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

by R. A. Lafferty

  There are those who say that our rational and perfect world would steep itself in this great unconscious geography of the under-mind, in the outré fauna and the incredible continents of the tortured imagination and of black legends. They pretend that this world would give us depth.

  We do not want depth. We want height! Let us seal off the under-things of the under-mind, and exalt ourselves! And our unease will pass.

  —Exaltation Philosophy

  Audifax O'Hanlon

  The True Believer was sailing offshore in an easterly direction in the latitude of fifteen degrees north and the longitude of twenty-four degrees east. To the north of the coasting ship was the beautiful Cinnamon Coast of Libya with its wonderful beaches and its remarkable hotels tawny in the distance. To the east and south and west were the white-topped waves that went on for ever and ever. The True Believer sailed along the southernmost edge of the ecumene, the habitable and inhabited world.

  August Shackleton was drinking Roman Bomb out of a potbellied bottle and yelping happily as he handled the wheel of the True Believer:

  “It's a kids' thing to do,” he yipped, “but there were never such beautiful waters to do it in. We try to call in outer spirits. We try to call up inner spirits and lands. It's a children's antic. Why do we do it, Boyle, other than for the fun of it?”

  “Should there be another reason, Shackleton? Well, there is; but we go about it awkwardly and without knowing what we're doing. The thing about humans which nobody apparently wishes to notice, is that we're a species which has never had an adult culture. We feel that lack more and more as we become truly adult in other ways. It grows tedious to stretch out a childhood forever. The easy enjoyments, the easy rationality, the easy governments and sciences, are really childish things. We master them while we are yet children, and we look beyond. But there isn't anything beyond the childishness, Shackleton. We must find a deeper view somehow. We are looking for that something deeper here.”

  “What? By going on a lark that is childish even to children, Boyle? I was ashamed in front of my sons when I confessed on what sort of diversion I was going. First there were the séances that we indulged in. If we raised any spirits there, they were certainly childish ones. And now we're on this voyage on the True Believer. We're looking for the geographical home of certain collective unconscious images! Why shouldn't the children hoot at us? Ah well, let us not be too ashamed. It's colorful and stimulating fun, but it isn't adult.”

  The other four members of the party, Sebastian Linter and the three wives, Justitia Shackleton, Luna Boyle, and Mintgreen Linter, were swimming in the blue ocean. The True Believer was coasting very slowly and the four swimmers were clipped to outrigger towlines.

  “There's something wrong with the water!” Justina Shackleton suddenly called up to her husband. “There's weeds in it, and there shouldn't be. There's reeds in it, and swamp grasses. There's mud. And there's green slime!”

  “You're out of your lovely head, lovely,” Shackleton called back. “It's all clear blue water off a sand coast. I can see fish twenty meters down. It's clear.”

  “I tell you it's full of green slime!” Justina called back. “It's so thick and heavy that it almost tears me away from the line. And the insects are so fierce that I have to stay submerged.”

  But they were off the Cinnamon Coast of Libya. They could smell the warm sand, and the watered gardens ashore. There was no mud, there was no slime, there were no insects off the Cinnamon Coast ever. It was all clear and bright as living, moving glass.

  Sebastian Linter had been swimming on the seaward side of the ship. Now he came up ropes to the open deck of the ship, and he was bleeding.

  “It is thick, Shackleton,” he panted. “It's full of snags and it's dangerous. And that fanged hog could have killed me. Get the rest of them out of the water!”

  “Linter, you can see for yourself that it is clear everywhere. Clear, and of sufficient depth, and serene.”

  “Sure, I see that it is, Shackleton. Only it isn't. What we are looking for has already begun. The illusion has already happened to all senses except sight. Stuff it, Shackleton! Get them out of the water! The snakes and the crocs will get them. The animals threshing around in the mud will get them. And if they try to climb up into the short, the beasts there will break them up and tear them to pieces.”

  “Linter, we're two thousand meters off shore and everything is clear. But you are disturbed. Oof, so am I! The ship has grounded, and it's fifty meters deep here. All right, everyone! I order everybody except my wife to come out of the water! I request that she come out. I am unable to order her to do anything.”

  The other two women, Luna Boyle and Mintgreen Linter, came out of the water. And Justina Shackleton did not.

  “In a while, August, in a while I come,” Justina called up to the ship. “I'm in the middle of a puzzle here and I want to study it some more. August, can a hallucination snap you in two? He sure is making the motions.”

  “I don't know, lovely,” August Shackleton called back to her doubtfully.

  Luna Boyle and Mintgreen Linter had come out of the ocean up the ropes. Luna was covered with green slime and was bleeding variously. Mintgreen was covered with weeds and mud, and her hands and feet were torn. And she hobbled with pain.

  “Is your foot broken, darling?” Sebastian Linter asked her with almost concern, “But of course, it is all illusion.”

  “I have the illusion that my foot is broken,” Mintgreen sniffled, “and I have the illusion that I am in very great pain. Bleeding blubberfish, I wish it were real! It wouldn't really hurt this much.”

  “Oh, elephant hokey!” Boyle stormed. “These illusions are nonsense. There can't be such an ambient creeping around us. We're not experiencing anything.”

  “Yes we are, Boyle,” Shackleton said nervously. “And your expression is an odd one at this moment. For the elephant was historical in the India that is, was fantastic in the further India that is fantastic, and is still more fanciful in its African contingency. In a moment we will try to conjure up the African elephant which is twice the mass of the historical Indian elephant. The ship is dragging badly now and might even break up if this continues, but the faro shows no physical contact. All right, the five of us on deck will put our heads together for this. You lend us a head too, Justina!”

  “Take it, take my head. I'm about to let that jawful snapper have my body anyhow. August, this stuff is real! Don't tell me I imagine that smell,” Justina called.

  “We will all try to imagine that smell, and other things,” August Shackleton stated as he uncorked another bottle of Roman Bomb. In the visible world there was still the Cinnamon Coast of Libya, and the blue ocean going on forever. But in another visible world, completely unrelated to the first and occupying absolutely a different space (but both occupying total space), were the green swamps of Africa, the sedgy shores going sometimes back into rain forests and sometimes into savannas, the moon mountains rising behind them, the air sometimes heavy mist and sometimes clear with scalding light, the fifth levels of noises, the hundred levels of colors.

  “The ambient is forming nicely even before we start,” Shackleton purred. Some of them drank Roman Bomb and some of them Green Canary as they readied themselves for the psychic adventure.

  “We begin the conjure,” Shackleton said, “and the conjure begins with words. Our little group has been involved in several sorts of investigations, foolish ones perhaps, to discover whether there are (or more importantly, to be sure that there are not) physical areas and creatures beyond those of the closed ecumene. We have gone on knob-knockers, we have held séances. The séances in particular were grotesque, and I believe we were all uneasy and guilty about them. Our Faith forbids us to evoke spirits. But where does it forbid us to evoke geographies?”

  “Ease up a little on the evoking!” Justina shrilled up at them. “The snapper just took me off at the left ankle. I pray he doesn't like my taste.”

  “It has been a
mystery for centuries,” said August (somewhat disturbed by his wife's vulgar outburst from the ocean), “that out of the folk unconscious there should well up ideas of continents that are not in the world, continents with highly imaginary flora and fauna, continents with highly imaginary people. It is a further mystery that these psychic continents and islands should be given bearings, and that apparently sane persons have claimed to visit them. The deepest mystery of all is Africa. Africa, in Roman days, was a subdivision of Mauretania, which was a subdivision of Libya, one of the three parts of the world. And yet the entire coast of Libya has been mapped correctly for three thousand years, and there is no Africa beyond, either appended or separate. We prove the nonsense of it by sailing in clear ocean through the middle of that pretended continent.”

  “We prove the nonsense further by getting our ship mired in a swamp in the middle of the imaginary continent and seeing that continent begin to form about us,” said Boyle. His Green Canary tasted funny to him. There was a squalling pungency in the air and something hair-raisingly foreign in the taste of the drink.

  “This is all like something out of Carlo Forte,” Linter laughed unsteadily.

  “The continental ambient forms about us,” said Shackleton. “Now we will evoke the creatures. First let us conjure the great animals: the rhinoceros, the lion, the leopard, the elephant, which all have Asian Counterparts; but these of the contingent Africa are to be half again or twice the size, and incomparably fierce.”

  “We conjure them, we conjure them,” they all chanted, and the conjured creatures appeared mistily.

  “We conjure the hippopotamus, the water behemoth, with its great comical bulk, its muzzle like a scoop shovel, and its eyes standing up like big balls—”

  “Stop it, August!” Justina Shackleton shrieked from the water. “I don't know whether the hippo is playful or not, but he's going to crush me in a minute.”

  “Come out of the water, Justina!” August ordered sternly.

  “I will not. There isn't any ship left for me to come to. You're all sitting on a big, slippery, broken tree out over the water, and the snappers and boas are coming very near your legs and necks.”

  “Yes, I suppose so, one way of looking it,” August said. “Now everybody conjure the animals that are compounded out of grisly humor, the giraffe with a neck alone that is longer than a horse, and the zebra which is a horse in a clown suit.”

  “We conjure them, we conjure,” they all chanted.

  “The zebra isn't as funny as I thought it would be.” Boyle complained. “Nothing is as funny as I thought it would be.”

  “Conjure the great snake that is a thousand times heavier than other snakes, that can swallow a wild ass,” Shackleton gave them the lead.

  “We conjure it, we conjure it,” they all chanted.

  “August, it's over your head, reaching down out of the giant mimosa trees,” Justina screamed warning from the swamp. “There's ten meters of it reaching down for you.”

  “Conjure the crocodile,” Shackleton intoned. “Not the little crocodile of the River of Egypt, but the big crocodile of deeper Africa that can swallow a cow.”

  “We conjure it, we imagine it, we evoke it, and the swamps and estuaries in which it lives,” they all chanted.

  “Easy on that one,” Justina shrilled. “He's been taking me by little pieces. Now he's taking me by big pieces.”

  “Conjure the ostrich,” Shackleton intoned,” the bird that is a thousand times as heavy as other birds, that stands a meter taller than a man, that kicks like a mule, the bird that is too heavy to fly. I wonder what delirium first invented such a wildlife as Africa's, anyhow?”

  “We conjure it, we conjure it,” they chanted.

  “Conjure the great walking monkey that is three times as heavy as a man,” August intoned. “Conjure a somewhat smaller one, two-thirds the size of man, that grins and gibbers and understands speech, that could speak if he wished.”

  “We conjure them, we conjure them.”

  “Conjure the third of the large monkeys that is dog-faced and purple of arse.”

  “We conjure it, we conjure it, but it belongs in a comic strip.”

  “Conjure the gentle monster, the okapi that is made out of pieces of the antelope and camel and contingent giraffe, and which likewise wears a clown suit.”

  “We conjure it, we conjure it.”

  “Conjure the multitudinous antelopes, koodoo, nyala, hartebeest, oryx, bongo, klipspringer, gemsbok, all so out of keeping with a warm country, all such grotesque takeoffs of the little alpine antelope.”

  “We conjure them, we conjure them.”

  “Conjure the buffalo that is greater than all other buffalo or cattle, that has horns as wide as a shield. Conjure the quagga. I forget its pretended appearance, but it cannot be ordinary.”

  “We conjure it, we conjure it.”

  “We come to the top of it all! Conjure the most anthropomorphic group in the entire unconsciousness: men who are men indeed, but who are as black as midnight in a hazel grove, who are long of angle and metatarsals and lower limb so they can run and leap uncommonly, who have crumpled hair and are massive of feature. Conjure another variety that are only half as tall as them. Conjure a third sort that are short of stature and prodigious of hips.”

  “We conjure them, we conjure them,” they all chanted. “They are the caricatures from the beginning.”

  “But can all these animals appear at one time?” Boyle protested. “Even on a contingent continent dredged out of the folk unconsciousness there would be varieties of climates and land-form. All would not be together.”

  “This is rhapsody, this is panorama, this is Africa,” said Lima Boyle.

  And they were all totally in the middle of Africa, on a slippery bole of a broken tree that teetered over a green swamp. And the animals were around them in the rain forests and the savannas, on the shore, and in the green swamp. And a man black as midnight was there, his face broken with emotion.

  Justina Shackleton screamed horribly as the crocodile sliced her in two. She still screamed from inside the gulping beast as one might scream under water.

  2

  The Ecumene, the world island, has the shape of an egg 110° from East to West and 45° from North to South. It is scored into three parts, Europa, Asia, and Libya. It is scored by the incurring seas, Europa from Asia by the Pontus and the Hurcanum Seas, Asia from Libya by the Persian Sea, and Libya from Europa by the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas (the Mediterranean Complex). The most westerly part of the world is Curuna in Iberia or Spain, the most northerly is Kharkovsk in Scythia or Russia, the most easterly is Sining in Han or China, the most southerly is the Cinnamon Coast of Libya.

  The first chart of the world, that of Eratothenes, was thus, and it was perfect. Whether he had it from primitive revelation or from early exploration, it was correct in minor detail. Though Britain seems to have been charted as an Island rather than a Peninisula, this may be an error of an early copyist. A Britain unjoined to the Main would shrivel, as a branch hewed from a tree will shrivel and die. There are no viable islands.

  All islands fade and drift and disappear. Sometimes they reappear briefly, but there is no life in them. The juice of life flows through the continent only. It is the One Land, The Living And Holy Land, The Entire And Perfect Jewel.

  Thus, Ireland is seen sometimes, or Hy-Brasil, or the American rock-lands: but they are not always seen in the same places, and they do not always have the same appearance. They have neither life nor reality.

  The secret geographies and histories of the American Society and the Atlantis Society and such are esoteric lodge-group things, symbolic and murky, forms for the initiated; they contain analogs and not realities.

  The ecumene must grow, of course, but it grows inwardly in intensity and meaning; its form cannot change. The form is determined from the beginning, just as the form of a man is determined before he is born. A man does not grow by adding more limbs or heads. That the ecumen
e should grow appendages would be as grotesque as a man growing a tail.

  —World As Perfection

  Diogenes Pontifex

  August Shackleton guffawed nervously when his wife was sliced in two and the half of her swallowed by the crocodile; and his hand that held the Roman Bomb trembled. Indeed, there was something unnerving about the whole thing. That cutoff screaming of Justina Shackleton had something shocking and unpleasant about it.

  Justina had once gone hysterical at a séance when the ghosts and appearances had been more or less conventional, but August was never sure just how sincere her hysteria was. Another time she had disappeared for several days from a séance, from a locked room, and had come back with a roguish story about being in spirit land. She was a high-strung clown with a sense of the outrageous, and this present business of being chopped in two was typical of her creations.

  And suddenly they were all explosively creative, each one's subjective patterns intermingling with those of the other to produce howling chaos. What had been the ship the True Believer, what had been the slippery overhanging bole, had now come dangerously down into the swamp. They all wanted a closer look.

  There was screaming and trumpeting, there was color and surge and threshing mass. The crocodile bellowed as a bull might, not at all as Shackleton believed that a croc should sound. But someone there had the idea that a crocodile should bellow like that, and that someone had imposed his ideate on the others. Unhorselike creatures whinnied, and vivid animals sobbed and gurgled.

  “Go back up, go back up!” the black man was bleating. “You will all be killed here.”

  His face was a true Mummers-Night black-man mask. One of the party was imagining strongly in that stereotyped form. But the incongruous thing about the black man was that he was gibbering at them in French, in bad French as though it were his weak second language. Which one of them was linguist enough to invent such a black French on the edge of the moment? Luna Boyle, of course. But why had she put grotesque French into the month of a black man in contingent Africa?