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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Go back up, go back up,” the black man cried. He had an old rifle from the last century and he was shooting the crocodile with it.

  “Hey, he's shooting Justina too,” Mintgreen giggled too gaily. “Half of her is in the dragon thing. Oh, she will have some stories to tell about this! She has the best imagination of all of us.”

  “Let's get her out and together again,” Linter suggested. They were all shouting too loudly and too nervously. “She's missing the best part of it.”

  “Here, here, black man,” Shackleton called. “Can you get the half of my wife out of that thing and put her together again?”

  “Oh, white people, white people, this is real and this is death,” the black man moaned in agony. “This is a closed wild area. You should not be here at all. However you have come here, whatever is the real form of that balk or tree on which you stand so dangerously, be gone from here if you can do it. You do not know how to live in this. White people, be gone! It is your lives!”

  “One can command a fantasy,” said August Shackleton. “Black man fantasy, I command that you get the half of my wife out of that dying creature and put her together again.”

  “Oh, white people on dope, I cannot do this,” the black man moaned. “She is dead. And you joke and drink Green Bird and Bomb, and hoot like demented children in a dream.”

  “We are in a dream, and you are of the dream,” Shackleton said easily. “And we may experiment with our dream creatures. That is our purpose here. Here, catch a bottle of Roman Bomb!” and he threw it to the black man, who caught it.

  “Drink it,” said Shackleton. “I am interested in seeing whether a dream figure can make incursion on physical substance.”

  “Oh, white people on dope,” the black man moaned. “The watering place is no place for you to be. You excite the animals, and then they kill. When they are excited it is danger to me also who usually move among them easily. I have to kill the crocodile who is my friend. I do not want to kill others. I do not want more of you to be killed.”

  The black man was booted and jacketed quite in the manner of a hunting store outing, this possibly by the careful imagining of Boyle who loved hunting rig. The black Mummers-Night mask was contorted in agony and apprehension, but the black man did drink the Roman Bomb nervously the while he begged them to be gone from that place.

  “You will notice that the skull form is quite human and the bearing completely erect,” Linter said. “You will notice also that he is less hairy than we are and is thick of lip, while the great ape is more hairy and thin of lip. I had imagined them to be the same creature differently interpreted.”

  “No, you imagine them to be as they appear,” Shackleton said. “It is your imagining of these two creatures that we are watching.”

  “But notice the configuration of the tempora and the mandible shape,” Linter protested, “—not what I expected.”

  “You are the only one of us who knows about tempora and mandible shape,” said Shackleton. “I tell you that it is your own imagery. He is structured by you, given the conventional Mummers-Night black-mask by all of us, clothed by Boyle, and speeches by Luna Boyle. His production is our joint effort. Watch it, everyone! It becomes dangerous now, even explosive! Man, I'm getting as hysterical as my wife! The dream is so vivid that it has its hooks in me. Ah, it's a great investigative experience, but I doubt if I'll want to return to this particular experience again. Green perdition! But it does become dangerous! Watch out, everyone!”

  Ah, it had become wild: a hooting and screaming and bawling wild Africa bedlam, a green and tawny dazzle of fast-moving color, pungent animal stench of fear and murder, and smell of human fear.

  A lion defiled the watering place, striking down a horned buck in the muddy shallows and going muzzle-deep into the hot-colored gore. A hippo erupted out of the water, a behemoth from the depths. Giraffes erected like crazily articulated derricks and galloped ungainly through the boscage.

  “Enough of this!” cried Mintgreen Linter. Frightened, she took the lead, incanting:

  “That the noon-time nightmare pass! The crocodile-dragon and the behemoth.”

  “We abjure them, we abjure them,” they all chanted in various voices.

  “That the black man and the black ape pass, and all black things of the black-green land.”

  “We abjure them, we abjure them,” they chanted. But the black man was already down under the feet and horns of a buffalo creature, dead, and his last rifle shot still echoing. He had tried to prevent the buffalo from upsetting the teetering bole and dumping all the white people into the murder swamp. The great ape was also gone, terrified, back to his high-grass savannas. Many of the other creatures had disappeared or become faint, and there was again the tang of salt water and of distant hot-sand beaches.

  “That the lion be gone who roars by day,” Luna Boyle took up the incantation, “and the leopard who is Pan-Ther, the all-animal of grisly mythology. That the crushing snakes be gone, and the giant ostrich, and the horse in the clown suit.”

  “We abjure them all, we abjure them all,” everybody chanted.

  “That the True Believer form again beneath our feet in the structure we can see and know,” August Shackleton incanted.

  “We conjure it up, we conjure it up,” they chanted, and the True Believer rose again barely above the threshold of the senses.

  “That the illicit continents fade, and all the baleful islands of our writhing under-minds!” Boyle blurted in some trepidation.

  “We abjure them, we abjure them,” they all chanted contritely. And the illicit Africa had now become quite fragile, while the Cinnamon Coast of South Libya started to form as if behind green glass.

  “Let us finish it! It lingers unhealthily!” Shackleton spoke loudly with resolve. “Let us drop our reservations! That we dabble no more in this particular illicitness! That we go no more hungering after strange geographies that are not of proper world! That we seal off the unsettling things inside us!”

  “We seal them off, we seal them off,” they chanted.

  And it was finished.

  They were on the True Believer, sailing in an easterly direction off the Cinnamon Coast of Libya. To the north was that lovely coast with its wonderful beaches and remarkable hotels. To the south and east were the white-topped waves that went on for ever and ever. It was over with, but the incantation had shaken them all with the sheer psychic power of it. “Justina isn't with us,” Luna Boyle said nervously. “She isn't on the True Believer anywhere. Do you think something has happened to her? Will she come back?”

  “Of course she'll come back,” August Shackleton purred. “She was truant from a séance for two days once. Oh, she'll have some good ones to tell when she does come back, and I'll rather enjoy the vacation from her. I love her, but a man married to an outré wife needs a rest from it sometimes.”

  “But look, look!” Luna Boyle cried. “Oh, she's impossible! She always did carry an antic too far. That's in bad taste.”

  The severed lower half of Justina Shackleton floated in the clear blue water beside the True Believer. It was bloodied and gruesome and was being attacked by slashing fishes.

  “Oh, stop it, Justina!” August Shackleton called angrily. “What a woman! Ah, I see it now. We turn to land.”

  It was the opening to the Yacht Basin, the channel through the beach shallows to the fine harbor behind. They tacked, they turned, they nosed in towards the Cinnamon Coast of Libya.

  The world was intact again, one whole and perfect jewel, lying wonderful to the north of them. And south was only great ocean and great equator and empty places of the under-mind. The True Believer came to port passage with the perfect bright noon-time on all things.

  Old Foot Forgot

  “Dookh-Doctor, it is a sphairikos patient,” Lay Sister Moira P. T. de C. cried happily. “It is a genuine spherical alien patient. You've never had one before, not in good faith. I believe it is what you need to distract you from the—ah—happy news
about yourself. It is good for a Dookh-Doctor to have a different patient sometimes.” “Thank you, lay sister. Let it, him, her, fourth case, fifth case or whatever come in. No, I've never had a sphairikos in good faith. I doubt if this one is, but I will enjoy the encounter.”

  The sphairikos rolled or pushed itself in. It was a big one, either a blubbery kid or a full-grown one. It rolled itself along by extruding and withdrawing pseudopods. And it came to rest grinning, a large translucent rubbery ball of fleeting colors.

  “Hello, Dookh-Doctor,” it said pleasantly. “First I wish to extend my own sympathy and that of my friends who do not know how to speak to you for the happy news about yourself. And secondly I have an illness of which you may cure me.”

  “But the sphairikoi are never ill,” Dookh-Doctor Drague said dutifully.

  How did he know that the round creature was grinning at him? By the colors, of course; by the fleeting colors of it. They were grinning colors.

  “My illness is not of the body but of the head,” said the sphairikos.

  “But the sphairikoi have no heads, my friend.”

  “Then it is of another place and another name, Dookh-Doctor. There is a thing in me suffering. I come to you as a Dookh-Doctor. I have an illness in my Dookh.”

  “That is unlikely in a sphairikos. You are all perfectly balanced, each a cosmos unto yourself. And you have a central solution that solves everything. What is your name?”

  “Krug Sixteen, which is to say that I am the sixteenth son of Krug; the sixteen fifth case son, of course. Dookh-Doc, the pain is not in me entirely; it is in an old forgotten part of me.”

  “But you sphairikoi have no parts, Krug Sixteen. You are total and indiscriminate entities. How would you have parts?”

  “It is one of my pseudopods, extended and then withdrawn in much less than a second long ago when I was a little boy. It protests, it cries, it wants to come back. It has always bothered me, but now it bothers me intolerably. It screams and moans constantly now.”

  “Do not the same ones ever come back?”

  “No. Never. Never exactly the same ones. Will exactly the same water ever run past one point in a brook? No. We push them out and we draw them back. And we push them out again, millions of times. But the same one can never come back. There is no identity. But this one cries to come back, and now it becomes more urgent. Dookh-Doc, how can it be? There is not one same molecule in it as when I was a boy. There is nothing of that pseudopod that is left; but parts of it have come out as parts of other pseudopods, and now there can be no parts left. There is nothing remaining of that foot; it has all been absorbed a million times. But it cries out! And I have compassion on it.”

  “Krug Sixteen, it may possibly be a physical or mechanical difficulty, a pseudopod imperfectly withdrawn, a sort of rupture whose effects you interpret wrongly. In that case it would be better if you went to your own doctors, or doctor: I understand that there is one.”

  “That old fogey cannot help me, Dookh-Doc. And our pseudopods are always perfectly withdrawn. We are covered with the twinkling salve; it is one-third of our bulk. And if we need more of it we can make more of it ourselves; or we can beg some of it from a class four who make it prodigiously. It is the solvent for everything. It eases every possible wound; it makes us round as balls; you should use it yourself, Dookh-Doc. But there is one small foot in me, dissolved long ago, that protests and protests. Oh, the shrieking! The horrible dreams!”

  “But the sphairikoi do not sleep and do not dream.”

  “Right enough, Dookh-Doc. But there's an old dead foot of mine that sure does dream loud and wooly.”

  The sphairikos was not grinning now. He rolled about softly in apprehension. How did the Dookh-Doctor know that it was apprehension? By the fleeting colors. They were apprehension colors now.

  “Krug Sixteen, I will have to study your case,” said the Dookh-Doctor. “I will see if there are any references to it in the literature, though I don't believe that there are. I will seek for analogy. I will probe every possibility. Can you come back at the same hour tomorrow?”

  “I will come back, Dookh-Doc,” Krug Sixteen sighed. “I hate to feel that small vanished thing crying and trembling.”

  It rolled or pushed itself out of the clinic by extruding and then withdrawing pseudopods. The little pushers came out of the goopy surface of the sphairikos and then were withdrawn into it completely. A raindrop falling in a pond makes a much more lasting mark than does the disappearing pseudopod of a sphairikos.

  But long ago, in his boyhood, one of the pseudopods of Krug Sixteen had not disappeared completely in every respect.

  “There are several jokers waiting,” Lay Sister Moira P. T. de C. announced a little later, “and perhaps some valid patients among them. It's hard to tell.” “Not another sphairikos?” the Dookh-Doctor asked in sudden anxiety.

  “Of course not. The one this morning is the only sphairikos who has ever come. How could there be anything wrong with him? There is never anything wrong with a sphairikos. No, these are all of the other species. Just a regular morning bunch.”

  So, except for the visitation of the sphairikos, it was a regular morning at the clinic. There were about a dozen waiting, of the several species; and at least half of them would be jokers. It was always so.

  There was a lean and giddy subula. One cannot tell the age or sex of them. But there was a tittering. In all human or inhuman expression, whether of sound, color, radioray or osmerhetor, the titter suggests itself. It is just around the corner, it is just outside, it is subliminal, but it is there somewhere. “It is that my teeth hurt so terrible,” the subula shrilled so high that the Dookh-Doctor had to go on instruments to hear it. “They are tromping pain. They are agony. I think I will cut my head off. Have you a head-off cutter, Dookh-Doctor?”

  “Let me see your teeth,” Dookh-Doctor Drague asked with the beginnings of irritation.

  “There is one tooth jump up and down with spike boot,” the subula shrilled. “There is one jag like poisoned needle. There is one cuts like coarse rough saw. There is one burns like little hot fires.”

  “Let me see your teeth,” the Dookh-Doctor growled evenly.

  “There is one drills holes and sets little blasting powder in them,” the subula shrilled still more highly. “Then he sets them off. Ow! Good night!”

  “Let me see your teeth!!”

  “Peeef!” the subula shrilled. The teeth cascaded out, half a bushel of them, ten thousand of them, all over the floor of the clinic.

  “Peeef,” the subula screeched again, and ran out of the clinic.

  Tittering? (But he should have remembered that the subula have no teeth.) Tittering? It was the laughing of demented horses. It was the jackhammer braying of the dolcus, it was the hysterical giggling of the ophis (they were a half a bushel of shells of the little stink conchs and they were already beginning to rot), it was the clown laughter of the arktos (the clinic would never be habitable again; never mind, he would burn it down and build another one tonight).

  The jokers, the jokers, they did have their fun with him, and perhaps it did them some good.

  “I have this trouble with me,” said a young dolcus, “but it make me so nervous to tell it. Oh, it do make me nervous to tell it to the Dookh-Doc.”

  “Do not be nervous,” said the Dookh-Doctor, fearing the worst. “Tell the your trouble in whatever way you can. I am here to serve every creature that is in any trouble or pain whatsoever. Tell it.”

  “Oh but it make me so nervous. I perish. I shrivel. I will have accident I am so nervous.”

  “Tell me your trouble, my friend. I am here to help.”

  “Whoops, whoops, I already have accident! I tell you I am nervous.”

  The dolcus urinated largely on the clinic floor. Then it ran out laughing.

  The laughing, the shrilling, the braying, the shrill giggling that seemed to scrape the flesh from his bones. (He should have remembered that the dolcus do not urinate; everyth
ing comes from them hard and solid.) The hooting, the laughing! It was a bag of green water from the kolmula swamp. Even the aliens gagged at it, and their laughter was of a pungent green sort.

  Oh well, there were several of the patients with real, though small, ailments, and there were more jokers. There was the arktos who— (Wait, wait, that particular jokerie cannot be told with human persons present; even the subula and the ophis blushed lavender at the rawness of it. A thing like that can only be told to arktos themselves.) And there was another dolcus who—

  Jokers, jokers, it was a typical morning at the clinic.

  One does whatever one can for the oneness that is greater than self. In the case of Dookh-Doctor Drague it meant considerable sacrifice. One who works with the strange species here must give up all hope of material reward or material sophistication in his surroundings. But the Dookh-Doctor was a dedicated man.

  Oh, the Dookh-Doctor lived pleasantly and with a sort of artful simplicity and dynamic involvement in the small articles of life. He had an excited devotion and balanced intensity for corporate life.

  He lived in small houses of giolach-weed, woven with careful double-rappel. He lived in each one for seven days only, and then burned it and scattered the ashes, taking always one bitter glob of them on his tongue for reminder of the fleetingness of temporal things and the wonderfulness of the returning. To live in one house for more than seven days is to become dull and habitual; but the giolach-weed will not burn well till it has been cut and plaited for seven days, so the houses set their own terms. One half day to build, seven days to inhabit, one half day to burn ritually and scatter, one renewal night under the speir-sky.