The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  She kissed him with kindly passion, and sweeping into the room, opened her weekend bag and set out a small but select number of items: a fifth of Maryland Rye Whisky, an album of seductive records, a small but expensive portable smorgasbord, a handful of yellow jackets, and a few small objects which he did not comprehend.

  “I fear I did not fully understand all that the club comprised. I had not expected a live girl.”

  “I am a live one all right. Sign here and we’ll get rid of the business and then get down to the business. In a few days you’ll get an invoice for me and you can mail the remittance. And any gratuity (which I am sure you will be delighted to give) I will take in cash in the morning.”

  “Yes, this is an interesting club. It is very piquant for them to send a live girl to talk to.”

  “To talk to? Are you a talker? I had a talker once before. Mr. 9th of the month was a talker. But when he finished talking, O Boy. I hope you can do as well.”

  “This may be the most delightful club I ever joined. My greatest need is always someone to talk to. Many people, comical as it seems, consider me a shattering bore.”

  “Why, I don't think that’s comical at all.”

  “I thank you for that, dear, or do I? There may be a double meaning in your remark. What is your name, dear?”

  “Ginger.” This was not really her name, nor the name she gave. But you thirty who are presently members of the club are not to be given her name. She was now in the process of changing.

  “The act of disrobing in the presence of a heterogeneous,” said Mansard, “seems to a naïf occidental like myself unusual. Yet in other climes it is not so.”

  “In the presence of what, dear?”

  “One of the other sex.”

  “O.” She was now in something black and silk and sheer.

  “You may not know,” continued Mansard, “that the manufacture of sheer silk began on the island of Cos. The silk fabric was imported from China, then dismantled thread by thread, and rewoven to a transparent thinness. Shall we set a date of about 312 BC as the beginning of this industry?”

  “Yes, let’s.”

  “From there they re-exported it all over the Aegean, and within a century as far as Rome itself.”

  “How clever of them.”

  “And though I don't believe I ever noticed it before, yet it has a certain charm. It conceals and yet it does not. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “I understand perfectly, precious.”

  “To the sight, and more subtly to all the senses, it offers a curious attraction, even temptation.”

  “Gee, I hope so. You want some pop-skull?”

  “A few drops only in a tumbler of warm water. A very little sugar with it. I believe that even moderation should be taken in moderation. I have a theory that the liquor that compels was first compounded, not of early rye or eimer, not of the grape itself, not even of the pomegranate (though that is very old if we correctly translate behke in the old Persian as pomegranate, though Bopp takes it to mean a quince) which I cannot swallow—”

  “Can't swallow a quince, treasure?”

  “Cannot swallow that etymological theory of the quince. But I believe the first compounded liquor is from an even earlier fruit than the behke, in fact from a small berry of the central Asian plateau. You might be interested in the origin of the modern Turkestan name of this berry.”

  “Wanna bet? Look, Prince Charming, why don't we get started?”

  “But I am already started. I'm almost in full disclosure. When I am started talking there is just no stopping me. And with such a winsome listener I may well talk all night.”

  “O my gosh! Mind if a play a Calypso?”

  “Do please. It is of the genre of the musique esclave. Indeed Chesterton said that Jazz itself was a slave music. And like all slaves it is of a clouded descent. It is a child of syncopation and improvisation, and percussion is its playmate.”

  “Yea, playmate.”

  “Quite different from the old plainsong of the once free men. Your motions, Miss Ginger, as you listen to that cacophony are odd; almost like those of a hetaera as described in Greek verse. You are not a hetaera, are you?”

  “Gee, glamour boy, I don't even know what one is.”

  “O, I hadn't realized that you were so sheltered. Then of course you aren't one. My specialized readings in the field have only carried me into the third century of our era. I wonder if they still have hetaerai today, and what do they call them now? But possibly everyone is too busy nowadays to bother with such dalliance.”

  Ginger came over and sat on his knee.

  “Any time, Mansard Darling, you’re tired of talking, well I’m just as ready as can be.”

  “Tired of talking? O I never tire of talking.”

  “Mr. 9th of the month was a talker. But when he finished, O Boy.”

  “I doubt if I will ever finish. It is so seldom that I have a charming girl who does not consider me a ghastly bore.”

  “If you only knew, dear, if you only knew.”

  And her cloudy green eyes soon closed and she was asleep.

  “O well, there is no law against talking to a sleeping girl. I’ll pretend she’s still awake.”

  So he told her all about the way the Ephesians yoked their oxen (the whiffle-tree as we understand the whiffle-tree is recent, less than sixteen hundred years old) and also explained the lineage of their goads. He told her about the statuettes of Tanagra, and much about ceramics generally, and of the four methods of fire-flashing before the modern. And then somehow the monologous conversation turned to the burial customs of the Carians, though we will never know what turned it in that direction.

  This is a vasty subject. “I might even say a deep subject,” Mansard murmured to the sleeping Ginger, and then he chuckled at his own joke, for he seldom made one.

  When one is completely fascinated time goes quickly, and Mansard noticed through his observatory window that the stars had faded (save for Eosphoros) and day was dawning.

  He gently wakened Ginger.

  “Gee, precious, you’re still talking. How do you do it? No, I won't stay for breakfast. I’ll just have about nine fast shots of that Rye. Then I’m going to run. If you only knew how I’m going to run. O thanks. That is indeed a generous gratuity. They teach us to say that. It makes it almost worthwhile.”

  She paused at the door.

  “Listen, peach pie, you know when you belong to this club you don't have to take all the selections; only four a year are required. I’d skip some of them. It isn't good to take chances. April and Mae and Junie are all right. But let August go by. And whatever you do, skip November! I wouldn't want to be responsible for what might happen if you pulled that talking routine on her.”

  Panic Flight

  “Men have left their own worlds for various reasons: plain spirit of adventure, desire for wealth or fame, escape from punishment—allergy—or irritation, curiosity, a devotion to the Planetary Service Corps, or from a sort of inner compulsion. This is the same as sometimes, in the earlier days of our homeland, impelled men to undertake seafaring.” “When they still retained the sea as such, Peter.”

  “Yes, when they still retained the sea as such, John. There was also the compulsion that impelled men across the land; ‘Westering’ it was called on our old continent, ‘Homing’ sometimes (though it led men far from actual home), Wanderlust. Had it not been for that to begin with, much could never have been begun.”

  “You forget, Peter, that it was necessary to impart artifically the Interplanetation Impulse when the crossing of new barriers seemed necessary. Yet the predilection had to be there for those selected for the imparting. We are all of rover families, earthbound though we once were. The Implanting would not have been possible in others.”

  “All except me.”

  “Oh yes, I had forgotten, Peter. All except you.”

  They sat on the pavilion of Earth Club, one of the thousand-odd exclusive country clubs of that simp
le but elegant suburb of Megapolis. It was in the conversational cool of the evening, that magic hundred hours of companionship and charm that precedes the soft coming of the night.

  These were close friends, though their acquaintance had been but of short decades: a sudden flowering of almost perfect understanding that will sometimes come to two men without a lengthy prelude.

  They watched the younger swimmers, and drank Dragons' Blood as they talked. This is a heady drink of Qas, that deutero-fluorocarbon twin to alcohol.

  “No man can have everything, Peter,” said John, “and we have had more than most: Health, Contentment (Do you still use those old Acme Contentment Pills, Peter? Most of the fellows have switched to B7), Long Life (interminable I should say: we are well rid of the prospect of what they used to call the Last Great Adventure), Relief from Worry. We have an endless enjoyment of endless variety. I have to get a Variety Booster in the morning. I had nearly forgotten.”

  “And in the morning I have to leave on another trip.”

  “You no more have to leave on another trip than you have to die. You want to leave on a trip.” He said this last accusingly. “It is time you settled down.”

  “Yes, John, I want to leave on a trip. Every so often I must be off. My last vacation I bought a small property on BQ965Y. I may build there.”

  “Let's get down to aeni clavuli fasteners, Peter,” said John. Peter winced at the phrase; in the Ancestral it had been ‘Get down to brass tacks’.

  “You aren't getting any younger, Peter. You've got to come down to paleo-geos. You have to settle in your parabola. It's time you found your orbit.”

  Peter winced three times at the three phrases.

  “Tell me, Peter,” John continued, “why do you still wander? You are not even from one of the old rover families. You never received an imparting of the Interplanetation Impulse. What do you seek?”

  “I do not seek. I flee.”

  “What?”

  “The cliché.”

  “I don't believe that I remember the meaning of the word. I take, of course, my Cliché-Toleration shots, but I have forgotten the origin and purpose of them. Yet when I miss one, I sometimes feel myself getting nervous.”

  “You should, John, you should.”

  “I don't quite understand. Perhaps you should tell me your trouble now. Though we have not been acquainted long, yet we do have a certain understanding.”

  “Then this is it. That thing, which you have forgotten, and from which I have fled through the cosmos, it was only a minor irritation during the old order. Then, with the prolongation of human life, its reiteration became more serious. Instead of hearing the same phrase a few thousand times, it is now millions and hundreds of millions of times that we hear it. You may not recall the history of that epidemic of suicides among baseball fans, and the murder charges lodged against a certain coterie of sports writers on account of it, and the bizarre development of that trial. The legal precedent established at that time could have resulted in absolute chaos, had it not been for the providential development of the Cliché-Toleration shot.

  “I took these, as did all others. I lived in contentment on the old earth for many years. I was a laboratory assistant. One day I got some unaccustomed results from an experiment. An action, no matter what, seemed to take place at a lower temperature than wanted. I went to my lead man. ‘It isn't the heat,’ he chuckled, ‘It's the hygro-effect.’ Crawling horrors! In the old speech that would have been — well you know what it would have been. I ran raving from the room. I was frightened. I had had my Cliché-Toleration shot only seven days before, and this should not so have affected me. I fled the world that night. I have not been back. I took space service on one of the minor orbitals of Procyon. I thought there I should have peace.”

  They watched the swimmers, or flyers in the pool. The pool was above the surface, a very heavy gaseous medium held in half-spherical shape by a Wilkinson-type pressure effect. The young people walked, swam, and flew at various heights in this: some gracefully, some playfully, some with a joyous lack of grace. These youngsters were of remarkable beauty and attraction, looking like so many advertisements for Suavity Tonic.

  “Well, how was it on the orbital?”

  “Not too bad at first. The good people there, though called alligator-men by the uncouth, are not so in fact; though of a leatherly green complexion, they are not unattractive, have even a sort of dignity in spite of their scales. And they are eager to please, perhaps too eager in their imitations of the speech and phrasing of the Earth Colony.

  “But one night as I left work one of my greenish friends said ‘meet you here, sphere’, and I replied without thinking ‘See you tomorrow, sauro.’ Then I recoiled from my own remark in horror. I took flight from the orbital that very night. Since then I have never had peace, nor lived more than a very few decades at a time in any one place.

  “I did a little farming on the Rigel Trabant, and lost myself in the hard pleasure of honest work. Then one evening at a Grange meeting, three of my fellow members used in quick succession three phrases that left me faint and feverish. For one said ‘Can do’, and one said ‘I'll buy that’ (meaning agreement, not intent to purchase), and one used the nauseating ‘Know-how’ in the sense of technique.

  “Consider the nakedness of the thing! I wonder if you realize that these three clichés are identical with the ancestral forms. They have not even been subjected to the form of Ameliorating Translation! I left my crops ungathered (I imagine that the mego-cuniculi made short work of them), and fled into space in a panic. For several decades I was a space-bum, always on the move. You know the type, working as a menial, drinking too much, often ordered by the cops off of this or that particular planet.”

  “Couldn't they give you stronger Cliché-Toleration shots?”

  “They could, and they did. But there is a limit to everything. I have long been at the maximum. I worry about the future. When the conscience was obsoleted, there was a prediction that it would someday be replaced by a sort of avriophobia. In my case it so happened.

  “I am near the maximum for my Futurama Injections. I am also near my maximum for my Variety Boosters, as well as for my Contentment Pills. There is a cogent reason why I never switched to B7; B7 does not go beyond the seventh power, once thought to be the limit. I hadn't wished to tell you that I need stronger than this. And worst of all, I find that my Perfect Detachment Inoculations are not now as effective as they once were.”

  “You mentioned once that you had found near-contentment in the suburbs of Achenar.”

  “So I had, John, till one of my co-workers dropped the phrase ‘Sklero-cephalic hippikos discernment’ which was in the Ancestral, before the Ameliorating Translation, ‘Hard-headed horse sense.’. The horse, when still retained in its equine form, was not conspicuous for sense.”

  “I understand, Peter. But were you not some time in the environs of Deneb? What went amiss there?”

  “A phrase in the talk of one of the politicos. I should have considered the source and sloughed it off, but my resistance was low that day and it got me. ‘Now is the time to differentiate the Meganthropoi from the Micanthropoi’ he said. Which is to say, before the Ameliorating, ‘to separate the men from the boys’.”

  “Such a little thing, Peter. You should not have let it bother you, really. And in the morning you are definitely going to BQ965Y? I will miss you, Peter.”

  “I will miss you also, John. But from my own observation it has a good climate, and the real estate man assured me that it is remarkably free from pollen and cliché.”

  They watched the young people diving and flying in the half-spherical swimming pool.

  “I was there once myself, Peter,” said John. “It's a nice place for a Sabbatical, but I wouldn't want to live there.”

  Peter rose retching and left the Earth Club in panic.

  He did not go to BQ965Y in the morning. He left that very night on the midnight express.

  Golden Gater />
  When you have shot and killed a man you have in some measure clarified your attitude toward him. You have given a definite answer to a definite problem. For better or worse you have acted decisively. In a way, the next move is up to him.

  And it can be a satisfying experience; the more so here, as many would like to have killed him. And now it is done under the ghastly light, just as that old devil's tune comes to a climax and the voices have swelled to an animal roar.

  And afterwards an overflowing satisfaction compounded of defiance and daring; and a wonderful clarity born of the roaring excitement. Not peace, but achievement. The shadows prowl in the corners like wolves, and one glows like a lantern.

  But Barnaby did not shoot him till Thursday evening. And this was only Monday, and that state of clarity had not yet been attained.

  It was clear to Barnaby that Blackie was really a villain. Not everybody knew this. A melodrama villain is only black behind the lights. Off stage he should have a heart of gold. Whether of wrestling match, or afternoon serial, or evening drama or film, or on the little stage here at the Golden Gate Bar, the villain should be — when his role is finished — kind and courteous, thoughtful and big-hearted, a prince of a fellow. That is no myth. Here it was not entirely true.

  “I have always suspected,” said Barnaby, “that there is some bad in every villain. I would prove this if only I had proof. Why am I drinking cider?”

  “We always give you cider when you have had enough beer.”

  “It is a dirty trick, and you are a dirty Irish trickster. Tell Jeannie to play ‘Fire in the Cockleburs.’ ”

  “There isn't any such song, dear.”

  “I know there isn't, Margaret, but once I asked her to play a song that wasn't, and she played it.”