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

by R. A. Lafferty

  That is how it has been said.

  Then we went out (for the last time, as it happened) from the Shelni burrow. And, as always, there was the riming with the five-year-old Ancient who guarded the place: “What to crowing?”

  “Got to going.”

  “Jinx on Jolly,

  Golly, Holly!”

  “Were it other,

  Bug, my brother!”

  “Holly crying.

  Sing her flying,

  Jugging, shouting.”

  “Going outing.”

  Now this was remarkable. Holly Harkel was crying when we came out of the burrow for the (as it happened) last time. She was crying great goblin tears. I almost expected them to be green.

  Today I keep thinking how amazingly the late Holly Harkel had finally come to look like the Shelni. She was a Shelni. “It is all the same with me now,” she said this morning. “Would it be love if they should go and I should stay?” It is a sticky business. I tried to complain, but those people were still ringing that bell and chanting “All you little Pig-Shelni-Singers come jump on the cart. Ride a tin can to Earth! Hey, Ben, look at them jump on the slaughter wagon!”

  “It was inexcusable,” I said. “Surely you could tell a human from a Shelni.”

  “Not that one,” said a bell ringer. “I tell you they all jumped on the wagon willingly, even the funny looking one who was crying. Sure, you can have her bones, if you can tell which ones they are.”

  I have Holly's bones. That is all. There was never a creature like her. And now it is over with.

  But it is not over!

  Singing Pig Breakfast Food Company, beware! There will be vengeance!

  It has been told.

  Ishmael Into The Barrens

  Sometimes, however, a group of animals about to become extinct undergoes considerable change of a pathological nature before it disappears from the scene.

  — Douglas Dewar

  It was early in the morning, which was illegal. Which is to say that it was illegal for persons to be about in the early morning. And yet there were a few people, some alive and some dead, scattered about in the morning hours. Most of these were yellow-card people doing necessary work in those hours; another few were authorized nothoi-hunters; the rest were outlaws. All of the dead people lying in the streets were outlaws; but some of the live people also were outlaws unknown.

  Really, there was no need for anyone to be about at this time; and if the world were ordered in a perfectly legal manner there would have been none. But the world was not perfectly ordered. There was outlawry and the breaking of the hours rules.

  There were the working hours for those of the age when work was still required, and concurrent with these were the basic-enjoyment hours for those beyond that age. Then there were the swinging hours for all (compulsory). And finally there were the morning hours, the forbidden hours — the hours for sleep, for rest, for completing a trip: these were from the fifth hour of the day till the thirteenth. Timers were adjusted so that the sunrise was always in the forbidden hours; and indeed no really good person had ever seen the sun rise, except certain very old ones who had seen it in their uninstructed youths. “No good person was ever the better for seeing the sun rise,” it is written in the Analects.

  It was an old and dirty city in the glare of the early illegal sun, but the yellow-card street-sweepers would soon clear away the worst of the debris. The swinging hours always left their clutter, as was their right. Here were yesterday's cut flowers in heaps, many thousands of broken balloons, posters torn and shredded, remnants of food and drink and vein-main, papers covered with scatter-print, discarded litter and clothing.

  Here also, right on the edge of a pile of broken guitars, a woman was lying twisted and grubby. She was very young and very dead. She was not, however, a casualty of the swinging hours, but of the early morning hours. And there was another one some distance from the first, blowsier and bloodier. They were not rare in the morning hours in the city. Very soon the sweepers would cart them away. By the thirteenth hour all would be clean again, and the Gentle World would begin another day.

  But here is the heroine, a live one, perhaps a lively one. Should she not be a platinum woman, scatter-ornamented and beautiful, according to the norms? Or a shining ebony or a creamy chocolate? Should she not be adjusted and legal? Flowery and scatter-eyed? Should she not be of the multiplexity, nonlineate, a Scan, an Agape Apple, a Neutrina, a Pop Poppy? A Poster Coaster at the very least? Should she not be a Happy Medium, a Plateau Potato, a Twanger, a Mime, a Dreamer, and Enhancer-Dancer? Are these not the aspects of a heroine? Nah, she wasn't like that at all. She was a Morning-Glory, which is illegal. She was a Gown-Clown, which is also illegal. She was not flowery, not scatter-eyed. She wasn't even quite beautiful though she rather wished that she were. And yet perhaps she was, in another way, in an old and almost private way.

  She had form. But was it not now bad form to have form? She had grace and face. She had a forky tongue and a willful way. She even had a measure of gaiety. She was tall and full. Her hair was midnight-black with green starlights in it (really). Her eyes were even blacker with deeper lights. She had a strong element of stubbornness in her, which is illegal. She was a flower-tender, and she was not enchanted with the job. (Something had gone out of the flowers, something had gone out of them.) Her name was Janine Pervicacia. To the people she was Jane the Crane, but she wasn't so leggy as all that.

  The flowers, especially those that were to be cut this day, needed care in the morning hours, and for that reason this yellow-card girl was tending them. But she tended them lineately, which was illegal.

  Here is the hero. Should he not be a Swing, a Slant, a Cut, according to the norms? A Spade, a Buck, a Whanger? Should he not be a Head, a Flash, an Etch, a Neutrino yet, a Burn, a Vein, a Flower? Yeah, but he wasn't like that. He wasn't that kind of hero at all. He was a Dawner, he was a doggedly pleasant man, he was even a sort of battler (“He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off” — Job), he was friendly; he was even intelligent on some subjects and murderous on others. He was big enough and thick enough; his hair was brambled but short. The people said that he would be the father of Ishmael. He didn't know what they meant; neither did the people. He was a moving man with cat-springs in him. He was a yellow-card street-sweeper, and his name was Morgan Saunders.

  He was making his rounds, cleaning up after the swingers. He growled when he came to the twisted and grubby woman who was very young and very dead.

  “Secret hid in the bottom of a well, May the nothoi-hunters all go to hell,” he chanted, which is illegal (the nothoi-hunters are authorized). He had a very hassle of a time bending the dead woman in the middle (he saw now that she was only a girl) and stuffing her into his wheeled canister. He quickly covered her with shards of broken guitars so she would be hidden from his eyes.

  Then he saw Jane the Crane tending flowers. He did not know her. This was her first morning back on the job after a term in a disorderly house. She was tending the flowers as if they were in straight lines, as if they were in rows, going down one file of them and back another. But only in her mind were they in rows.

  “That is not the allowed way to tend flowers, girl,” Morgan spoke to her very low. “You must not consider them as growing in rows, even in your thought. Consider them as random scatter-clusters, or there will be a black mark on your record. Consider them as a revolving nexus of patternless broken volutes. They grow random in nature, you know, and the Gentle World is all for the random. I am only trying to help you.”

  “I know you are. The things I have been put through by people trying to help me! I tell you, though, that nothing grows random in nature. Everything falls into patterns. And flowers very often do grow in terraced tiers and in tufted rows. I've seen them.”

  “That is very dangerous talk,” said Morgan Saunders, “and I believe that the nothoi-hunters are eyeing us even now. Is it possible that I will see you here again to
morrow? Do you know the doubled-up girl in my canister?”

  “I know her. Her name is Agar. Yes, it is possible that you will see me here again tomorrow. It is possible that I will be the doubled-up dead girl in your canister tomorrow.”

  Then Morgan Saunders went on his way, picking up old flowers and broken balloons and guitars and dead women. He went on past the Pop Palace with its high sign in psychedelic dancing dots: “THE GOLDEN DWARF, MAN, MAN, THAT'S MAN!”

  And Janine Pervicacia continued to tend the flowers (those that would die today), moving her hands as if the flowers were in rows; and they weren't.

  This is a love and hate story (both were illegal) from the False Terminal Days that were the middle or the twenty-first century. It is very difficult to decode the story and lay it out for the reason that (even in its illegal form) it was printed in scatter-print. No other sort of print was available. Every printing machine, even the small household ones used by private individuals, was both a scatter-printer and a randoming machine. Each letter could have many different shapes and colors, and these were so blended that no two colors or shape-styles might come together, or that nothing might range itself into lines even accidentally. Scatter-print was the flowering of 150 years of pop-posters. It shouted a complex nonlineate message, or else it did not: but it shouted. There was difficulty that about a third of the signs were not letters at all, had no meaning or sound value to them: and their blending in made the words difficult to read — if one were still a reader and not a depth comprehender. There was also a difficulty in that it was illegal to number pages; ever; in anything, long or short. Pages must be fed in unnumbered, and they were then randomized. And they are very difficult to unrandom.

  For this reason there will be anomalies and inconsistencies in this story, for all that we try to untangle it and set it in line. It was (in its first form) an illegal private record by a grieving friend, but we cannot be sure of the order it should fall into. We do not know for sure whether Jane the Crane was the doubled-up dead girl in the canister on the first morning or on the one-thousandth. We do not know when the destruction of Morgan Saunders took place, whether before the birth of Ishmael or after, but we have set it before. And we do not know whether the interlude of the odd man and the Odd God is truly a part of this account or whether it should be interluded at the point we give it or at another. We can but guess how long Jane the Crane was in a disorderly house, and we cannot always tell flashback from future glimpse. We try.

  The next morning (we cannot be sure that it was the next morning, but it was a different morning) Morgan Saunders slowed his cleaning and sweeping as he came near where Janine Pervicacia was tending flowers. It was summer now (flowers, of course, must be grown in all seasons) and perhaps it hadn't been the other time. Janine (Jane the Crane) was revealed as a gown-clown in an old unrevealing dress. There was scarcely a square foot of her body exposed. She worked now with a carefulness and neatness that were unusual. This girl might be beyond help. “There are dangerous and divergent things in your manner,” Morgan said in a low voice. “If you are not more careless you may be sent to a disorderly house. I am only trying to help you.”

  “I've already been in the disorderly house,” Janine said cheerlessly. “I was discharged as incurable and always to be watched.”

  “How was it there?” Morgan asked. “I have always been afraid of it, for myself. I have been threatened with it, and I am always careful to assume the careless manner.”

  “It was horrible and depressing. I was put in with very small children, five and six years old. We were taught artless art. ‘Form is only the pedestal. Deformity is the statue,’ one of the instructors said that first day. ‘The trick is to smash the pedestal completely and yet leave something of the statue. Deformity is beauty, always remember that. Form, which is pattern, is always ugly.’ That's what he told us. We had classes in pop-posters, which are hand-done scatter-print. We had classes in Lump the Lump, which is plastic modeling. We had classes in finger painting, and paintings by chimpanzees were used as models and suggestions. I noticed of the children that though many of them were handsome and even-featured when they first came to the disorderly house, their features soon altered. One eye would become larger than the other. The two sides of their faces would no longer match. One side of their months would be pulled down and the other pulled up. They would come to look as crooked as most people do look. The instructors could tell at a glance which children were being inculcated with the proper sense of deformity: those who themselves became deformed. We talk too long. I am sure we will be watched.”

  “Wait. We have so much of danger to spend anyhow. Let us spend a little of it now.” And Morgan himself was doing a dangerous thing. He was smoking a short fag, but it was not what you think: not potty, not dotty, not snow, not glow, none of the approved high things. It was old, forbidden, non-mind-enhancing tobacco. “What else did they try to teach you in the disorderly house?”

  “Guitar,” said Jane the Crane. “That remains the worst of all experiences, the hell-thing that certain humans can never accept. I still wake up screaming at night (working in the mornings, I sometimes sleep illegally during the swing hours of night) at the oppressiveness, the whining meanness of it. It is the only instrument that is always random, that does not have to be randomized. Oh, the twang, twang, twang, the eternal flatness of it! ‘After all, is not the purpose of life on earth to accustom the people to life in hell?’ one of the instructors asked. This is one of the permanent quips of the disorderly houses, of course, but the way the instructor said it in a deformed voice out of a deformed face shook me. It is true, Morgan, it is true. Or is it?”

  “It is not everywhere true, Janine. It is not my purpose, but it is theirs. What else did they teach the children and fail to teach you?”

  “Crudity, nudity; presbys and lesbos; monophony, cacophony; profanity, urbanity; muggery and buggery. Narcosis. Doggery. Flesh-mesh. Much else. Does that stuff not curdle the convoluted ears of you? It should.”

  “Do they not have a course to teach ducks to swim? But it seems that a little bit of this would be beyond the scope of five-and six-year-olds, Janine, especially beyond those who had to be sent back for corrections.”

  “Never mind, they would remember it and they would be ready for it when their time came to appreciate it. Go now. We have spent too much danger and we are watched.”

  “Will I see you here again tomorrow, Janine?”

  “Tomorrow or next season, or someday, or never.”

  “Will you think of me?”

  “I will think of you as if this were another world, towering where it was meant to be high, ordered where it should be ordered, free in the great central things, and free from the dwarfed and compulsory freedoms. I will think of you, Morgan, in ways that are presently unthinkable.”

  Janine (Jane the Crane) turned back to caring for her flowers, which she liked but was not impassioned over. And Morgan Saunders went on about his sweeping and cleaning, past the Pop Palace, past the Dog Temple, past Levelers Loggia, past the Pseudo-Parthenon, past Humanity Hall with its great poster in electric scatter-print raising its headless torso into the sky: “MAN, THIS GELDED GLORY OF THE LEVEL WAY.”

  In the False Terminal Days that were the middle of the twenty-first century the population plateau had been reached. It had not been reached in perfect peace. In an odd piece entitled The Analects of Isaac we encounter the phrase “the conflicts created in a society which sees in population stability the only hope of the human race.” There were conflicts. There had been hard feelings. Blood had run in the rivers in some localities. But every casualty of this conflict had become part of the feedback of the population-stability calculators. It was settled now. It was enforced. But the conflict continued, and it must still continue till the total death of one or both of the antagonists. It had become one-sided. It looked like the conflict between an elephant and a day fly. But there were irreconcilables. There were die-hards among those midges. And
there were also hard-abornings, illegitimate and double-damned and defiant. The plateau had been reached, but there were bumps on the plateau.

  Stable population. And the second step (very nearly achieved already) was population homogeneity. For fifty years the restrictions had been most selective. By now those of extreme colors were about of equal number, and the great central blending out-numbered them both. Hereafter, only progeny-crosses between the two extremes or out of the central blending could be permitted; none at all among either extreme.

  In any case, with the stack-up (old hippies never die; they don't even fade away) a kid-card now cost a quarter of a million dollars. That was very high, and perhaps it would go even higher.

  In any case, again, as either both-white or both-black, there would be an impediment between Janine Pervicicia and Morgan Saunders. (They hadn't talked about a union at all, but they had begun to think about it.) This impediment is mentioned in the old scatter-print record written by the grieving friend. But this record does not indicate which was the color of their impediment, and we do not know it either.

  A flower-care inspector had been plaguing Janine Pervicacia. He could not fault her that the flowers in her care were insufficient in numbers and vitality. It was something else. The flowers from her care were reported to be out of sympathy with the flower people. They had not the right attitude to all this. They had developed sympathies of their own, or of Janine's; and the flower people could feel the alienation, and they complained. There is a fine line here. There really is sympathy and antipathy even in cut flowers, but it is liable to exaggeration and subjectivity by the flower people. “You will have to conform,” the flower-care inspector told Janine sternly. “There is complaint.”