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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “I never even knew who you were, little c. You are protean and you are not at all plausible.”

  “You called me up and you still don't know who I am, Charles? But this was our finest trick, our greatest illusion on which we worked subconsciously for years. We are our own masterpiece, Charles. And you didn't recognize it when it happened. You are the Magic Man but I am the Magic Man run wild. Aye, Charles, he's best when he runs wild.”

  “Tell me, cicerone, who are you? Who am I?” Chartel begged. “What is my difficulty?”

  “Our difficulty, Charles, is that one of us became too serious,” carnefice tried to explain. “To be serious is the only capital crime. For that, one of us will have to die — but it isn't as though it were a serious matter. Every man is at least two men, but ordinarily the two are not at the same time bodied and apparent. Now you have marred our greatest trick — but it was fun while it lasted.”

  Little c signaled to Veronica and she came down the corridor with a bunch of boards under her arm. She was admitted to the cell by the puzzled jailor.

  “One of us will have to leave forever,” coquelicot told Charles Chartel. “It isn't right for both of us to be around.”

  “Ah, I will be sorry to see you go, chandos,” said Chartel. “But who are you? I never could remember your name properly and there is something weird about that. You change forever in appearance and name. Who are you, little c?”

  “Only that. Just little c. Or shall we say sub-c? But we are too clever to be hounded into a hole like this, Charles. Remember! We were our own greatest trick, even if it failed.”

  “What must we do now?” Chartel asked dully.

  “A simple transference,” cogne said. He was building the box board by board.

  “I'm not a bad man underneath,” Chartel sniveled. “I'm misunderstood.”

  “No, we're a fine man underneath, Charles. I am the man underneath,” said ciud. “Get in the box.”

  “I get in? I am Charles (the Great Zambesi) Chartel. You are only little c, sub-c, an aspect of myself. I will not get into the box!”

  “Get in, Charles,” said cistercium. “It was a mix-up from the beginning. You were never meant to see the light of day. The wrong one of us has been running loose.”

  “I'll fight, I'll claw, I'll rant!”

  “That's what a healthy subconscious is supposed to do,” cludok said. “Get in!”

  “It's murder! I won't go! It's oblivion!”

  “No such thing, Charles. It isn't as though we weren't the same person. I'll still be here.”

  Then little c and Veronica shoved the Great Zambesi Charles Chartel down into the box and closed the lid. In doing so, little c became himself the Great Zambesi. For, when he opened the box again, it was empty. And he took it apart board by board. The jailor said that he had to have his prisoner and Veronica gave him the boards.

  “There, there, doll,” she said. “Make one out of them. Try real hard.”

  And Veronica and the Great Zambesi left that place.

  We won't say that Zambesi wasn't the greatest magician in the world. He may have become the greatest, after he began to treat it lightly. People, he was good! There was never any act with such variety and fun in it. After his strange mid-life hiatus he achieved new heights. “And I'm certainly glad you overcame your personality difficulties,” the loving Veronica told him later. “For a while there — whoof! But I always knew you were a fine man underneath.”

  Configuration Of The North Shore

  The patient was named John Miller. The analyst was named Robert Rousse.

  Two men.

  The room was cluttered with lighting, testing, and recording equipment. It had several sets of furniture that conferred together in small groups, sodas, easy chairs, business chairs, desks, couches, coffee tables, and two small bars. There were books, and there was a shadow booth. The pictures on the walls were of widely different sorts.

  One setting. Keep it simple, and be not distracted by indifferent details.

  “I have let my business go down,” Miller said. “My wife says that I have let her down. My sons say that I have turned into a sleepy stranger. Everybody agrees that I've lost all ambition and judgment. And yet I do have a stirring ambition. I am not able, however, to put it into words.” “We'll put it into words, Miller, either yours or mine,” Rousse said. “Slip up on it right now! Quickly, what is the stirring ambition?”

  “To visit the Northern Shore, and to make the visit stick.”

  “How does one get to this Northern Shore, Miller?”

  “That's the problem. I can locate it only very broadly on the globe. Sometimes it seems that it should be on the eastern tip of New Guinea, going north from the D'Entrecasteaux Islands and bypassing Trobriand; again I feel that it is off in the Molucca Passage toward Talaud; and again it should be a little further south, coming north out of the Banda Sea by one of the straats. But I have been in all those waters without finding any clue to it. And the maps show unacceptable land or open sea wherever I try to set it.”

  “How long?”

  “About twenty-five years.”

  “All in what we might call the Other East Indies and dating from your own time in that part of the world, in World War II. When did it become critical?”

  “It was always critical, but I worked around it. I built up my business and my family and led a pleasant and interesting life. I was able to relegate the Thing to my normal sleeping hours. Now I slow down a little and have less energy. I have trouble keeping both sets of things going.”

  “Can you trace the impression of the North Shore to anything? Transfigured early memory of some striking sea view? Artform-triggered intuitions? Can you trace any roots to the evocative dream?”

  “I had an inland childhood, not even a striking lakeview in it. And yet the approach to the North Shore is always by a way recognized from early childhood. I don't believe I have any intuition at all, nor any sense of art forms. It is simply a continuing dream that brings me almost to it. I am rounding a point, and the North Shore will be just beyond that point. Or I have left ship and wade through the shallows; and then I have only a narrow (but eerie) neck of land to traverse to reach the North Shore. Or I am, perhaps, on the North Shore itself and going through fog to the place of importance, and I will have the whole adventure as soon as the fog clears a little; but it doesn't. I've been on the verge of discovering it all a thousand times.”

  “All right. Lie down and go to dreaming, Miller. We will try to get you past that verge. Dream, and we record it.”

  “It isn't that easy, Rousse. There's always preliminaries to be gone through. First there is a setting and sound and smell of place near the surf and a tide booming. This watery background then grows fainter; but it remains behind it all. And then there is a little anteroom dream, a watery dream that is not the main one. The precursor dream comes and goes, sharp and clear, and it has its own slanted pleasure. And only then am I able to take up the journey to the North Shore.”

  “All right, Miller, we will observe the amenities. Dream your dreams in the proper order. Lie easy there. Now the shot. The records and the shadow booth are waiting.”

  Shadow booths reproduced dreams in all dimensions and senses, so much so that often a patient on seeing a playback of his own dream was startled to find that an impression, which he would have said could in no way be expressed, was quite well expressed in shadow or color or movement or sound or odor. The shadow booth of the analyst Rousse was more than a basic booth, as he had incorporated nearly all of his own notions into it. It reproduced the dreams of his patients very well, though to some extent through his own eyes and presuppositions.

  First was given the basic, and Rousse realized that for his patient Miller this was New Guinea, and more particularly Black Papua, the stark mountain land full of somber spooky people. It was night; the area seemed to be about fifty yards from the surf, but every boom and sigh was audible. And there was something else: the tide was booming
underground; the ocean permeated the land. Guinea, the mountain that is an island, was a mountain full of water. The roots of the mountain move and sigh; the great boulders squeak when the hammer of the tide hits them; and on the inside of the cliffs the water level rises. There is a feeling of being on a very large ship, a ship a thousand miles long.

  “He has captured the Earth-Basic well,” the analyst Rousse said. Then the basic faded back a bit, and the precursor dream began.

  It was a flat-bottomed rowboat from some old camping trip. He was lying on his back in the bottom of the boat, and it was roped to a stump or tree and was rocking just a little in the current. And here was another mountain full of water, but an island one of much less bulk, and the ice-cold springs ran out of its sides and down its piney shoulders to the shingle of the creek bank. Fish jumped in the dark, and blacksnakes slid down the hill to drink. Bullfrogs echoed, and hoot owls made themselves known; and far away dogs and men were out possuming, with the baying carrying over the miles. Then the boy remembered what he must do, and in his dream he unroped the boat and shoved into the stream and ran his trout line. From every hook he took a fish as long as his arm till the boat was full and nearly swamped.

  And from the last hook of all, he took a turtle as big as a wagon wheel. He would not have been able to get it into the boat had not the turtle helped by throwing a booted leg over the side and heaving himself in. For by this time it was not so much like a turtle but more like someone the boy knew. Then he talked for a while with the turtle that was not exactly a turtle anymore. The turtle had a sack of Bull Durham and the boy had papers, so they rolled and smoked and watched the night clouds slide overhead. One of them was named Thinesta and one was named Shonge, which chased the first and would soon have him treed or caught, if they did not run into the mountain or the moon first.

  “Boy, this is the life!” said the turtle. “Boy this is the life!” said the boy.

  “He's a poet,” said Rousse, and this puzzled him. He knew himself to be a cultured man, and he knew that Miller wasn't.

  Then the little precursor dream slid away, and there began the torturous and exhilarating journey to the North Shore. It was coming around a point in an old windjammer on which all the men were dead except the dreamer. The dead men were grinning and were happy enough in their own way. They had lashed themselves to rails and davits and such before they had died. “They didn't want it bad enough,” the dreamer said, “but they won't mind me going ahead with it.” But the point was devilish hard to turn. There came on wind and driving spray so that the ship suffered. There was only ashen light as of false dawn. There was great strain. The dreamer struggled, and Rousse (caught up in the emotion of it) became quite involved and would have been in despair if it were not for the ultimate hope that took hold of him.

  A porpoise whistled loudly, and at that moment they rounded the point. But it was a false point, and the true point was still up ahead. Yet the goal was now more exciting than ever. Yet both the current and the wind were against them. Rousse was a practical man. “We will not make it tonight,” he said. “We had better heave to in this little cove and hold onto what advantage we have gained. We can make it the next time from here.”

  “Aye, we'll tie up in the little cove,” one of the dead men said, “we'll make it on the next sortie.”

  “We will make it now,” the dreamer swore. He jammed the windjammer and refused to give up.

  It was very long and painful, and they did not make it that night, or that afternoon in the analyst's office. When the dream finally broke, both Miller and Rousse were trembling with the effort and the high hope was set again into the future.

  “That's it,” Miller said. “Sometimes I come closer. There is something in it that makes it worthwhile. I have to get there.”

  “We should have tied up in the cove,” Rousse said. “We'll have blown backwards some ways, but it can't be helped. I seem to be a little too much in empathy with this thing, Miller, I can see how it is quite real to you. Analysis, as you may not know, has analogs in many of the sciences. In Moral Theology, which I count a science, the analog is Ultimate Compensation. I am sure that I can help you. I have already helped you, Miller. Tomorrow we will go much further with it.”

  The tomorrow session began very much the same. It was Guinea again, the Earth Basic, the Mountain Spook Land, the Fundament permeated with Chaos which is the Sea. It boomed and sighed and trembled to indicate that there are black and sea-green spirits in the basic itself. Then the basic adjusted itself into the background, and the precursor dream slid in. The boy, the dreamer was in a canoe. It was night, but the park lights were on, and the lights of the restaurants and little beer gardens along the way. The girl was with him in a cave; she had green eyes and a pleasantly crooked mouth. Well, it was San Antonio on the little river that through the parkways and under the bridges. Then they were beyond the parkway and out of town. There were live-oak trees overhanging the water, and beards of Spanish moss dragged the surface as though they were drifting through a cloud made up of gossamer and strands of old burlap.

  “We've come a thousand miles,” the girl said, “and it costs a dollar for every mile for the canoe. If you don't have that much money we'll have to keep the canoe; the man won't take it back unless we pay him.”

  “I have the money, but we might want to save it to buy breakfast when we cross the Mississippi,” the boy said. The girl's name was Ginger, and she strummed on a stringed instrument that was spheroid; it revolved as she played and changed colors like a juke box. The end of the canoe paddle shone like a star and left streaks of cosmic dust on the night water as the boy dipped it.

  They crossed the Mississippi, and were in a world that smelled of wet sweet clover and very young catfish. The boy threw away the paddle and kissed Ginger. It felt as though she were turning him inside out, drawing him into her completely. And suddenly she bit him hard and deep with terrible teeth, and he could smell the blood running down his face when he pushed her away. He pushed her out of the canoe and she sank down and down. The underwater was filled with green light and he watched her as she sank. She waved to him and called him in a burst of bubbles. “That's all right. I was tired of the canoe anyhow. I'll walk back.”

  “Damn you, Ginger, why didn't you tell me you weren't people?” the dreamer asked.

  “It is ritual, it is ordering, the little precursor dreams that he makes,” Rousse said.

  Then the precursor dream glided away like the canoe itself, and the main thing gathered once more to mount the big effort. It was toward the North Shore once more, but not in a windjammer. It was in a high hooting steamship that rode with nine other ships in splendid array through one of the straats out of what, in concession to the world, they had let be called the Banda Sea. “We come to the edge of the world now,” the dreamer said, “and only I will know the way here.”

  “It is not the edge of the world,” one of the seamen said. “See, here is the map, and here we are on it. As you can see, it is a long way to the edge of the world.”

  “The map is wrong,” the dreamer said, “let me fix it.” He tore the map in two. “Look now,” the dreamer pointed, “are we not now at the edge of the world?” All saw that they were; whereupon all the seamen began to jump off the ship, and tried to swim back to safety. And the other ships of the array, one by one, upended themselves and plunged into the abyss at the edge of the water. This really was the edge of the world, and the waters rushed over it.

  But the dreamer knew the secret of this place, and he had faith. Just in time he saw it, right where he knew it must be, a narrow wedge of high water extending beyond the edge of the world. The ship sailed out on this narrow wedge, very precariously. “For the love of God be careful!” Rousse gasped. “Oh hell. I'm becoming too involved in a patient's dream.” Well, it was a pretty nervous go there. So narrow was the wedge that the ship seemed to be riding on nothing; and on both sides was bottomless space and the sound of water rusting into it and falling f
orever. The sky had also ended — it does not extend beyond the world. There was no light, but only ashen darkness. And the heavy wind came up from below on both sides.

  Nevertheless, the dreamer continued on and on until the wedge became too narrow to balance the ship. “I will get out and walk,” the dreamer said, and he did. The ship upended itself and plunged down into bottomless space; and the dreamer was walking, as it were, on a rope of water, narrower than his boots, narrow as a rope indeed. It was, moreover, very slippery, and the sense of depth below was sickening. Even Rousse trembled and broke into cold sweat from the surrogate danger of it.

  But the dreamer still knew the secret. He saw, far ahead, where the sky began again, and there is no sky over a void. And after continuing some further distance over the dangerous way, he saw where the land began again, a true land miss looming up ahead.

  What was dimly seen, of course, was the back side of the land mass, and a stranger coming onto it would not guess its importance. But the dreamer knew that one had only to reach it and turn the point to be on the North Shore itself.

  The excitement of the thing to come communicated itself, and at that very moment the watery rope widened to a path. It was still slippery and dangerous, it still had on each side of it depths so deep that a thousand miles would be only an inch. And then for the first time the dreamer realized the fearsomeness of the thing he was doing. “But I always knew I could walk on water if the thing got bad enough,” he said. It was a tricky path, but it was a path that a man could walk on.

  “Keep on! Keep on!” Rousse shouted. “We're almost there!”

  “There's a break in the path,” said Miller the dreamer, and there was. It wasn't a hundred feet from the land mass, it wasn't a thousand feet to the turning of the point and the arrival at the North Shore itself. But there was a total break. Opposite them, on the dim land mass, was an emperor penguin.