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

by R. A. Lafferty

  4. Margaret Cot. Artist and photographer, botanist and bacteriologist. Full of chatter and a sort of charm. Better looking than anyone deserves to be. Salty, really the newest thing in salinity. A little bit wanton. And a little kiddish.

  5. Brian Carroll. Naturalist. And natural. He had been hunting for something all his life, but did not know what it was, and was not sure that he would know it when he found it, but he hoped that it would be different. “O Lord,” he would pray, “however it ends don't let it have a pat ending. That I couldn't stand.” He believed that anything repeated was trite. And it was for that reason that there were pleasant surprises for him on Bellota.

  6. Georgina Chantal. Biologist and iceberg. But the capsule description may be unjust. For she was more than biologist and much more than iceberg. Frosty only when frostiness was called for, she was always proper and often friendly. But she was no Margie Cot, and in contrast perhaps she was a little icy.

  Actually there wasn't a bad apple in that basket.

  The most obvious peculiarity of Bellota was its gravity, which was half that of Earth's, though the circumference of the globe was no more than a hundred miles. It was on account of this peculiarity that Daniel Phelan was on the little planet in the first place. For it was held by those who decide such things that there was a bare chance that he could find the answer: no one else had found it. His own idea was that his presence there was fruitless: he already had the answer to the gravity behavior of Bellota; it was contained in Phelan's Corollary. Bellota was the only body that behaved as it should. It was the rest of the universe that was atypical.

  And in other ways Bellota was a joker. Fruits proved noisome and thorns succulent. Rinds and shells were edible and heartmeat was not. Proto-butterflies stung like hornets and lizards secreted honeylike manna. And the water—the water was soda water—sheer carbonated soda water.

  If you wanted it any other way, you caught rain water, and this was so highly nitric that drinking it was something of an experience also; for the thunderstorms there were excessive.

  No, they were not excessive, claimed Phelan, they were normal. It was on all other atmospheric planets known that there was a strange deficiency of thundershowers.

  Here, at least, there was no deficiency: it rained about five minutes out of every fifteen, and the multi-colored lightning was omnipresent. In all their stay there, the party was never without the sound of thunder, near or distant, nor of the probe of lightning. For this reason there could be no true darkness there, not even between the flashes; there were flashes between the flashes. Here was meteorology concentrated, without dilution, without filler.

  “But it is always different,” said Georgina. “Every lightning flash is entirely different, just as every snowflake is different. Will it snow here?”

  “Certainly,” said Phelan. “Though it did not last night, it should tonight. Snow before midnight and fog by morning. After all, midnight and morning are only an hour apart.”

  At that time they had been on the planet only a few hours.

  “And here the cycle is normal,” said Phelan. “It is normal nowhere else. It is natural for humans and all other creatures to sleep for two hours and to wake for two hours. That is the fundamental cycle. Much of our misbehavior and perversity comes from trying to adapt to the weird day-night cycle of whatever alien world we happened to be born on. Here within a week we will return to that normal that we never knew before.”

  “Within what kind of week?” asked Hardy.

  “Within Bellota's twenty-eight-hour week. And do you realize that the projected working week here would be just six and two-thirds hours? I always thought that that was long enough to work anyhow.”

  There were no seas there, only the soda-water lakes that covered a third of the area. And there were flora and fauna that burlesqued more than they really resembled Earth's and kindred worlds'.

  The trees were neither deciduous nor evergreen (though Brian Carroll said that they were ever-green), nor palm. They were trees as a cartoonist might draw them. And there were animals that made the whole idea of animals ridiculous.

  And there was Snuffles.

  Snuffles was a bear—possibly—and of sorts. The bear is himself a caricature of animalkind, somehow a giant dog, somehow a shaggy man, an ogre, and also a toy. And Snuffles was a caricature of a bear.

  Billy Cross tried to explain to them about bears. Billy was an old bear man.

  “It is the only animal that children dream of without having seen or been told about. Moncrief by his recall methods has studied thousands of early childhood dreams. Children universally dream of bears, Tahitian children subject to no ursine influence in themselves or their ancestry, Australian children, town tikes before they ever saw a bear toy. They dream of bears. The bear is the boogerman. Bears live in the attics of old childhood houses. They did in my own and in thousands of others. Their existence there is not of adult suggestion, but of innate childhood knowledge.

  “But there is a duality about this boogerman. He is friendly and fascinating as well as frightening. The boogerman is not a story that adults tell to children. It is the only story that children tell to adults who have forgotten it.”

  “But how could you know?” asked Margie Cot. “I had no idea that little boys dreamed of bears. I thought that only girls did. And with us I had come to believe that the bear dreams symbolized grown man in his fundamental aspect, both fascinating and frightening.”

  “To you, Marie, everything symbolizes grown man in his fundamental aspect. Now the boogerman is also philologically interesting, being actually one of the less than two hundred Indo-European root words. Though Bog has come to mean God in the Slavic, yet the booger was earlier an animal-man demiurge, and the Sanskrit bhaga is not without this meaning. In the sense of a breaker, a smasher, it is in the Old Irish as bong, and the early Lithuanian as banga. In the sense of a devourer, it survives in the Greek root phag, and as one who puts to flight it is in the Latin fug. We have, of course, the Welsh bwg, a ghost, and bogey has been used in the meaning of the devil. And we have bugbear, which rounds out the circuit.”

  “So you make God and the Bear and the Devil one,” said Georgina.

  “In many mythologies it was the bear who made the world,” said John Hardy. “After that he did nothing distinguished. It was felt by his devotees that he had done enough.”

  Snuffles was not a bear exactly. He was a pseudoursine. He was big and clumsy, and bounced around on four legs, and then up on two. He was friendly, chillingly so, for he was huge. And he snuffled like some old track-eating train.

  He was a clown, but he seemed to observe the line that the visitors drew. He did not come really close, though often too close for comfort. He obeyed, or when he did not wish to obey, he pretended to misunderstand. He was the largest animal on Bellota, and there seemed to be only one of him.

  “Why do we call him he?” asked Brian Carroll, the naturalist. “Only surgery could tell for sure, but it appears that Snuffles has no sex at all. There is no way I know of that he could reproduce. No wonder there is only one of him; the wonder is that there should be any at all. Where did he come from?”

  “That could be asked of any creature,” said Daniel Phelan. “The question is, where is he going? But he shows a certain sophistication in this. For it is only with primitives that toy animals (and he is a toy, you know) are sexed. A modern teddy bear or a toy panda isn't. Nor were the toys in the European tradition except on the fringes (Tartary before the ninth century, Ireland before the fifth) since pre-classical times. But before those times in its regions, and beyond its pale even today, the toy animals are totems and are sexed, exaggeratedly so.”

  “Yes, there is no doubt about it,” said Brian. “He does not have even the secondary characteristics of mammal, marsupial, or what you will. But he has characteristics enough of his own.”

  Snuffles was, among other things, a mimic. Should a book be left around, and they were a bookish bunch, he would take it in
his forepaws and hold it as to read, and turn the pages, turning them singly and carefully. He could use his padded paws as hands. His claws were retractable and his digits projective. They were paws, or they were claws, or they were hands and he had four of them.

  He unscrewed caps and he could use a can opener. He kept the visitors in firewood, once he understood that they had need of it, and that they wanted dry sticks of a certain size. He'd bite the sticks to length, stack them in small ricks, bind them with lianas, and carry them to the fire. He'd fetch water and put it on to boil. And he gathered bellotas by the bushel.

  Bellota means an acorn, and they had named the planet that from the profusion of edible fruit-nuts that looked very like the acorn. These were a delicacy that became a staple.

  And Snuffles could talk. All his noises were not alike. There was the “snokle, snoke, snokle” that meant he was in a good humor, as he normally was. There was a “snook, snook” and a “snoff.” There were others similar in vocables but widely varied in tone and timbre. Perhaps Billy Cross understood him best, but they all understood him a little.

  In only one thing did Snuffles become stubborn. He marked off a space, a wild old pile of rocks, and forbade them to enter its circle. He dug a trench around it and he roared and bared foot-long fangs if any dared cross the trench. Billy Cross said that Snuffles did this to save face; for Commander John Hardy had previously forbidden Snuffles a certain area, their supply dump and weapons center. Hardy had drawn a line around it with a mattock and made it clear that Snuffles should never cross that line. The creature understood at once, and he went and did likewise.

  The party had been set down there for two Earth weeks—twelve Bellota weeks—to study the life of the planetoid, to classify, to take samples, tests, notes, and pictures; to hypothesize and to build a basis for theory. But they ventured hardly at all from their original camp site. There was such an amazing variety of detail at hand that it would take many weeks even to begin to classify it.

  A feature there was the rapidity of enzyme and bacterial action. A good wine could be produced in four hours, and a fungus-cheese made from grub exudations in even less time. And in the new atmosphere thoughts also seemed to ferment rapidly.

  “Every person makes one major mistake in his life,” said John Hardy to them once. “Were it not for that, he would not have to die.”

  “What?” quizzed Phelan. “Few die violently nowadays. How could all die for a mistake?”

  “Yet it's a fact. Deaths are not really explained, for all the explanations of medicine. A death will be the result of one single much earlier rashness, of one weakening of the mind or body, or a crippling of the regenerative force. A person will be alive and vital. And one day he will make one mistake. In that moment the person begins to die. But if a man did not make that one mistake, he would not die.”

  “Poppycock,” said Daniel Phelan.

  “I wonder if you know the true meaning of ‘poppycock’?” asked Billy Cross. “It is poppy-talk, opium-talk, rambling of one under the narcotic. Now the element ‘cock’ in the word is not (as you would imagine) from either the Norwegian kok, a dung heap, nor from coquarde in the sense that Rabelais uses it, but rather from—”

  “Poppycock,” said Phelan again. He disliked Billy Cross's practice of analyzing all words, and he denied his assertion that a man who uses a word without feeling its full value is a dealer in false coinage, in fact a liar.

  “But if a person dies only by making a mistake, how does an animal die?” asked Margie Cot. “Does he also make a mistake?”

  “He makes the mistake of being an animal and not a man,” said Phelan.

  “There may be no clear line between animal and man,” Margie argued.

  “There is,” said Phelan, and three others agreed.

  “There is not,” said Billy Cross.

  “An animal is paradoxically a creature without an anima — without a soul,” said Phelan. “This comes oddly from me because I also deny it to man in its usual connotation. But there is a total difference, a line that the animal cannot cross, and did not cross. When we arrive at wherever we are going, he will still be skulking in his den.”

  “Here, at least, it is the opposite of that,” said Brian Carroll. “Snuffles sleeps in the open, and it is we who den.”

  It was true. Around their campsite, their supply dump and weapons center, there were three blind pockets; grottoes back in the rocks. Billy Cross, Daniel Phelan and Margie Cot each had one of these, filled with the tools of their specialties. Here they worked and slept. And these were dens.

  John Hardy himself slept in the weapons center, inside the circle where Snuffles was forbidden. And the hours that he did not sleep he kept guard. Hardy made a fetish of security. When he slept, or briefly wandered about the region, someone else must always take a turn at guard, weapon at hand. There was no relaxation of this, no exception, no chance of a mistake.

  And Snuffles, the animal, who slept right out in the open (“Is it possible,” Brian asked himself, “that I am the only one who notices it? Is it possible that it happens?”) did not get wet. It rained everywhere on that world. But it did not rain on Snuffles.

  “The joy of this place is that it is not pat,” said Brian Carroll. As previously noted, he hated anything that was pat. “We could be here for years and never see the end of the variety. With the insects there may be as many species as there are individuals. Each one could almost be regarded as a sport, as if there were no standard to go by. The gravity here is cock-eyed. Please don't analyze the word, Billy; I doubt myself that it means rooster-eyed. The chemistry gives one a hopeful feeling. It uses the same building blocks as the chemistry elsewhere, but it is as if each of those blocks were just a little off. The lightning is excessive, as though whoever was using it had not yet tired of the novelty; I never tired of the novelty of lightning myself. And when this place ends, it will not have a pat ending. Other globes may turn to lava or cold cinders. Bellota will pop like a soap bubble, or sag like spaghetti, or turn into an exploding world of grasshoppers. But it won't conform. I love Bellota. And I do hate a pat ending.”

  “There is an old precept of ‘Know thyself,’ ” said Georgina Chantal. They talked a lot now, as they were often wakeful, not yet being accustomed to the short days and nights of Bellota. “Its variant is ‘Look within.’ Look within, but our eyes point outward! The only way we can see our faces is in a mirror or in a picture. Each of us has his mirror, and mine is more often the microscope. But we cannot see ourselves as we are until we see ourselves distorted. That is why Snuffles is also a mirror for all of us here. We can't understand why we're serious until we know why he's funny.”

  “We may be the distortion and he the true image,” said Billy Cross. “He lacks jealousy and pomposity and greed and treachery — all the distortions.”

  “We do not know that he lacks them,” said Daniel Phelan.

  So they talked away the short days and nights on Bellota, and accumulated data.

  II

  When it happened, it happened right in narrow daylight. The phrase was Brian's, who hated a pat phrase. It happened right in the middle of the narrow two-hour Bellota day. All were awake and aware. John Hardy stood in the middle of the weapons center on alert guard with that rifle cradled in the crook of his arm. Billy and Daniel and Margaret were at work in their respective dens; and Brian and Georgina, who did not den, were gathering insects at the open lower end of the valley, but they had the center in their sight.

  There was an unusual flash of lightning, bright by even Bellota standards, and air snapped and crackled. And there was an unusual sound from Snuffles, far removed from his usual “snokle, snokle” talk.

  And in a moment benignity seemed to drain away from that planet.

  Snuffles had before made as if to cross the line, and then scooted off, chortling in glee, which is perhaps why the careful John Hardy was not at first alarmed.

  Then Snuffles charged with a terrifying sound.

>   But Hardy was not tricked entirely; it would be impossible for man or beast to trick him entirely. He had a split second, and was not one to waste time making a decision; and he was incapable of panic. What he did, he did of choice. And if it was a mistake, why, even the shrewdest decision goes into the books as a mistake if it fails.

  He was fond of Snuffles and he gambled that it would not be necessary to kill him. It was a heavy rifle; a shoulder shot should have turned the animal. If it did not, there would not be time for another shot.

  It did not, though, and there was not. Commander John Hardy made one mistake and for that he died. He died uncommonly, and he did not die from the inside out, as meaner men do.

  It was ghastly, but it was over in an instant. Hardy's head was smashed and his face nearly swiped off. His back was broken and his body almost sheared in two. The great creature, with the foot-long canines and claws like twenty long knives, mangled him and crushed him and shook him like a red mop, and then let go.

  It may be that Brian Carroll realized most quickly the implications. He called to Georgina to come out of the valley onto the plain below, and to come out fast. He realized that the other three still alive would not even be able to come out.

  Incongruously, a thing that went through Brian Carroll's mind was a tirade of an ancient Confederate general against ancient General Grant, to the effect that the blundering fool had moved into a position that commanded both river and hill and blocked three valley mouths, and it could only be hoped that Grant would move along before he realized his advantage.

  But Brian was under no such delusion. Snuffles realized his advantage; he occupied the supply dump and weapons center, and commanded the entrances to the three blind pockets that were the dens of Billy Cross and Daniel Phelan and Margie Cot.