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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “You will have to wait till we get it fixed,” the penguin said. “My brothers have gone to get more water to fix it with. It will be tomorrow before we get it fixed.”

  “I'll wait,” the dreamer shouted. But Rousse saw something that the dreamer did not see, that nobody else had ever seen before. He looked at the shape of the new sky that is always above the world and is not above the abyss. From the configuration of the sky he read the Configuration of the Northern Shore. He gasped with unbelief. Then the dream broke.

  “It may be only the quest-in-itself motif,” Rousse lied, trying to control himself and bring his breathing back to normal. “And then, there might, indeed, be something at the end of it. I told you, Miller, that analysis has its parallels in other sciences. Well it can borrow devices from them also. We will borrow the second-stage-platform from the science of rocketry.” “You've turned into a sly man, Rousse,” Miller said. “What's taken hold of you suddenly? What is it that you are not saying?”

  “What I am saying, Miller, is that we will use it tomorrow. When the dream has reached its crest and just before it breaks up, we'll cut in a second stage booster. I've done it before with lesser dreams. We are going to see this thing to the end tomorrow.”

  “All right.”

  “It will take some special rigging,” Rousse told himself when Miller was gone. “And I'll have to gather a fair amount of information and shape it up. But it will be worth it. I am thinking of the second stage shot in another sense, and I might be able to pull it off. This isn't the quest-in-itself at all. I've seen plenty of them. I've seen the false a thousand times. Let me not fumble the real! This is the Ultimate Arrival Nexus that makes a man clean out of himself. It is the compensation. If it were not achieved in one life in a million, then none of the other lives would have been worthwhile. Somebody has to win to keep the gamble going. There has to be a grand prize behind it all. I've seen the shape of it in that second sky. I'm the one to win it.” Then Rousse busied himself against the following day. He managed some special rigging. He gathered a mass of information and shaped it up. He incorporated these things into a shadow booth. He canceled a number of appointments. He was arranging that he could take some time off, a day, a month, a year, a lifetime if necessary.

  The tomorrow session began very much the same, except for some doubts on the part of the patient Miller. “I said it yesterday, and I say it again,” Miller grumbled. “You've turned sly on me, man. What is it?”

  “All analysts are sly, Miller, it's the name of our trade. Get with it now. I promise that we will get you past the verge today. We are going to see this dream through to its end.”

  There was the Earth Basic again. There was the Mountain booming full of water, the groaning of the rocks, and the constant adjusting and readjusting of the world on its uneasy foundation. There was the salt spray, the salt of the earth that leavens the lump. There were the crabs hanging onto the wet edge of the world.

  Then the Basic muted itself, and the precursor dream slid in, the ritual fish.

  It was a rendezvous of ships and boats in an immensity of green islands scattered in a purple-blue sea. It was a staging area for both ships and islands; thence they would travel in convoys to their proper positions, but here they were all in a jumble. There were LST's and Jay Boats, cargo ships and little packets. There were old sailing clippers with topgallants and moonscrapers full of wind, though they were at anchor. There was much moving around, and it was easy to step from the ships to the little green islands (if they were islands, some of them no more than rugs of floating moss, but they did not sink) and back onto the ships. There were sailors and seamen and pirates shooting craps together on the little islands. Bluejackets and bandits would keep jumping from the ships down to join the games, and then others would leave them and hop onto other islands.

  Piles of money of rainbow colors and of all sizes were everywhere. There were pesos and pesetas and pesarones. There were crowns and coronets and rixdollars. There were gold certificates that read “Redeemable only at Joe's Marine Bar Panama City.” There were guilders with the Queen's picture on them, and half-guilders with the Jack's picture on them. There were round coins with square holes in them, and square coins with round holes. There was stage money and invasion money, and comic money from the Empires of Texas and Louisiana. And there were bales of real frogskins, green and sticky, which were also current.

  “Commodore,” one of the pirates said, “get that boat out of the way or I'll ram it down your throat.”

  “I don't have any boat,” said the dreamer. “I'm not a commodore; I'm an army sergeant; I'm supposed to guard this box for the lieutenant.” Oh hell, he didn't even have a box. What had happened to the box? “Commodore,” said the pirate, “get that boat out of the way or I'll cut off your feet.”

  He did cut off his feet. And this worried the boy, the dreamer, since he did not know whether it was in the line of duty or if he would be paid for his feet. “I don't know which boat you mean,” he told the pirate. “Tell me which boat you mean and I'll try to move it.”

  “Commodore,” the pirate said, “move this boat or I'll cut your hands off.”

  “This isn't getting us anywhere,” the dreamer said, “tell me which boat you want moved.”

  “If you don't know your own boat by now, I ought to slit your gullet,” the pirate said. It was harder to breathe after that, and the boy worried more. “Sir, you're not even a pirate in my own outfit. You ought to get one of the sailors to move the boat for you. I'm an army sergeant and I don't even know how to move a boat.”

  The pirate pushed him down in a grave on one of the green islands and covered him up. He was dead now and it scared him. This was not at all like he thought it would be. But the green dirt was transparent and he could still see the salty dogs playing cards and shooting craps all around him.

  “If that boat isn't moved,” the pirate said, “you're going to be in real trouble.”

  “Oh, let him alone,” one of the dice players said. So he let him alone.

  “It's ritual sacrifice he offers,” Rousse said, “He brings the finest gifts he can make every time. I will have to select a top one from the files for my own Precursor.” Then it was toward the North Shore again as the Precursor dream faded.

  It was with a big motor launch now, as big as a yacht, half as big as a ship. The craft was very fast when called on to be, for it was going through passes that weren't there all the time. Here was a seacliff, solid and without a break. But to one who knows the secret there is a way through. Taken at morning half-light and from a certain angle there was a passage through. The launch made it, but barely. It was a very close thing, and the cliffs grouped together again behind it. And there behind was the other face of the seacliff, solid and sheer. But the ocean ahead was different, for they had broken with the map and with convention in finding a passage where there was none. There were now great groupings of islands and almost-islands. But some of them were merely sargasso-type weed islands, floating clumps; and some of them were only floating heaps of pumice and ash front a volcano that was now erupting.

  How to tell the true island from the false? The dreamer threw rocks at all the islands. If the islands were of weed or pumice or ash they would give but a dull sound. But if they were real land they would give a solid ringing sound to the thrown rock. Most of them were false islands, but now one rang like iron.

  “It is a true island,” said the dreamer, “it is named Pulo Bakal.” And after the launch had gone a great way through the conglomerate, one of the islands rang like solid wood to the thrown rock. “It is a true island,” said the dreamer, “it is named Pulo Kaparangan.”

  And finally there was a land that rang like gold, or almost like it (like cracked gold really) to the thrown rock. “It is true land, I think it is,” said the dreamer. “It is named Pulo Ginto. I think it is. It is the land itself, and its North Shore should be the Shore Itself. But it is spoiled this day. The sound was cracked. I don't want
it as much as I thought I did. It's been tampered with.”

  “This is it,” Rousse urged the dreamer. “Quickly now, right around the point and you are there. We can make it this time.”

  “No, there's something wrong with it. I don't want it the way it is. I'll just wake up and try it some other time.”

  “Second stage called for,” Rousse cried. He did certain things with electrodes and with a needle into Miller's left rump, and sent him reeling back into the dream. “We'll make it,” Rousse encouraged. “We're there. It's everything you've sought.”

  “No, no, the light's all wrong. The sound was cracked. What are we coming to — oh no no, it's ruined, it's ruined forever. You robbed me of it.”

  What they came to was that little canal off the River and into the Sixth Street Slip to the little wharf where barges used to tie up by the consolidated warehouse. And it was there that Miller stormed angrily onto the rotten wooden wharf, past the old warehouse, up the hill three blocks and past his own apartment house, to the left three blocks and up into the analyst's office, and there the dream and reality came together.

  “You robbed me, you filthy fool,” Miller sputtered, waking up in a blathering anger. “You've spoiled it forever. I'll not go back to it. It isn't there anymore. What a crass thing to do.”

  “Easy, easy, Miller. You're cured now, you know. You can enter into your own full life again. Have you never heard the most beautiful parable ever, about the boy who went around the world in search of the strangest thing of all, and came to his own home in the end, and it so transfigured that he hardly knew it?”

  “It's a lie, is what it is. Oh, you've cured me, and you get your fee. And slyness is the name of your game. May somebody someday rob you of the ultimate thing!”

  “I hope not, Miller.”

  Rousse had been making his preparations for a full twenty-four hours. He had cancelled appointments and phased out and transferred patients. He would not be available to anyone for some time, he did not know for how long a time. He had a hideout, an isolated point on a wind-ruffled lake. He needed no instrumentation, he believed he knew the direct way into it.

  “It's the real thing,” he told himself. “I've seen the shape of it, accidentally in the dream sky that hung over it. Billions of people have been on the earth, and not a dozen have been to it; and not one would bother to put it into words. ‘I have seen such things —’ said Aquinas. ‘I have seen such things —’ said John of the Cross. ‘I have seen such things —’ said Plato. And they all lived out the rest of their lives in a glorious daze.

  “It is too good for a peasant like Miller. I'll grab it for myself.”

  It came easy. An old leather couch is as good a craft as any to go there. First the Earth Basic and the Permeating Ocean, that came natural on the wind-ruffled point of the lake. Then the ritual offering, the Precursor Dream. Rousse had thrown a number of things into this: a tonal piece by Gideon Styles, an old seascape by Grobin that had a conic and dreamlike quality, Lyall's curious sculpture “Moon crabs,” a funny sea tale by McVey and a poignant one by Gironella. It was pretty good. Rousse understood this dream business. Then the Precursor Dream was allowed to fade back. And it was off toward the North Shore by a man in the first craft ever dreamed up, by a man who knew just what he wanted, “The Thing Itself,” by a man who would give all the days of his life to arrive at it.

  Rousse understood the approaches and the shoals now; he had studied them thoroughly. He knew that, however different they had seemed each time in the dreams of Miller, they were always essentially the same. He took the land right at the first rounding of the point, leaping clear and letting his launch smash on the rocks.

  “There will be no going back now,” he said, “it was the going back that always worried Miller, that caused him to fail.” The cliffs here appeared forbidding, but Rousse had seen again and again the little notch in the high purple of them, the path over. He followed the path with high excitement and cleared the crest.

  “Here Basho walked, here Aquin, here John de Yepes,” he proclaimed, and he came down toward the North Shore itself, with the fog over it beginning to lift.

  “You be false captain with a stolen launch,” said a small leviathan offshore.

  “No, no, I dreamed the launch myself,” Rousse maintained. “I'll not be stopped.”

  “I will not stop you,” said the small leviathan. “The launch is smashed, and none but I know that you are false captain.”

  Why, it was clearing now! The land began to leap out in its richness, and somewhere ahead was a glorious throng. In the throat of a pass was a monokeros, sleek and brindled.

  “None passes here and lives,” said the monokeros.

  “I pass,” said Rousse.

  He passed through, and there was a small moan behind him.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “You died,” said the monokeros.

  “Oh, so I'm dead on my couch, am I? It won't matter. I hadn't wanted to go back.”

  He went forward over the ensorcelled and pinnacled land, hearing the rakish and happy throng somewhere ahead.

  “I must not lose my way now,” said Rousse. And there was a stele, standing up and telling him the way with happy carved words.

  Rousse read it, and he entered the shore itself.

  And all may read and enter.

  The stele, the final marker, was headed:

  Which None May Read and Return

  And the words on it—

  And the words—

  And the words—

  Let go! You're holding on! You're afraid! Read it and take it. It is not blank!

  It's carved clear and bright.

  Read it and enter.

  You're afraid.

  Eurema's Dam

  He was about the last of them. What? The last of the great individualists? The last of the true creative geniuses of the century? The last of the sheer precursors?

  No. No. He was the last of the dolts.

  Kids were being born smarter all the time when he came along, and they would be so forever more. He was about the last dumb kid ever born.

  Even his mother had to admit that Albert was a slow child. What else can you call a boy who doesn't begin to talk till he is four years old, who won't learn to handle a spoon till he is six, who can't operate a doorknob till he is eight? What else can you say about one who put his shoes on the wrong feet and walked in pain? And who had to be told to close his mouth after yawning? Some things would always be beyond him—like whether it was the big hand or the little hand of the clock that told the hours. But this wasn't something serious. He never did care what time it was.

  When, about the middle of his ninth year, Albert made a breakthrough at telling his right hand from his left, he did it by the most ridiculous set of mnemonics ever put together. It had to do with the way a dog turns around before lying down, the direction of whirlpools and whirlwinds, the side a cow is milked from and a horse is mounted from, the direction of twist of oak and sycamore leaves, the maze patterns of rock moss and of tree moss, the cleavage of limestone, the direction of a hawk's wheeling, of a shrike's hunting, and of a snake's coiling (remembering that the mountain boomer is an exception, and that it isn't a true snake), the lay of cedar fronds and of balsam fronds, the twist of a hole dug by a skunk and by a badger (remembering pungently that skunks sometimes use old badger holes). Well, Albert finally learned to remember which was right and which was left, but an observant boy would have learned his right hand from his left without all that nonsense.

  Albert never learned to write a readable hand. To get by in school he cheated. From a bicycle speedometer, a midget motor, tiny eccentric cams, and batteries stolen from his grandfather's hearing aid, Albert made a machine to write for him. It was small as a doodlebug and fitted onto a pen or pencil so that Albert could conceal it with his fingers. It formed the letters beautifully as Albert had set the cams to follow a copybook model. He triggered the different letters with keys no b
igger than whiskers. Sure it was crooked, but what else can you do when you're too dumb to learn how to write passably?

  Albert couldn't figure at all. He had to make another machine to figure for him. It was a palm-of-the-hand thing that would add and subtract and multiply and divide. The next year when he was in the ninth grade they gave him algebra, and he had to devise a flipper to go on the end of his gadget to work quadratic and simultaneous equations. If it weren't for such cheating Albert wouldn't have gotten any marks at all in school.

  He had another difficulty when he came to his fifteenth year. People, that is an understatement. There should be a stronger word than “difficulty” for it. Albert was afraid of girls. What to do?

  “I will build me a machine that is not afraid of girls,” Albert said. He set to work on it. He had it nearly finished when a thought came to him: “But no machine is afraid of girls. How will this help me?”

  His logic was at fault and analogy broke down. He did what he always did. He cheated.

  He took the programming rollers out of an old player piano in the attic, found a gear case that would serve, used magnetized sheets instead of perforated music rolls, fed a copy of Wormwood's Logic into the matrix, and he had a logic machine that would answer questions.

  “What's the matter with me that I'm afraid of girls?” Albert asked his logic machine.

  “Nothing the matter with you,” the logic machine told him. “It's logical to be afraid of girls. They seem pretty spooky to me too.”

  “But what can I do about it?”

  “Wait for time and circumstances. They sure are slow. Unless you want to cheat—”

  “Yes, yes, what then?”

  “Build a machine that looks just like you, Albert, and talks just like you. Only make it smarter than you are, and not bashful. And, ah, Albert, there's a special thing you'd better put into it in case things go wrong. I'll whisper it to you. It's dangerous.”