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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Map, sir? I'm a poor kalo man who wouldn't know about things like that.”

  “Smith! You're a qualified cartographer!”

  “Does seem that I followed a trade with a name like that. But the cliff is real enough. I climbed it in my boyhood—in my other boyhood. And that yonder, sir, is Drapengoro Rez—the Grassy Mountain. And the high plateau ahead of us which we begin to climb is Diz Boro Grai—the Land of the Great Horses.”

  Rockwell stopped the terrain buggy and leaped off. Smith followed him in a happy daze.

  “Smith, you're wide-eyed crazy!” Rockwell gasped. “And what am I? We're terribly lost somehow. Smith, look at the log chart and the bearings recorder!”

  “Log chart, sir? I'm a poor kalo man who wouldn't know—”

  “Damn you, Smith, you made these instruments. If they're correct we're seven hundred feet too high and have been climbing for ten miles into a highland that's supposed to be part of a mirage. These cliffs can't be here. We can't be here. Smith!”

  But Seruno Smith had ambled off like a crazy man.

  “Smith, where are you trotting off to? Can't you hear me?”

  “You call to me, sir?” asked Smith. “And by such a name?”

  “Are the two of us as crazy as the country?” Rockwell moaned. “I've worked with you for three years. Isn't your name Smith?”

  “Why, yes, sir, I guess it might be englished as Horse-Smith or Black-Smith. But my name is Pettalangro and I'm going home.”

  And the man who had been Smith started on foot up to the Land of the Great Horses.

  “Smith, I'm getting on the buggy and I'm going back,” Rockwell shouted. “I'm scared liverless of this country that changes. When a mirage turns solid it's time to quit. Come along now! We'll be back in Bikaner by tomorrow morning. There's a doctor there, and a whiskey bar. We need one of them.”

  “Thank you, sir, but I must go up to my home,” Smith sang out. “It was kind of you to give me a ride along the way.”

  “I'm leaving you, Smith. One crazy man is better than two.”

  “Ashava, Sarishan,” Smith called a parting.

  “Smith, unriddle me one last thing,” Rockwell called, trying to find a piece of sanity to hold to. “What is the name of the seventh sister?”

  “Deep Romany,” Smith sang, and he was gone up into the high plateau that had always been a mirage.

  In an upper room on Olive Street in St. Louis, Missouri, a half-and-half couple were talking half-and-half.

  “The rez has riser'd,” the man said. “I can sung it like brishindo. Let's jal.”

  “All right,” the wife said, “if you're awa.”

  “Hell, I bet I can riker plenty bano on the beda we got here. I'll have kakko come kinna it aro.”

  “With a little bachi we can be jal'd by areat,” said the wife.

  “Nashiva, woman, nashiva!”

  “All right,” the wife said, and she began to pack their suitcases.

  In Camargo in the Chihuahua State of Mexico, a shade-tree mechanic sold his business for a hundred pesos and told his wife to pack up—they were leaving.

  “To leave now when business is so good?” she asked.

  “I only got one car to fix and I can't fix that,” the man said.

  “But if you keep it long enough, he will pay you to put it together again even if it isn't fixed. That's what he did last time. And you've a horse to shoe.”

  “I'm afraid of that horse. It has come back, though. Let's go.”

  “Are you sure we will be able to find it?”

  “Of course I'm not sure. We will go in our wagon and our sick horse will pull it.”

  “Why will we go in the wagon, when we have a car, of sorts?”

  “I don't know why. But we will go in the wagon, and we will nail the old giant horseshoe up on the lintel board.”

  A carny in Nebraska lifted his head and smelled the air.

  “It's come back,” he said. “I always knew we'd know. Any other Romanies here?”

  “I got a little rart in me,” said one of his fellows. “This narvelengero dives is only a two-bit carnival anyhow. We'll tell the boss to shove it up his chev and we'll be gone.”

  In Tulsa, a used-car dealer named Gypsy Red announced the hottest sale on the row:

  “Everything for nothing! I'm leaving. Pick up the papers and drive them off. Nine new heaps and thirty good ones. All free.”

  “You think we're crazy?” the people asked. “There's a catch.”

  Red put the papers for all the cars on the ground and put a brick on top of them. He got in the worst car on the lot and drove it off forever.

  “All free,” he sang out as he drove off. “Pick up the papers and drive the cars away.”

  They're still there. You think people are crazy to fall for something like that that probably has a catch to it?

  In Galveston a barmaid named Margaret was asking merchant seamen how best to get passage to Karachi.

  “Why Karachi?” one of them asked her.

  “I thought it would be the nearest big port,” she said. “It's come back, you know.”

  “I kind of felt this morning it had come back,” he said. “I'm a chal myself. Sure, we'll find something going that way.”

  In thousands of places fawney-men and dukkerin-women, kakki-baskros and hegedusies, clowns and commission men, Counts of Condom and Dukes of Little Egypt parvel'd in their chips and got ready to roll. Men and families made sudden decisions in every country. Athinganoi gathered in the hills above Salonika in Greece and were joined by brothers from Serbia and Albania and the Rhodope Hills of Bulgaria. Zingari of north Italy gathered around Pavia and began to roll toward Genoa to take ship. Boêmios of Portugal came down to Porto and Lisbon. Gitanos of Andalusia and all southern Spain came to Sanlúcar and Málaga. Zigeuner from Thuringia and Hanover thronged to Hamburg to find ocean passage. Gioboga and their mixed-blood Shelta cousins from every cnoc and coill of Ireland found boats at Dublin and Limerick and Bantry.

  From deeper Europe, Tsigani began to travel overland eastward. The people were going from two hundred ports of every continent and over a thousand highroads—many of them long forgotten.

  Balauros, Kalo, Manusch, Melelo, Tsigani, Moro, Romani, Flamenco, Sinto, Cicara, the many-named people was traveling in its thousands. The Romani Rai was moving.

  Two million Gypsies of the world were going home.

  At the institute, Gregory Smirnov was talking to his friends and associates.

  “You remember the thesis I presented several years ago,” he said, “that, a little over a thousand years ago, Outer Visitors came down to Earth and took a sliver of our Earth away with them. All of you found the proposition comical, but I arrived at my conclusion by isostatic and eustatic analysis carried out minutely. There is no doubt that it happened.”

  “One of our slivers is missing,” said Aloysius Shiplap. “You guessed the sliver taken at about ten thousand square miles in area and no more than a mile thick at its greatest. You said you thought they wanted to run this sliver from our Earth through their laboratories as a sample. Do you have something new on our missing sliver?”

  “I'm closing the inquiry,” Gregory said. “They've brought it back.”

  It was simple really, jekvasteskero, Gypsy-simple. It is the gadjo, the non-Gypsies of the world, who give complicated answers to simple things.

  “They came and took our country away from us,” the Gypsies had always said, and that is what had happened.

  The Outer Visitors had run a slip under it, rocked it gently to rid it of nervous fauna, and then taken it away for study. For a marker, they left an immaterial simulacrum of that high country as we ourselves sometimes set name or picture tags to show where an object will be set later. This simulacrum was often seen by humans as a mirage.

  The Outer Visitors also set simulacra in the minds of the superior fauna that fled from the moving land. This would be a homing instinct, inhibiting permanent settlement anywhere until the t
ime should come for the resettlement; entwined with this instinct were certain premonitions, fortune-showings, and understandings.

  Now the Visitors brought the slice of land back, and its old fauna homed in on it.

  “What will the—ah—patronizing smile on my part—Outer Visitors do now, Gregory?” Aloysius Shiplap asked back at the Institute.

  “Why, take another sliver of our Earth to study, I suppose, Aloysius,” Gregory Smirnov said.

  Low-intensity earthquakes rocked the Los Angeles area for three days. The entire area was evacuated of people. Then there was a great whistle blast from the sky as if to say, “All ashore that's going ashore.”

  Then the surface to some little depth and all its superstructure was taken away. It was gone. And then it was quickly forgotten.

  From the Twenty-second Century Comprehensive Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, page 389:

  ANGELENOS. (See also Automobile Gypsies and Prune Pickers.) A mixed ethnic group of unknown origin, much given to wandering in automobiles. It is predicted that they will be the last users of this vehicle, and several archaic chrome-burdened models are still produced for their market. These people are not beggars; many of them are of superior intelligence. They often set up in business, usually as real estate dealers, gamblers, confidence men, managers of mail-order diploma mills, and promoters of one sort or other. They seldom remain long in one location.

  Their pastimes are curious. They drive for hours and days on old and seldom-used cloverleafs and freeways. It has been said that a majority of the Angelenos are narcotics users, but Harold Freelove (who lived for some months as an Angeleno) has proved this false. What they inhale at their frolics (smog-crocks) is a black smoke of carbon and petroleum waste laced with monoxide. Its purpose is not clear.

  The religion of the Angelenos is a mixture of old cults with a very strong eschatological element. The Paradise Motif is represented by reference to a mystic “Sunset Boulevard.” The language of the Angelenos is a colorful and racy argot. Their account of their origin is vague:

  “They came and took our dizz away from us,” they say.

  Afterword (Land Of The Great Horses)

  From Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison

  We are all cousins. I don't believe in reincarnation, but the only system of reincarnation that satisfies justice is that every being should become successively (or sometimes simultaneously) every other being. This would take a few billion lifetimes; the writer with a feel for the Kindred tries to do it in one. We are all Romanies, as in the parable here, and we have a built-in homing to and remembrance of a woolier and more excellent place, a reality that masquerades as a mirage. Whether the more excellent place is here or heretofore or hereafter, I don't know, or whether it will be our immediate world when it is sufficiently animated; but there is an intuition about it which sometimes passes through the whole community. There is, or there ought to be, these shimmering heights; and they belong to us. Controversy (or polarity) is between ourselves as individuals and as members of the incandescent species, confronted with the eschatological thing. I'd express it more intelligently if I knew how.

  But I didn't write the story to point up this notion, but to drop a name. There is a Margaret the barmaid—not the one in the story, of course (for we have to abide by the disavowal “Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental”), but another of the same name—and she is a Romany. “Put my name in a story, just Margaret the barmaid,” she told me. “I don't care what, even name a dog that.” “But you won't know it,” I said, “you don't read anything, and none of the people you run around with do.” “I will know it exactly,” she said, “when someone else reads it someday, when they come to the name Margaret the barmaid. I know things like that.”

  Not from me, but from someone who reads it here, Margaret will receive the intuition, and both parties will know it. “Hey, the old bat did it,” Margaret will say. I don't know what the reader-sender caught in the middle will say or think.

  I am pleased to be a member of this august though sometimes raffish company playing here in this production. It has an air of excellence, and some of it will rub off on me. We are, all of us, Counts of Con-dom and Dukes of Little Egypt.

  Once On Aranea

  One fine spider silk, no more than 1/80,000 of an inch thick, could this bind and kill a man? He would soon know. It would be a curious death, to be done in by fine spider silk. “—but then mine has been a curious life,” Scarble muttered from a tight throat, “and it might as well have an ironic end to it. I wonder if you know, you mother-loving spiders,” he called out with difficulty, “that every death is ironic. The arachnidian irony has a pretty fine edge, though.”

  It had begun on Aranea a week earlier. In their surveying of the planet-sized asteroids of the Cercyon Belt, their practice was (after the team had completed the Initial Base Survey) to leave a lone man on the asteroid for a short period. The theory was that any malevolent force, which might not move against a group, could come into the open against a lone man. In practice it had given various results.

  Donners said that nothing at all happened on his world when he was there alone, and that nothing had happened to him. But Donners had developed a grotesque facial tic and an oddity of speech and manner. Something had happened to him which he had not realized.

  Procop had simply disappeared from his world, completely and with no residue. He couldn't have traveled a hundred kilometers on foot in the time he had, and there was no reason for him to travel even ten. He should have left traces — of the calcium which was hardly on that world at all, of cellular decomposition, of amino acids. If a gram of him had been left on that world in any form, the scanners would have found it, and they hadn't. But exploratory parties grow used to such puzzles.

  Bernheim said that he had gone to pieces when left alone. He did not know whether there had been strange happenings on his world or in his head. He had straightened up only with a great effort when he saw them come back for him, he said. Bernheim had always been a man of compulsive honesty.

  Marin said that it hadn't been a picnic when he was left alone, but that nothing had happened there that he wouldn't be able to find an answer to if he could devote a thousand years to it. He said it was more a test of a man than of a world. But it was the test that the Party was to use for the livableness of a world.

  On Aranea it was Scarble who would remain alone and make the test. On Aranea, the Spider Asteroid, there were two sorts of creatures — at first believed to be three. But two of these first apparent forms were different stages of the same species.

  There were the small four-legged scutters. There were the two-legged, two-armed, upright straddling fingerlings. Finally there were the “Spiders” — actually dodecapods, the largest of them as big as a teacup. The two-legged fingerlings were the spiders, after their metamorphosis.

  Bernheim was reading his report, the final bit for the Initial Base Survey:

  “The basic emotion of the small quadrupeds, Scutterae Bernheimiensis, is subservience. They register that they are owned by the spider complex, and that they must serve it.”

  “So, there are two species, one slave to the other,” said Marin. “It's a common pattern.”

  “The biped fingerlings, Larva Arachnida Marin, do not realize their relationship to the ‘Spiders,’ ” Bernbeim continued. “When forced into the metamorphosis, their reaction is stark consternation.”

  “So would mine be,” said Scarble. “And what's the basic emotion of the adult spiders, the Arachne Dodecapode Scarble?”

  “It is mother-love, lately reoriented by an intrusion and intensified many-fold.”

  “By what intrusion? And how intensified?” Marin asked.

  “We are the intrusion. We are the intensification,” Bernheim explained. “They are intensely excited only since our arrival. That murmuring and chirping of millions of them is all for us. This is maternal affection gone hysterical — for us!”

  They exp
loded in the first real laughter ever heard on Aranea, and even the spiders giggled in million-voiced accord.

  “Oh, those mother-loving spiders!” became their byword for their stay there, and it had to go into the report.

  So it was with rare good humor that three of them (Bernheim, Marin, Donners) took off and left Scarble alone on the Spider World, himself chortling every time he thought of the maternal spiders. For companion, Scarble had only a dog named Dog, which is to say Cyon; it was a classical dog. This would be easy. Scarble liked spiders and even looked like one — a spindly, wiry man covered with black hair almost everywhere except on the top of his head; a man who ran much to long legs and arms and had not a great amount of body to him. When he waved his arms, as he did when he talked, he gave the impression of having more than two of them. Even his humor was spider-like.

  And what was there to scare any man in the golden daylight of Aranea? Scarble had the name of not being afraid of anything; he had been diligent to give himself that name. And courage is the normal complement of the male animal everywhere. Individual exceptions are common in every species, but they are abnormal. Scarble was normal.

  And, should normal courage fail, they had left him a supply of Dutch Courage, and French, Scotch, Canadian, and Kentucky; as well as a distilled-on-the-wing drink known as Rocket Red. They always left a man with a good bottled stock.

  It was on this prime stock that the shadow of the coming thing first fell — and Scarble didn't recognize it. He was delighted when he woke from his first sleep on Aranea and saw the stuff as covered with cobwebs as though it had been a hundred years in a cellar. He sampled it with exceptional pleasure. Mellow! Even the Rocket Red had acquired age and potent dignity.