyes came open. “Just a minute. It’s only fair to warn you, my friend, that if you turn to the right, you’ll come back here just the same. The way’s longer and more fatiguing though. Better go to the left again; you’ll get here quicker.”

  Barber ignored him and strode resolutely down the right-hand path. After a little distance, however, he was obliged to admit that Three-eyes had been right about one thing, at least. The path here was certainly more fatiguing. It climbed sharply; his foot struck an outcrop of rock. He looked down; instead of the lawnlike carpet on which he had been walking, the path underfoot was now nearly bare, except for rank tufts of yellowish vegetation, and ahead the rocks were more frequent. The hedges had changed character here, too. They were much taller, at least twenty feet, and had come in close to pinch the path to a mere passage. The turns, too, were no longer rounded curves but angles; and as Barber negotiated one of them, something caught and scraped across the back of his hand, leaving a scratch that showed little drops of blood. The hedges here had thorns.

  He climbed. At a little summit the hedge on one side broke back to reveal a sandy depression. In the middle of it, a few yards from the path, was another native, with a long, horsy face, elaborately rigged out in some sort of tweedy material with a red silk sash sweeping diagonally down across his chest. He had a crooked stick in both hands and was violently banging it into the sand, throwing up little spurts with each stroke.

  “Hello,” said Barber.

  The native glanced up, revealing a monocle on his face, swung the stick over his shoulder and brought it down again—swish-thump! “Thirty-four, sixty-two,” said the native as a grain of sand landed in Barber’s eye.

  “Sorry,” said the native curtly, shifted his feet, and drove the stick down again, so the next explosion of sand went off in another direction. “Thirty-five, sixty-seven,” he remarked to himself.

  Barber extracted the grain of sand, and asked: “Beg pardon, but can you tell me the way to the Kobold Hills?”

  Swish-thump! “Thirty-three, sixty-one.”

  Barber raised his voice: “Hey, can you tell me—”

  The monocled face swung round like a gun turret. “My good mortal, I’m not deaf.”

  “Then why don’t you answer?”

  “Can’t.”

  “Oh, you mean you don’t know.”

  “Certainly I know. But I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t know you. We haven’t been introduced. You might be some blighter.”

  Barber hovered between laughter and annoyance and compromised on a snort. “Look here,” he said, “I’m on state business.” He shook the wand. “Here’s my credentials. Now suppose you—”

  “No use, old thing. Awfully sorry and all that. Nothing personal.”

  “But it’s important!”

  “Oh, undoubtedly; I quite understand. Safety of the realm and all that.” He elevated one hand and pointed the index finger at his forehead. “Ah, I have it! You find old Jib; lives down the road a bit. Literary chap, so it doesn’t matter whom he meets. He can make the introductions.” He showed Barber a tweedy shoulder and swung again. “Forty-one, fifty-eight.”

  The hedge-lined track plunged down sharply, angled, angled again, changed character to the original type of hedge-and-grass within a couple of hundred yards, and Barber found himself back at the fork in the roads, with the inverted sophist regarding him out of one green eye.

  “You’re beginning to develop. Now that you perceive the compelling logic of the situation, why not take the next step?” he said. “Give up this trip and align yourself with the forces of progress. A little temporary violence is necessary to achieve any great improvement.”

  Barber gripped the ivory wand and advanced grimly on Three-eyes. “Look here,” he said, “I’m going to the Kobold Hills and if you don’t tell me how to get there, there’s going to be a little temporary violence right now.”

  The individual raised all three eyebrows—or, rather, lowered them, being upside down. “Are you threatening me, mortal?”

  “You’re damned right, I’m threatening you!”

  “Evidently you will accomplish nothing against the kobolds.”

  “Why not?”

  “The complaint is the manufacture and use of instruments of force, is it not? It’s the one that hidebound old nympholept Oberon usually makes.”

  “Yes,” admitted Barber, drawn back into the argument in spite of himself.

  “To prevent them,” said Three-eyes triumphantly, “it is necessary for you to use an instrument of force on me. You thus adopt the methods of the kobolds. In the higher sense, which looks beyond externals, you are a kobold. Therefore, you cannot thwart them, because you would be thwarting yourself in the process. Q.E.D. OUCH!”

  Barber had jabbed at him with the point of the wand, but before it made contact with the comfortable belly that instrument gave off a long streak of blue fire. It touched Three-eyes and ran all over him, leaving him shining with a phosphorescent light. The mouth flew open and the creature gasped: “All right, I’ll tell you. Take that thing away. I’m an elemental force. You can’t get away from me till you propose a problem for which I can’t find a logical solution. . . . But I don’t think you can do that,” he added as Barber lowered the wand. “Mortals lack a sense of process.” A smile of self-satisfaction spread across the inverted countenance. “Don’t try Achilles and the tortoise on me; I know that one.”

  Barber fingered his chin in puzzlement, considering the question. There was no reaction from his newly developed instinct for lies; presumably this singular creature was perfectly right when he said he would have to be out-argued. Yet how to do that? .
. . His fingers revealed a pronounced stubble of beard, far more than he should have grown in two nights and a day. This was presumably another characteristic of Fairyland—that it made his whiskers grow unreasonably. It certainly needed the attention of either a barber or a Barber with a razor, which reminded him of being called ad nauseam, “The Barber of Seville.”

  Three-eyes, who had shut all of them, opened one. “I thought so,” he remarked. “Better give it up.”

  Barber of Seville! That was it—Bertrand Russell’s paradox of the Spanish barber.

  “By no means,” he said. “Listen: suppose there’s a village in Spain which nobody enters or leaves. In this village there is one barber, male and clean-shaven. If this barber shaves every man in the village who does not shave himself; if he does not shave any man in the village who does shave himself: who shaves the barber?”

  “I should have mentioned that mortals who try to stick me and fail generally turn into parasites of some kind,” said the creature. “Want to withdraw the question?”

  “I’ll take my chances,” said Barber, gripping the wand firmly. It ought to be some protection.

  “All right then.” The eyes closed. “Let’s see—if he does shave himself—by Hecate, then he doesn’t—and if he doesn’t he does—”

  Barber turned, shaken with inward amusement. As he did so, the now-declining moon threw a new shadow along the hedge at the right. There was a narrow gap in it that he had not noticed before, and the brighter green of the grass in that direction showed a path led through it. He turned into it; a long graceful curve swept away before him, but he had not followed it for more than twenty steps before a vivid blue flash from the direction of the crossroad paled the moonglow. Boom! The shock of an explosion almost took him off his feet.

  When his eyes recovered from the glare, he walked quickly back to the gap in the hedge. Three-eyes had vanished.

  Barber turned back, and saw he was going down a gentle declivity toward a structure that resembled a large metal hatbox. It had low windows all round, and a faint purring, as of machinery, came from within. In front of it, a bald and burly brown elf was squatted on the grass. His left hand held open the pages of a book. An intricate system of flying trusses composed of small branches had been rigged to one of the potted trees just beside him to hold a cage containing half a dozen fireflies. Presumably they were to furnish light for his reading, but the solid bottom to the cage prevented this from being altogether a success. The elf did not appear to mind. His lips were moving rapidly as he followed the text, and with his other hand he was busily writing something on several sheets of paper, without noticing that his pen had run dry and was leaving no marks whatever.

  “Pardon me,” said Barber. “Is your name Jib, by any chance?”

  “Yes, yes,” said the elf. “What can I do for you? Quick, now; I’m writing down my thoughts about this book. I believe it will be my most important work.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to interrupt you. Do you know the way to the Kobold Hills?”

  “No, no, not now. I used to, but I haven’t kept up with athletics recently. I have so much to do in directing the currents of intellectual opinion. You really must read my commentary on this book. It’s about the theory of inverse value.”

  “Would you mind stepping along to introduce me to a fellow with a red sash who doesn’t talk to strangers?”

  “Yes, yes, surely. Very glad to. The author’s theory is sound, but he makes several slight mistakes in arriving at the rationale of inverse values, with the result that he reaches the correct result by the wrong route. My commentary will clarify the whole matter.”

  “What whole matter?”

  “Why, the theory of inverse values,” said the elf, tucking the volume under his arm and joining Barber in the path. “We can prove that nothing has any value.”

  “Huh?”

  “Certainly. Obviously two oranges are worth twice as much as one orange.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And one is worth half as much as two. That is, value is proportionate to quantity.”

  There seemed nothing to do but humor this helpful but argumentative sprite. “I see,” said Barber.

  “But as quantity approaches infinity, value becomes inverted. A thousand cubic feet of air has no value. The amount of air is, practically speaking, infinite. But if the amount of oranges in fairyland were infinite? Suppose that, I say, suppose it.”

  “I am supposing it. What then?”

  “Well, an orange is a fruit. You add to the amount of oranges in existence that of lemons, pomegranates, quinces, apples, et cetera, all the fruits that have a supposititious value. The result is a total practically infinite, as in the case of air. Therefore, all these fruits taken together must have an inverse value, or none at all, as in the case of air. And if the total sum has no value, the individual fractions—single oranges, for instance—have no value likewise. . . . The last part is my commentary.”

  “Beg pardon,” said Barber, “but isn’t there a flaw in your reasoning?”

  “Not at all, not at all, my dear fellow. Mechanically perfect. Cured my orbulina. Here’s Cyril now.”

  They had climbed out of the declivity, and Barber saw the same fairy, whacking away and muttering, “Forty-four, eighteen.” Evidently they were on the opposite side of his clearing than Barber had approached before; he could see the tall thorn hedges beyond.

  “What’s your name?” demanded Jib. “Barber? I say, Cyril! I want you to meet my old friend Barber.”

  “Right-ho,” said the tweedy native, with energetic cordiality. “Delighted, charmed. How can I help you?”

  Barber repeated the now-wearisome question.

  “Oh, surely,” said Cyril. “Only too glad. Keep right along this path, but—let’s see, this is Monday, what? Then you have to take the left fork at the first turning. Carry right on till you reach the forest. You’ll have to ask your way after you get into it, I’m afraid. The shapings do things to the forest paths. Look here, do you want me to accompany you?”

  “It might be helpful, but aren’t you busy?”

  “Well, rather. I’m just on the edge of setting a new record. But for a friend of old Jib’s . . .”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t think of bothering you, then. What do you mean by the forest?”

  “There are forests and forests. This is the forest. Cheerio, then.”

  He shook hands, and turned to thumping at the sand again. Jib squatted down with his book on his knees, and began to go through the motions of writing, oblivious of the fact that he had left both the inkless pen and his paper behind.

  CHAPTER VI

  Meandering ahead the path took a slight downward slope and the hedges opened out to reveal a new and monotonous succession of flower beds. To Barber, trying to gain some sense of the geography of the place for a homeward journey he supposed he would have to make in time, it seemed that he was going in exactly the same direction as that which had carried him past Cyril and back to the fork where Three-eyes held forth. He cursed a faulty sense of orientation and craned his neck to catch a glimpse of the thorn hedges, but a grove of impossible potted elms cut them off, if, indeed, they were there at all.

  Carry on.

  There were long shadows across the path that hinted of a setting moon. Barber was reminded that he had been walking all night without food. He was not hungry yet, for that matter, but if he were going to eat at all it had better be now.

  When Oberon’s royal chamberlain had handed him one of the ever-filled foodbags carried by Fairyland travelers, it was with the warning that he had better use it before sunrise. A single shaft of sunlight striking the thing was liable to cause a kind of minor shaping.

  “I mind me well,” the chamberlain added in a low voice, “of the bag our gracious lady and Resplendency took on her journey to the Marshes of Meraa. ’Tis no disrespect to mark that she’s of careless habit; let the dawn beams on’t. Ho! The thing physicked her preciously with a fine reducing diet—
carrots uncooked, salads, and wee brown biscuits.” Barber had no difficulty in imagining Titania faced with a situation like that; the explosion would—make the bombing of Bradford look weak. The bombing which seemed as remote now as the discovery of the North Pole.

  He brushed the crumbs from his lap and stood up. The shadows had lengthened and run together as he ate, the moon was a cooky with a piece bitten out, at the very edge of the horizon. There was still no sign of the sun that had driven away the previous night’s moon; perhaps even the ephemerides of fairyland did not run on schedule. In the weakened light the path was harder to trace. He strained forward to follow it . . . and was swallowed in a dark as intense as though he had suddenly gone blind.

  Something slightly chilly brushed past his face from overhead, and he felt a rush of the most horrible fear. To stand there in dark worse than a London blackout and be struck at from above! Something else tapped him gently on one shoulder, like a falling leaf or an insect, and his mind began to fill with pictures of giant winged spiders. He brushed at the shoulder—nothing, and the something touched his leg. All around were sounds and soft whisperings. Fred Barber jumped and would have run—but where, in that maze of hedges and unknown traps? He would have given anything, done anything, to be back at the Adelphi with the air-raid alarm screaming and the Heinkels coming over. This was worse than being bombed, worse than lying in the hospital with a head wound, wondering if you were going nuts, worse than—

  Without any preliminary graying of the sky a big red sun jumped up and flooded the whole queer, smiling landscape with light. Another touch came on Barber’s hand; he looked down and saw it damp with a big drop of simple rain, and between him and the sun were the slanting silvery lines of a shower.

  Barber laughed, too happy with relief to feel shame, and looked up. There was not a cloud in the sky. The rain was coming out of nowhere, faster now, and making a gorgeous triple rainbow against the coming day. He would be soaked—but what of it? The path curved clear before him and he stepped out along it, twirling the wand. When it reached the top of its arc, the rain, though coming faster than ever, didn’t seem to strike him. He experimented a little, and discovered that when he held the wand point up it deflected the rain from a circle quite big enough to keep him dry. A practical piece of magic; but he was getting tired, and the rather heavy meal he had taken from the chamberlain’s bag made him sleepy.