Young Charles Archer knew that this was a crossroads of the world. Whichever turning was taken, it would predicate a certain sort of nation and world and humanity. He thought about it deeply. Then he decided. He went out and invested his entire inheritance in his choice.
“I considered the two investments and I made my choice,” said Charles Archer, the old man now in the now present. “I put all I had into it, thirty-five thousand dollars, a considerable sum in those days. You know the results.” “I am one of the results, Great-grandfather,” said Angela Archer. “If you had invested differently you would have come to different fortune, you would have married differently, and I would be different or not at all. I like me here and now. I like everything as it is.”
Three of them were out riding early one Saturday morning, the old man Charles Archer, his great-granddaughter Angela, and her fiancé Peter Brady. They were riding through the quasiurbia, the rich countryside. It was not a main road, and yet it had a beauty (partly natural and partly contrived) that was as exciting as it was satisfying.
Water always beside the roadway, that was the secret! There were the carp ponds one after another. There were the hatcheries. There were the dancing rocky streams that in a less enlightened age might have been mere gutter runs or roadway runs. There were the small and rapid trout streams, and boys were catching big trout from them.
There were the deep bush-trees there, sumac, witch hazel, sassafras—incense trees they might almost have been. There were the great trees themselves, pecan and hickory and black walnut, standing like high backdrops; and between were the lesser trees, willow, Cottonwood, sycamore. Catheads and sedge grass and reeds stood in the water itself, and tall Sudan grass and bluestem on the shores. And always the clovers there, and the smell of wet sweet clover.
“I chose the wrong one,” said old Charles Archer as they rode along through the textured country. “One can now see how grotesque was my choice, but I was young. In two years, the stock-selling company in which I had invested was out of business and my loss was total. So early and easy riches were denied me, but I developed an ironic hobby: keeping track of the stock of the enterprise in which I did not invest. The stock I could have bought for thirty-five thousand dollars would now make me worth nine million dollars.”
“Ugh, don't talk of such a thing on such a beautiful day,” Angela objected.
“They heard another of them last night,” Peter Brady commented. “They've been hearing this one, off and on, for a week now, and haven't caught him yet.”
“I always wish they wouldn't kill them when they catch them,” Angela bemoaned. “It doesn't seem quite right to kill them.”
A goose-girl was herding her white honking charges as they gobbled weeds out of fields of morning onions. Flowering kale was shining green-purple, and okra plants were standing. Jersey cows grazed along the roadway, and the patterned plastic (almost as patterned as the grasses) filled the roadway itself.
There were clouds like yellow dust in the air. Bees! Stingless bees they were. But dust itself was not. That there never be dust again!
“They will have to find out and kill the sly klunker makers,” said old man Charles Archer. “Stop the poison at its source.”
“There's too many of them, and too much money in it,” said Peter Brady. “Yes, we kill them. One of them was found and killed Thursday, and three nearly finished klunkers were destroyed. But we can't kill them all. They seem to come out of the ground like snakes.”
“I wish we didn't have to kill them,” Angela said.
There were brightly colored firkins of milk standing on loading stoas, for this was a milk shed. There were chickens squawking in nine-story-high coops as they waited the pickups, but they never had to wait long. Here were a thousand dozen eggs on a refrigeration porch; there a clutch of piglings, or of red steers.
Tomato plants were staked two meters high. Sweet corn stood, not yet come to tassel. They passed cucumber vines and cantaloupe vines, and the potato hills rising up blue-green. Ah, there were grapevines in their tight acres, deep alfalfa meadows, living fences of Osage orange and whitethorn. Carrot tops zephyred like green lace. Cattle were grazing fields of red clover and of peanuts—that most magic of all clovers. Men mowed hay.
“I hear him now!” Peter Brady said suddenly.
“You couldn't. Not in the daytime. Don't even think of such a thing,” Angela protested.
Farm ducks were grazing with their heads under water in the roadway ponds and farm ponds. Bower oaks grew high in the roadway parks. Sheep fed in hay grazer that was higher than their heads; they were small white islands in it. There was local wine and choc beer and cider for sale at small booths, along with limestone sculpture and painted fruitwood carvings. Kids danced on loading stoas to little post-mounted music canisters, and goats licked slate outcroppings in search of some new mineral.
The Saturday riders passed a roadway restaurant with its tables out under the leaves and under a little rock overhang. A one-meter-high waterfall gushed through the middle of the establishment, and a two-meter-long bridge of set shale stone led to the kitchen. Then they broke onto view after never-tiring view of the rich and varied quasiurbia. The roadway forms, the fringe farms, the berry patches! In their seasons: Juneberries, huckleberries, blueberries, dewberries, elderberries, highbush cranberries, red raspberries, boysenberries, loganberries, nine kinds of blackberries, strawberries, greenberries.
Orchards! Can there ever be enough orchards? Plum, peach, sand plum and chokecherry, black cherry, apple and crab apple, pear, blue-fruited pawpaw, persimmon, crooked quince. Melon patches, congregations of beehives, pickle patches, cheese farms, flax farms, close clustered towns (twenty houses in each, twenty persons in a house, twenty of the little settlements along every mile of roadway), country honkey-tonks, as well as high-dog clubs already open and hopping with action in the early morning; roadway chapels with local statuary and with their rich-box-poor-boxes (one dropped money in the top if one had it and the spirit to give it, one tripped it out the bottom if one needed it), and the little refrigeration niches with bread, cheese, beef rolls, and always the broached cask of country wine: that there be no more hunger on the roadways forever!
“I hear it too!” old Charles Archer cried out suddenly. “High-pitched and off to the left. And there's the smell of monoxide and—gah—rubber. Conductor, conductor!”
The conductor heard it, as did others in the car. The conductor stopped the cars to listen. Then he phoned the report and gave the location as well as he might, consulting with the passengers. There was rough country over to the left, rocks and hills, and someone was driving there in broad daylight.
The conductor broke out rifles from the locker, passing them out to Peter Brady and two other young men in the car, and to three men in each of the other two cars. A competent-seeming man took over the communication, talking to men on a line further to the left, beyond the mad driver, and they had him boxed into a box no more than half a mile square.
“You stay, Angela, and you stay, Grandfather Archer,” Peter Brady said. “Here is a little thirty carbine. Use it if he comes in range at all. We hunt him down now.” Then Peter Brady followed the conductor and the rifle-bearing men, ten men on a death hunt. And there were now four other groups out on the hunt, converging on their whining, coughing target.
“Why do they have to kill them, Great-grandfather? Why not turn them over to the courts?” “The courts are too lenient. All they give them is life in prison.”
“But surely that should be enough. It will keep them from driving the things, and some of the unfortunate men might even be rehabilitated.”
“Angela, they are the greatest prison breakers ever. Only ten days ago, Mad Man Gudge killed three guards, went over the wall at State Prison, evaded all pursuit, robbed the cheesemakers' cooperative of fifteen thousand dollars, got to a sly klunker maker, and was driving one of the things in a wild area within thirty hours of his breakout. It was four days before they fo
und him and killed him. They are insane, Angela, and the mental hospitals are already full of them. Not one of them has ever been rehabilitated.”
“Why is it so bad that they should drive? They usually drive only in the very wild places, and for a few hours in the middle of the night.”
“Their madness is infectious, Angela. Their arrogance would leave no room for anything else in the world. Our country is now in balance, our communication and travel is minute and near perfect, thanks to the wonderful trolleys and the people of the trolleys. We are all one neighborhood, we are all one family! We live in love and compassion, with few rich and few poor, and arrogance and hatred have all gone out from us. We are the people with roots, and with trolleys. We are one with our earth.”
“Would it hurt that the drivers should have their own limited place to do what they wanted, if they did not bother sane people?”
“Would it hurt if disease and madness and evil were given their own limited place? But they will not stay in their place, Angela. There is the diabolical arrogance in them, the rampant individualism, the hatred of order. There can be nothing more dangerous to society than the man in the automobile. Were they allowed to thrive, there would be poverty and want again, Angela, and wealth and accumulation. And cities.”
“But cities are the most wonderful things of all! I love to go to them.”
“I do not mean the wonderful Excursion Cities, Angela. There would be cities of another and blacker sort. They were almost upon us once when a limitation was set on them. Uniqueness is lost in them; there would be mere accumulation of rootless people, of arrogant people, of duplicated people, of people who have lost their humanity. Let them never rob us of our involuted countryside, or our quasiurbia. We are not perfect; but what we have, we will not give away for the sake of wild men.”
“The smell! I cannot stand it!”
“Monoxide. How would you like to be born in the smell of it, to live every moment of your life in the smell of it, to die in the smell of it?”
“No, no, not that.”
The rifleshots were scattered but serious. The howling and coughing of the illicit klunker automobile were nearer. Then it was in sight, bouncing and bounding weirdly out of the rough rock area and into the tomato patches straight toward the trolley interurban.
The klunker automobile was on fire, giving off ghastly stench of burning leather and rubber and noxious monoxide and seared human flesh. The man, standing up at the broken wheel, was a madman, howling, out of his head. He was a young man, but sunken-eyed and unshaven, bloodied on the left side of his head and the left side of his breast, foaming with hatred and arrogance.
“Kill me! Kill me!” he croaked like clattering broken thunder. “There will be others! We will not leave off driving so long as there is one desolate place left, so long as there is one sly klunker maker left!”
He went rigid. He quivered. He was shot again. But he would die howling.
“Damn you all to trolley haven! A man in an automobile is worth a thousand men on foot! He is worth a million men in a trolley car! You never felt your black heart rise up in you when you took control of one of the monsters! You never felt the lively hate choke you off in rapture as you sneered down the whole world from your bouncing center of the universe! Damn all decent folks! I'd rather go to hell in an automobile than to heaven in a trolley car!”
A spoked wheel broke, sounding like one of the muted volleys of rifle fire coming from behind him. The klunker automobile pitched onto its nose, upended, turned over, and exploded in blasting flames. And still in the middle of the fire could be seen the two hypnotic eyes with their darker flame, could be heard the demented voice:
“The crankshaft will still be good, the differential will still be good, a sly klunker maker can use part of it, part of it will drive again—ahhhiii.”
Some of them sang as they rode away from the site in the trolley cars, and some of them were silent and thoughtful. It had been an unnerving thing. “It curdles me to remember that I once put my entire fortune into that future,” Great-grandfather Charles Archer moaned. “Well, that is better than to have lived in such a future.”
A young couple had happily loaded all their belongings onto a baggage trolley and were moving from one of the Excursion Cities to live with kindred in quasiurbia. The population of that Excursion City (with its wonderful theaters and music halls and distinguished restaurants and literary coffeehouses and alcoholic oases and amusement centers) had now reached seven thousand persons, the legal limit for any city: Oh, there were a thousand Excursion Cities and all of them delightful! But a limit must be kept on size. A limit must be kept on everything. It was a wonderful Saturday afternoon. Fowlers caught birds with collapsible kite-cornered nets. Kids rode free out to the diamonds to play Trolley League ball. Old gaffers rode out with pigeons in pigeon boxes, to turn them loose and watch them race home. Shore netters took shrimp from the semi-saline Little Shrimp Lake. Banjo players serenaded their girls in grassy lanes.
The world was one single bronze gong song with the melodious clang of trolley cars threading the country on their green-iron rails, with the sparky fire following them overhead and their copper gleaming in the sun. By law there must be a trolley line every mile, but they were oftener. By law no one trolley line might run for more than twenty-five miles. This was to give a sense of locality. But transfers between the lines were worked out perfectly. If one wished to cross the nation, one rode on some one hundred and twenty different lines. There were no more long-distance railroads. They also had had their arrogance, and they also had had to go.
Carp in the ponds, pigs in the clover, a unique barn-factory in every hamlet and every hamlet unique, bees in the air, pepper plants in the lanes, and the whole land as sparky as trolley fire and right as rails.
Symposium
“Perversity,” cried ancient Swift,
“Of lifeless things,” and cursed a skewer.
But some of them, with lilt and lift,
Were fuller up with life than you are.
Be there a jug devoid of juice?
A stick or stone with no life in it?
A shoe that has no sense of use?
Then name us such. Begin, begin it!
The wisdom of old furniture,
The panniers' passioned cerebration…
“They cannot be!” (But are you sure?)
… The Artifacts' cool speculation…
As reft of life as children's blocks,
The Things arise to balk and bait us.
Be it a chance such ricks and rocks,
Inanimate, could animate us?
I'M INANIMATE, YOU'RE INANIMATE
—Virgo Haedus
The world begins, not necessarily for the first time.
Not with a bang, but a tumble. In the beginning was noise. A cataract of worlds or entities rolling and cascading in fearful clatter. The cosmic atom, the world-box, has disgorged. Here is bursting galactic expansion into free area. Avalanche of noise and bright color. Not chaos, but thunderous exodus; and every particle bearing its own thunder sign. This is beginning, this is happening! Let no least part of it ever forget the primordial tumble that is the beginning!
Then, the stable state and memory. The first thought ever thought anywhere, anywhen: It's as though I've been here before.
The senses clear. There are persons present, high persons who can only be designated in code.
“Have I missed anything?” Kay spoke, for speech is always simultaneous with consciousness. “It seems I have just wakened. Is this the way the world begins?”
“Yes, I believe this is the way the universe begins every time,” Eff muttered, “with entities waking to consciousness and conversing with their mature peers. At every world-beginning, the persons are born adult and intelligent. That business of being born puling and helpless is a late accretion, and there is no evidence that it is anything more than a fable or a fall.”
“I am not alone?” Gee wondered aloud. “
There are others and they discuss? Well, if we've got to have conversation, let's agree to keep it inside the frame. Oh, hello, Zee!”
“My name is Zed, for so it is called in the old country. Let's keep the frame moving, Gee, and anything we wish can be inside it. Look at anything through a frame, and it's a striking picture. There may be other frames, but we are limited to our own: space, time, motion, mass, and the vivifying principle, known to us through consciousness on its several levels, by means of the senses and parasenses, and aided by less than a dozen styles of thought. It's limited, but it's all we seem to have.”
“And, Zed,” said O doubtfully, “every one of those elements is shaky. We are unable to separate space from one of its elements—shape. We do not know whether the particular distortion we live in is one of shape or of space. For instance, with us, the relation of the ring to the tendon of a circle is three and a continuing decimal to one. But we know from Scripture, and also from the geometry of Jordman, that in undistorted space or shape the relation would be exactly three to one. Now, if we were in such an undistorted space or shape, might we not think undistorted thoughts? It is certain that we would think in a different manner and that every object of our thoughts would differ from the present. We would not have the same grammar or conventions.”
“There is no undistorted space, O,” Wye said solidly. “Distortion is a necessary element. If I be not distorted, then I be not at all. The shape of space depends on the amount of matter in the universe. Matter is the distortion, but no matter is nothing. The amount of matter posits its own mathematics. There cannot be theoretical mathematics, only the mathematics of an actual universe. But, should the mass of the universe increase by only an ounce (Nictitating nebulas!—that's a little too slight), should it increase by no more than a thousand galaxies, then every mathematical property would change. The ratio of the ring to the tendon of a circle might then become three and a half, or five, or nine, or one. There might then be thirteen whole numbers between one and ten.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 98
