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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “For my part, I believe that we do live in a universe of changing mass, and that every property changes with it. Do you know why nobody discovered certain simple relationships before Pythagoras did so? It was because they had only just then become true relationships. Do you know why nobody discovered the three laws of motion before Newton discovered them? And why Newton did not discover them before he did? Because—they had not been true the day before.”

  “But if the mass of the universe should be constant—” O interposed.

  “No, no, forget it!” Wye bade him. “That raises more difficulties than it solves. The neatest universe, which I believe to be the present and true one, has time as a constant, and everything else as a variable. This was hinted at by Aristotle and developed more fully by Aloysius Shiplap. Its implications (which include ourselves) are tremendous.”

  “You blockhead!” Zed exploded. “That constant-time universe, by definition, must always have been thirteen billion years old. And it cannot age by one more second without annihilating itself.”

  “Yes. Is it not a beautiful concept?” Wye beamed.

  “Even less than of these things do we know about the vivifying principle,” You cut in. “One person has said, in apparent contradiction to his senses, that nothing can exist without it. But his fellow contradicted him. ‘Look at that rock,’ he said. ‘It exists, and it is dead matter. You are answered.’ But was he answered rightly?

  “We know the shell of our own world to a depth of no more than fifty thousand meters. But every rock, every piece of that known mantle, has been living matter. We cleared away the doubt about the main bulk of it fifty years ago. There is the possibility, if the fragments should be sufficiently analyzed, that every particle of the universe was first living matter before it was anything else. Life and matter may have been simultaneous and identical. Then the question, whether life can arise from lifeless matter, becomes inverted. The question becomes: Can matter arise from anything except life? We should not ask: How did life appear? but: How did death appear? I believe death is the illusion. If any particle of matter should ever die, it would immediately disappear to every sense and meaning. It's all alive. The very rocks (I don't see any rocks right now, but I know of them intuitively) could get up and walk away if they wished.”

  “But the inverted form of the question hasn't been accepted by anyone except yourself, You,” En cut in, “and I've heard that it's mighty lonesome to be a minority of one. The rest of us will still ask: How did life appear, by accident or by design? The man of the house here (how do I know about a man or a house or an exocosmos at all?) has a small electrical appliance there on the sideboard; it has an electric motor in it. I ask you, You: How did the first electric motor appear, by accident or by design?

  “It's a simple little four-pole thing. Nothing is needed but a small amount of copper, iron, and insulating material—all of them things found in nature. We assume that the first motor was very simple, but could it have originated by accident in a primordial swamp, workable and working? We must assume a power source—accidental, of course—and some random sort of transmission lines. There aren't, when you strip the unessentials away, more than a few hundred items that have to fall together in the right pattern to achieve it. But I maintain that accident could not have accomplished it.

  “And I also maintain that the most simple living cell is a billion to a billion powers times as intricate as the most sophisticated motor. It's improbable that an electrical motor could have appeared by accident, complete with name plate and with greasing instructions printed on an attached tag. And the difference in probability is staggering. Boys have made motors. Who has made a cell?”

  “Ah, En, permit me to exercise my talent for fiction and for irony.” Ex essayed it. “I posit a primordial swamp in which is found a long glob of natural copper fused by lightning. In an accidental manner the copper has become looped three times around another glob of volcanic iron. I posit natural lodestone somehow to form a field. I posit proto-mica wedging itself into position as insulator, and a shaft of accidental design, and good honest mud as a bearing surface.”

  “But several of your items were formed during organic periods, Ex,” En objected. “They would not be found in a truly primordial swamp.”

  “No matter, En, we'd find something else to serve as well. Close by, I posit a stagnant pool a little different from the other pools. Chance metallic solutions have given it polarity potential in its acid constituent. It hasn't a brand name on it, but it is a battery. (In the beginning, God made d.c., and the alternator was not as yet.) I posit conductors of some sort, I forget just what, and several hundred other details that will come easy to a swamp with all the time in the world. It is ready! It happens! And I swear by all primordial things that it is witnessed!

  “For I also posit two rocks rubbing together in a high wind. ‘It turns, it turns!’ is the sound the rocks make as they rub together. ‘Tell all the boys that it turns.’ ”

  “You are trapped by your own narrowness, Ex,” said Eye. “You are considering whether a thing might be so or might not be so, as if there were no other alternatives. Believe me, the multiplex alternator came first. Let us consider what is beyond categories. You see a circle, a form: but what if we go beyond the idea of form? You think of a number: but what if we are in a country where there can be no idea of number, where neither unity nor diversity has any meaning, where neither being nor nonbeing can be conceived of?

  “You think of space. What if there are a hundred alternatives to space, and I do not mean a hundred alternative kinds of space. What if there are a thousand other things in the category with living and dying? We operate according to one sort of grammar and we view the world by its syntax. Let us view it from the no-framework of no-grammar. I could go on with it, but the terminology becomes insufferably cute. What was that jolt? It's the noise the world always makes just before it ends. How do I know that, since I've never seen a world end before? Megagalactic memory, I suppose. After all, we're supposed to think of these things. We are seminal contrivances.”

  “How do you know that we're seminal contrivances?” Are asked, puzzled.

  “It says so on the box,” Ex told him.

  “We work with what we have,” said Are. “Let the inconceivables bury their own dead. I believe that every point is the center, even though in your land, Eye, the idea of a center disappears. I stand and say that I am the medium of all things, that there are as many things smaller than me as there are larger. But the meanest parasite in a sub-atomic civilization may say the same thing, and so may the shambling oaf whose outline is made up of clustered galaxies. But I ask you: Does this go on forever, or is it circular? The people (or is it the robots?) say that people and robots alternate in cycles. People make robots. Then, after a million years, the robots make people again. Then the robots die out and the people reign alone. After a decent interval, the people make robots again. And the people die once more. There have been many of these cycles. We ourselves are neither people nor robots, though I do not at the moment remember just what we are.

  “But as to size, is it re-entrant like space and time? Will the smallest of particles, a million scales descended, look through the ultimate microscope and see the nine thousand billion greater galaxies as a mere hint of light at the lowest limit of vision? And if space and time and size be all re-entrant, may not categories be so also? Perhaps the no-concepts of Eye do not go on forever (though they easily might go beyond the concept of ever). May they not return, each one eating ills ultimate grandfathers like a handful of peanuts, and discover that they have become concepts once more? The only theory of cosmology that satisfies is that every star or body should become in sequence every other star or body. The only theory of reincarnation that satisfies is that every person should become in sequence every other person. Looking around me, I don't think I'll like it.”

  “I feel it too now, Eye,” said Pea. “It's the end of the world all right, the synteleia, the
kid with the box, the latter days when our philosophy fails us. One thing happened to us, the clattering tumble. We appeared. They can't take that away from us. If there should come a second high happening, then we are doubly blessed. Well, they've never let us finish a talk yet, but we'll talk while we live. What do you think: Is it all a circle eating itself? And are all of us but shadows in the mind of each of us. If I have no existence except that Ell has dreamed me, and he has no existence outside of the mind of Ess, and if so around the circle of the twenty-six of us—”

  “The twenty-seven of us!” Thorn roared thunderously. “I am here! And you are all in my mind, not I in yours. The proof is that you forget me in your count and I do not fit into the box. I am the only one with true consciousness, and that brings us to an interesting point. Did consciousness come to us by physical analogy? How is the double thing (consciousness, that which regards itself) born in a single mind? Is it not by analogy with the double orifices that lead into that mind? We know that the duostomata have the most vivid consciousness of all creatures. And the only one-eyed intelligent race yet discovered, the Yekyaka, has missed consciousness completely. Hey, somebody break out the cigars and brandy if we're going to talk! Question: Are cigars and brandy intuitive concepts?”

  “It is true that you view us from the outside, Thorn, and for the simple reason that you are not here,” said Tea. “Ah, I do love a gracious snifter and a good cigar. I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.”

  “The non-elites?” Thorn asked. “Why, Vee and Cue and Jay and their fellows are spelling little riddles over toward the edge of the table there.”

  “But you are not here, Thorn,” Tea insisted. “You went out of existence so long ago that it is only by accident that we remember your name. You are the shaggy fringes sticking out from the framework. You belong to the spooks, the sports, the meteorological monstrosities. Dammit, Thorn, you just don't fit in! To us you are awkward, and awkwardness is the sin that will not be forgiven in this world or the next. Whoops! Hold on to your hats, boys! I hear those end-of-the-world noises too!”

  “So I am awkward, a spook, am I, Tea?” Thorn demanded. “Tea, you can't get rid of the awkward. It does not really dispose of a thing to call it Fortean. I offend because I'm an old-timer who remembers when everything was larger. I was talking to a crony recently. ‘They don't make planets the way they used to,’ he said, ‘they don't make stars and stuff as well. Time gets tired, and light, and matter. Everything shrinks, but the measuring stick shrinks also, so nobody notices. I tell you, I remember light that was light,’ he said, ‘I remember molecules of acetophenone-ketone that were as big as horses, and some mere atoms were as big as the house cats now. The light then would shatter a steel plate of today, the minutes were as millennia, the pounds each weighed a million tons. It was grander and shaggier in the old days.’ My crony was right, but so few of us remember those times. Hey, it's coming for you guys now! There's an advantage to not fitting in. I don't have to go.”

  “It's upon us!” cried Ell. “We've talked for our thousand years, and the world collapses! Time is foreshortened! Our brains melt like wax!”

  CHILD (sex unknown; the way they dress them now, it's hard to tell): “Blocks! Jump! Jump in the box if you want to get out again tomorrow. It's time to get back in the box.”

  THE BLOCKS: “Woe, woe, woe! It's the synteleia, the kid with the box, the final happening that voids all happenings.”

  CHILD: “All in but one! Jump, jump in! Oh, no, no, you're the one that doesn't belong. I don't know where you always come from. Get out of here. You're crazy.”

  MOTHER (or FATHER—the way they dress them now, it's hard to tell): “Ah, you have been playing with the alphabetical blocks, Iracema. These are good ones. Chatter-blocks in the Chatter-box, it says. They have little coils inside them and they react to each other. Sometimes they seem to talk and think. They are seminal blocks. That's what the toy salesman said.”

  PARENT (the other one, the one with the longer hair): “Educational toys are good.”

  Groaning Hinges Of The World

  Eginhard wrote that the Hinges of the World are, the one of them in the Carnic Alps north of the Isarko and quite near High Glockner, and the other one in the Wangeroog in the Frisian islands off the Weser mouth and under the water of this shelf; and that these hinges are made of iron. It is the Germanies, the whole great country between these hinges that turns over, he wrote, after either a long generation or a short generation. The only indication of the turning over is a groaning of the World Hinges too brief to terrify. That which rises out of the Earth has the same appearance in mountains and rivers and towns and people as the land that it replaces. The land and the people do not know that they have turned over, but their neighbors may come to know it. A man looking at the new, after the land had turned over, would not see it different from the old: and yet it would be different. But the places and the persons would have the same names and appearances as those they replaced.

  Strabo, however, eight hundred years earlier, wrote that the Hinges of the World are in high Armenia, the one of them on the Albanian extension into the Caspian Sea, the other at Mount Ararat itself (known from the earliest time as the hinge of the world). Strabo wrote that it is the whole Caucasus Mountains that turn over, with all the people and goats: and the hinges on which the region turns are bronze.

  But Elpidius claimed that the Hinges of the World are, the one of them at Aneto in Andorra (anciano Gozne del Mundo), and the other at Hendaye on the Biscay coast. He stated that it is the Pyrenees that turn over, that their turning is always for a very long generation, and that the Basques who obtain in that region are people from under the earth and are much more Basque-like than those they replace. He wrote that the Hinges of the World are here of rock-crystal.

  All three of the writers give the name Revolution to this turning over of a region, but lesser authorities have later given that name to less literal turnings. There is something very consistent about the reports of these three men, and there are aspects of their accounts almost too strange not to be true.

  But they all lie. How would any of these regions turn over on hinges? And if they have the same appearance in land and people after they have turned over, who would know that they had turned? It would seem that if a man have the same name and appearance after he has turned over, then he is still the same man. As to the deep groaning of the World Hinges which all three authorities state is heard at the time of turnover, why, one hears groanings all the time.

  The only region of the world that does in fact turn over is far around the world from all of these. It is in the western Moluccas. One hinge is just north of Berebere on Morotai Island and the other is at Ganedidalem on Jilolo or Halmahera Island. These are the true Hinges of the World and they are made of hard kapok-wood well oiled. All the peoples of this region were peaceful with themselves and their neighbors almost all the time. The people under the world were no more than people in stories to them. There was fire under the islands, of course, and volcanoes on them; and the people under the earth were said to be themselves brands of fire. Well, let them stay under the world then. Let the hinges not turn again!

  But one day a fisherman from Obi Island was out in his boat right on the edge of the region that was said to have turned over in the old times. He had pulled in only a few fish in his nets and he had about decided to sail to Jilolo and steal enough fish from the timid people there to fill his boat.

  Then he heard a short, deep groaning. He felt a shock, and a shock-wave. But who pays attention to things like that around the volcano islands? He was uneasy, of course, but a man is supposed to be uneasy several times a day.

  He pulled in his net. Then he felt a further shock. This net had been torn in one place and he had tied it together. He had tied it, as he always did, with a pendek knot. But now he saw that it was tied with a panjang knot which he had never tied in his life. He noticed also that the fish in his net were of a little bit darker color th
an usual. He wouldn't have noticed this if he hadn't noticed the knot first. In great fear he set his short sail, and he also drove his oar as hard as he could to take the boat toward his own Obi Island.

  The only region where the panjang knot is commonly tied is the region under the world. This region had turned up in the age of the fisherman's ancestors, to the death and destruction of many of them, and now it may have turned up once more. A part of the fisherman's net must have been in the region that turned over, he was that close to the fringe of it. The fisherman knew that the upheaval people would have the same names and appearances as people he knew; he knew also that the whole business might be a high storm.

  Fast canoes out of Jilolo overtook the fisherman before he was home. He was frightened at first, but when they came closer to overhaul him, he saw that the men in them were friends of his, Jilolo people, the most gentle people in the world. You could push the Jilolos, you could steal their fish, you could steal their fruits, you could even steal their boats, and they would only smile sadly. The fisherman forgot all about the turnover when the gentle Jilolos overtook him.

  “Hello, Jilolo men, give me fish, give me fruits,” the fisherman said, “or I will run down your canoes and push you into the water. Give me fish. My boat is not near full of fish.”

  “Hello, our friend,” the Jilolo men said to the fisherman. Then they came on board his boat and cut off his head. They were men of the same names and appearances as those he had known, and yet they were different.

  The Jilolos tied the fisherman's head onto the prow of the foremost and biggest canoe. “Guide us into the best landing of Obi Island,” they told the head. So the head guided them in, telling them whether to veer a little to the east or the west, telling them about the cross-wave and the shoal, telling them how to go right to the landing. (The shy Jilolos had formerly used a poorer landing when they came to Obi Island.)