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

by R. A. Lafferty

  Fruit.

  Mother said, “Oh Will, don't

  duit.”

  “I'd think it would give too high a flavor to the gum,” said Glasser.

  It's a lot of fun to open cocktail cookies and read out utterances of a Ktistec machine. The Institute staff generated a bunch of what we can only call merriment. But they were busy people, and the party had to come to an end. Epiktistes issued a verse as they prepared to leave.

  When the world's last Tosher's

  is drunken,

  and the world's last item has

  flewn,

  and the Institute people are

  stunken,

  and Epikt is high as the—

  And there he stuck! Eight million billion billion memory contacts he had in him, and he couldn't come up with a rhyme for flewn.

  “How many items have you really gathered, Epikt?” Glasser asked as they began to break up.

  “Millions of them, bub, millions of them.”

  “No. Actually, he has about three-quarters of a million that he believes he can tie together,” Smirnov explained. “I feel that he'll bring them into a pattern, but I'm afraid it will be a facetious one.”

  “Epikt, you cute cubicle, will you be able to give us any idea of what to look for by tomorrow?” Valery asked.

  “Boys and girls, I'll have it all wrapped up and on display for you tomorrow,” Epiktistes issued. “I'll even be able to tell you what the thing smelled like.”

  Expectation ran high among the people of the Institute. Epiktistes wanted to have the reporters in, but Smirnov said no. He didn't trust his machine. Epikt was a cube twenty meters on one side; and of his thousands of eyes, some of them always seemed to be laughing at his master.

  “It won't be a hoax?” Smirnov asked his machine apprehensively.

  “Boss, did I ever hoax you?” Epikt issued.

  “Yes.”

  “Boss, some things are best presented in the guise of a hoax, but underneath this won't be one.”

  It was a crooked-tongued machine sometimes, and Smirnov was more apprehensive than ever.

  The next day everyone gathered early to hear what Epikt had to say. They pulled up chairs and recording canisters and waited for the machine to begin.

  “Ladies, gentlemen, associates,” said Epikt solemnly, “we are gathered together to hear of an important matter. I will present it as well as I am able. There will be disbelief, I know, but I am sure of my facts. Make yourselves comfortable.” He paused and then as an afterthought added, “You may smoke.”

  “You clanking cubicle, don't tell us what we may do,” Smirnov screamed. “You're only a machine that I made.”

  “You and three thousand other workers,” issued Epikt, without blinking an eye, “and in the final stages, the important stages, I directed my own assembly. I could not have happened otherwise. Only I know what is in me. As to my own abilities—”

  “Get on with it, Epikt,” Smirnov ordered, “and try to avoid the didactic manner.”

  “Then to get to the point, in the year 1980, the largest city of the American Midland was destroyed by an unnatural disaster.”

  “That was only twenty years ago,” Glasser cut in. “It seems that someone would have heard of it.”

  “I wonder if St. Louis knew that she was destroyed,” Valery ventured. “She acts as though she thought that she were still there.”

  “St. Louis was not the city,” issued Epikt. “This destruction of a metropolitan area of seven million persons in much less than seven seconds was a great horror from the human viewpoint—come to think of it I now recall being a little disturbed by it myself. The thing was so fearful that it was decided to suppress the whole business and blissfully forget about it.”

  “Wouldn't that be a little difficult?” said Aloysius Shiplap sarcastically.

  “It was very difficult to do,” issued Epikt, “and yet it was done, completely, within twenty hours. And from that moment until this, nobody has remembered or thought about it at all.”

  “And if Your Whimsical Highness will just explain how this was done?” Smirnov challenged the machine.

  “I'll explain as well as I can, good master. The project was put in charge of a master scientist who shall be nameless—but only for a few minutes.”

  “How were the written references of a metropolis of seven million persons obliterated?” asked Cogsworth.

  “By a device then newly invented by our master scientist,” Epikt answered. “It was known as the Tele-Pantographic Distorter. Even I, from this distance of time and through the cloud of induced amnesia, cannot understand how it worked. But it did work, and it simultaneously destroyed all printed references to our subject. This left holes in the references, and the flow of matter to fill those holes was sometimes of inferior texture, as I have noted. Holographic—that is handwritten, for you, Valery—references were more difficult. Most were simply destroyed. In more important documents, the text was flowed in automatic writing to fill the hole, and in close imitation of the original handwriting. But these imitations were often imperfect. I have a few thousand instances of this. But the Tele-Pantographic Distorter was a truly remarkable machine, and I regret it is now out of use.”

  “Kindly explain what happened to this remarkable machine,” said Smirnov.

  “Oh, it's still here in the Institute. You stumble into it a dozen times a day, good master, and you curse it as ‘That Damnable Pile of Junk,’ ” issued Epikt. “But you have a block that will not allow you to remember what it is.”

  “I believe that I have been stumbling into such a pile of junk for many years,” mused Smirnov. “Several times I have almost permitted myself to wonder what it was.”

  “And you invented it. The master scientist of the memory-obliteration was yourself, Gregory Smirnov.”

  “Hog hang it, Epikt! Your jug will leak!” protested Shiplap. “How of the human memories? The seven million inhabitants of the city would have had relatives of at least an equal number elsewhere. Didn't they wonder about their mothers or children or brothers or sisters?”

  “They sorrowed, but they didn't wonder,” issued Epikt. “It was a sorrow to which they could give no name. Examine the period and see how many really sad songs were popular in the years 1980 and 1981. But broadcast euphoria soon masked it over. The human memory of the thing was blocked by induced world amnesia. This was done hypnotically over the broadcast waves, and over more subtle waves. Few escaped it. The deaf moron mentioned in one of my items was one of those few. He scrawled the name of the town on a wall once, but it meant nothing to anyone.”

  “But there would be a hundred million loose ends to clean up,” Glasser protested.

  “Raise that number several powers,” issued Epikt. “There were very many loose ends, and most of them were taken care of. I gathered a million or so that remained in the process of this study, but they could not break through the induced amnesia. The door was bolted on the whole subject. Then it was double-locked. It was necessary to destroy not only the memory, but also the memory of that memory. Mr. Smirnov, in what was perhaps his greatest feat, put himself under the final hypnosis against it. It was his job to pull in the hole after them all. But it bothered him more than others because he was more involved in it. After this temporary explanation it will bother him no more. This time he will forget it with a clear conscience.

  “He does not recognize or remember it even now. It was his intent and triumph that he never should. The city and its destruction are forgotten forever, but the method of that memory-obliteration has only been forced to a subliminal level. It will be resurrected and used again whenever there is a great unnatural disaster.”

  “And where in tarnation or the American Midlands was this city?” Cogsworth hollered.

  “Its site is now known as the Great Blue Island Swamp,” issued Epikt.

  “Finish it, you goggle-eyed gadget,” Shiplap shrilled. “What's the name of that town?”

  “Chicago,” issue
d Epikt.

  That broke it! That tore it clear up! It was a hoax after all. That clattering clown of a cubicle had led them into it with all eyes open. Valery went into her high laughter, and her good husband Cogsworth chortled like a gooney bird with the hiccups.

  “Chicago! It sounds like a little zoo beaver sliding down a mud slide and hitting the water. Chicago!” It was the funniest word Valery had ever heard.

  “Nobody but a machine gone comic could coin a name like that,” laughed Glasser with his fire-cracker laugh. “Chicago!”

  “I take my hat off to you, Epiktistes,” said Aloysius Shiplap. “You are a cog-footed, tongue-in-cheek tall tale teller. People, this machine is ripe!”

  “I'm a little disappointed,” said Smirnov. “So the mountain labored and produced a mouse. But did it have to be a wall-eyed mouse in a clown suit, Epikt? It's too tall even for a tale. That a great city could be completely destroyed only twenty years ago and we know nothing about it—that's tall enough. But that it should have the impossible name of Chicago tops it all. If you weighed all possible sounds—and I'm sure that you did, Epikt—you could not come up with a more ridiculous sounding name than that.”

  “Good people, it is meant to be this way,” issued Epiktistes. “You cannot remember it. You cannot recognize it. And when you leave this room you will not even be able to recall the funny name. You will have only the dim impression that the clownish machine played a clownish trick on you. The disasters—for I suspect that there were several such—are well forgotten. The world would lie down and die if it remembered them too well.

  “And yet there really was a large city named Chicago. As Sikago it left a hole in one Hungarian dictionary-encyclopedia; and the Petit Larousse had to flow French froth about the Chibcha Indians into the place where Chicago had stood. Something, for which I find the tentative name Chicago Hot, was pulled out of the jazz complex by the roots. The Calumet River had flowed about the city somewhere, so there came a reluctance to use that name of the old Indian peace pipe. Chicago was a great city. The heart of her downtown was known as the Loop, and one of her baseball teams was named the Cubs. For that reason those two word were forced out of use. They might be evocative.”

  “Loop? Cubs?” giggled Valery. “Those words are almost as funny as Chicago. How do you make them up, Epikt?”

  “In popular capsule impression Chicago was the chewing-gum capital of the world. The leader in this manufacture was a man named—as well as I can reconstruct it—Wiggly. Children somehow found the echoes of the gruesome destruction of Chicago and tied it in with this capsule impression to produce the bloody Little Willy verses about chewing gum.”

  “Epikt, you top yourself,” said Shiplap, “if anything could top an invention as funny as Chicago.”

  “Good people, it comes down over you like a curtain,” issued Epiktistes. “You forget again—even my joke, even the funny name of the town. And, more to the point, I forget also.

  “It's gone. Gone. All gone. How peculiar! It is a long blank tape you all stare at as though you were under hypnosis. I must have suffered a blackout. I never issued a blank tape before. Smirnov, I have the taste in my terminals of an experiment that didn't quite come off. Feed me another. I don't fail often.”

  “That is enough for today, Epiktistes. We are all sleepy for some reason. No, it didn't work out—whatever it was. I forget what it was that we were working on. It doesn't matter. Our failures are well forgotten. We'll hit on something else. We're working on a lot of things.”

  Then they all shuffled out sleepily and went back to their work. Smirnov's machine had busted on something or other, but it was a good machine and would hit the next time, of that they were sure.

  In the corridor, Smirnov stumbled into his old Tele-Pantographic Distorter. He had been stumbling unseeing into it every day for twenty years.

  The machine rolled nine banks of eyes at Smirnov and smiled willingly. Was it another of those disasters? Was there any deep work to be done? Tele-Pan was ready. But no. Smirnov passed on. The machine smiled again and went peacefully back to sleep.

  “That damnable piece of junk,” Smirnov growled, walking along and petting his sore shin. “I feel almost as if I were on the verge of wondering what it is.”

  A Special Condition In Summit City

  “How do we communicate anyhow, Sumner?” Fenwick asked. “Those two seem almost to have something new to say about communication.” “Except that they're unable to communicate it,” Sumner jeered. “That's the trouble with permitting scientists and such amateurs to have opinions about thought processes. We communicate by words, Fenwick, and not by any sort of waves dreamed up by these wave-brains. They are saying that even conventional signs owe their meaning to telepathy.”

  “But Hegeman and Bott-Grabman are men of considerable reputation—forget in just what field. They say that words are only a conversation or index that we employ, and that we could not communicate more than fifty percent if we were restricted to words.”

  “Let them stick to their own fields,” said Sumner. “They know nothing of language communication.”

  “It isn't only language that they downgrade,” said Fenwick. “Signs, conventions, assumptions, all sorts of things—they say that these convey little by themselves. They say that we would have no way of knowing our own face in the mirror—even though we looked at it a dozen times every day of our lives—if it were not for these personal waves which are popularly known as telepathy. They even say that the parallelism of concepts—which is what we know as consciousness—would not be possible without the reception of the echo of our own waves.”

  “I tell you, those men know nothing, Fenwick.”

  “But Bott-Grabman has one striking case: an Italian-speaking woman married to an Armenian-speaking man for thirty years. Neither has learned the spouse's language, but they always understood each other.”

  That is when it happened, but silently and with no tip-off. The change came over everyone in the city. Fenwick's own personal waves were scrambled as he continued, and it made a difference:

  “The woman—now I am not sure which was the woman—I think one of them was a woman and one was an Armenian—the pro-names of both were ambivalent, or rather unknown to me—What gender is Morvan? How Armenian is Renentlas? It would not be incompatible that it was the other one who talked Haik.”

  “Haik, Yike! It's a good thing they didn't understand each other or they'd have been divorced in a year. You are exorbitantly involved, Fenwick.”

  “It is you, you convoluted colt,” Fenwick flared back, “and I don't speak temporally, old Sumner-mumner.”

  That made Sumner mad, and they had a fistfight.

  “We should be able to understand each other a modicum,” Sumner said as he marinated Fenwick's ear (but they couldn't, they couldn't understand each other at all).

  “You mean we should be able to understand each other a bit,” said Fenwick as he fractured Sumner's kidney. “Sure I mean a bit—one of the pairs of stands that a hawser goes around—it is not something that goes into a horse's mouth, Sumner. Which one of us is Sumner? I'd like to see you put one into a horse's mouth.”

  “Horse's mouth straight from the is different,” said Sumner, or perhaps it was Fenwick. Actually it was the speaker who spoke. “I'm telling you straight from the horse's mouth you are the wrong end of a horse. That is my inconsequential opinion.”

  They fought, and they had been friends.

  The same evening, a few miles across town, an elderly Armenian man cut the throat of his Italian wife of thirty years. “All at once it seemed she was just jabber,” he said.

  At about the same time, a fat man rushed back angrily and punched a newsboy in the face. “You have sold me a foreman paper,” he accused the boy.

  “It's the same paper you get every evening,” bubbled the boy bloodily. “You punch people in the face, you wait till my brother comes, he'll punch your dod bobbed knob. It's the same letters. It's the same words.” />
  “I know it's the same words. Why can't I read it then? It must be in a foreman language.”

  He punched the boy in the face again, and left. What you expect him to do when a boy sells him a paper he can't read?

  Two men were on a scaffold thirty stories up. This isn't the story of the two Irishmen on a scaffold. One of these was Irish and one was a Dane. “Drop the line a little,” said the Dane. “Hah! Did I say drop it? Belay that last. I mean rai—”

  “You mean railly drop it?” asked the Irishman. “I take it that is the meaning of belay, though I wish you'd forego Danish words.”

  He railly dropped the line. He fell thirty stories. It killed him.

  “The fellow misunderstood me,” said the Dane. “He never did that before. I was trying to tell him—” But the fall killed the Dane too.

  Traffic was getting snarled. “Can't you tell green from red, bub?” a policeman asked an honest citizen motorist.

  “I sure can, and your nose ain't green,” said the honest citizen, and his wife laughed at the joke.

  “Then why don't you obey the light?” asked the policeman.

  “Why? They started to give orders now?”

  “Red means stop.”

  “Red don't mean stop to me,” said the honest citizen. “Even stop don't mean stop to me. You start taking orders from lights and pretty soon you're taking orders from bugs. Why don't they fix some way all the cars don't try to cross the intersection at the same time? This way makes a jam-up.”

  “Why don't you blow your horn, John?” the honest citizen's wife asked him. “Everyone else is blowing his horn.”

  The honest citizen blew his horn.

  Things started to get rough as the evening came on. The police couldn't do anything. There was now no way of telling a policeman from anyone else. The magistrate couldn't make out warrants. What kind of words do you put on warrants anyhow? What do they mean if you put them there? And how will they mean the same thing to someone else? The power went off in large sections. There was confusion in the power houses and the switching stations. Who remembered the difference between cut it in and cut it out and cut it off?