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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Conform to what?” she asked. “Form is damnable to you.”

  “You will please to cease using words as having direction, Jane the Crane flower-carer Fifth-class,” he said sharply. “Words are like confetti, like stars, like snowflakes, like — there simply are not words for words! You must conform to nonconformity, of course. Your lineate overview will minimize you in the simultaneous multidepth mosaic appraisal.”

  “Oh, that! I have already been weighed and found wanting. Do what you will with me, but do not stand and goggle at me.”

  “We could have a meeting during the swinging hours and come to a certain understanding with each other.”

  “I'll see you in the Barrens first!”

  “Then, if you will not be affectionate or gentle or human, you must improve on your work. Your flowers must show more feeling at once.”

  “They will show more feeling!” Jane of the forky tongue cried. “They'll bark it you! They'll snap at you with their severed heads!”

  Jane the Crane was getting many marks against her record.

  And an Official Instigator had been plaguing Morgan Saunders. One must talk to in Official Instigator. They are privileged. They have rights of entry into property and dwellings, and into minds. But they are not direct. They nibble at you; they potshot; they speak in randomized riddles. This was a very old Instigator; of the very first generation of them. He wore a pop button (“Never trust anyone under ninety”); he wore a pop beard which was perhaps infested; he wore a loincloth, he wore shamble-sandals; he wore flowers and sashes and ribbons and jewelry, but no real garment. He rated as old even in a world made up mostly of old people. He was an Ancient Hippie indeed.

  “You find me objectionable, Morgan in my hands,” he sniped, “and that is a most dangerous finding of yours. You are an alien to the Gentle World, Morgan, and you are known as the philosopher of the street-sweepers. But the world doesn't need a philosophy — not a rigid street-sweeper philosophy, at any rate. We will snip those rigid corners off you, or we will snip that rigid head off you. Whence are you named? Yours isn't a name from the randoming machines. Therefore it is an illegal name. In one old context Morgan meant ‘from over the sea’; in another it meant ‘morning’, which is very significant in your case.”

  “In still another case it meant a pony, old man,” Morgan said. “A very stylish pony.”

  “Can a Morgan pony sire a wild ass?” (Somehow the old Instigator already knew about the wild-ass boy Ishmael, who was not even conceived yet, much less born.) “But run, Morgan, run,” the old Instigator went on. “We will catch you with our gentle pursuit. Why do you resist us who are kind to every living creature?”

  “Kind to every living creature, old man? But you murder the nothoi.”

  “Are the nothoi living creatures, Morgan? Not in law, not in fact. Who will admit ever seeing such creatures? Who will admit that there are such things living anywhere? They are fables, Morgan, fables from the Barrens. They are less substantial even than ghosts. Prove that they are not. Take me and show me a nothos.”

  “That would be the death of both myself and the small thing.”

  “If they cause deaths, then they are demons. Who could find fault with the ritual slaying of such ghosts and demons?”

  This Official Instigator was one of the authentic Ancient Hippies, those in the hundred-years-and-over class. They had station and rights. They had final honor.

  “We are the open world,” said this Ancient Hippie. “We open, and you will not come in to us.”

  “You are not open, old man,” Morgan insisted. “You close the great way itself. You open only mole runs, and you go blind in their windings, proclaiming them to be the great way. We stubborn ones are for the open world that is gone.”

  “It is you who withdraw, Morgan. You withdraw from the Gentle World.”

  “You withdraw from life, old man, and the withdrawal syndromes are weird and twitchy.”

  “Be careful, Morgan. I and mine are main things in the withdrawal syndromes, and we will not be spoken of slightingly. Can you not see that you are wrong? You do not see how curiously you withdraw from life in opposing me here? Do you not know that you have just passed death sentence on yourself?”

  “Certainly I know it,” Morgan said.

  It was true. Everything spoken to an Instigator was recorded, and the records were fed to appraisal machines. But how many seals does it take on a death sentence? Morgan Saunders knew that there were very many on his already.

  But he walked out on the Instigator, which was illegal. He went on about his work, on past the Hippie Hippodrome, with its high sign of writhing splatter-paint: “MAN, OUR STUNTED PURPOSE AND OUR GREATEST STUNT.”

  The nothoi-hunters plagued both Janine Pervicacia and Morgan Saunders, following them, leveling guns at them, mocking them, hungering for them. The nothoi-hunters had the sense of prey; they had sophisticated equipment. They killed a lot. They were authorized to kill a lot. But they did not want to hunt out their field. Here it was a special prey that they waited for and counted on, that they counted on even before it came into being, that they everlastingly hoped for. The hunters asked both Janine and Morgan when Ishmael would be along, this even before the time when Janine and Morgan had met. But now Morgan and Janine had met, and they talked about Ishmael, not realizing it, never having heard the name, not realizing that they were talking about a coming person. “Expectation of anything is out of order, of course,” Morgan said to Janine, “and there is not much hope in hope. Nevertheless, I get a distant tang of something that may not be all wrong. Are you with me in it, Janine, if we discover some good way (even if it is a short way) away from this?”

  “I am with you in anything you want to do, O Morgan with the short bramble hair, but it is all at an end. Everything goes down, and we go down with it.”

  “We will not go down, Janine. This is not the end yet, even for such as we are.”

  “Yes, the ending, Morgan, the evening of the seventh day.”

  “Janine, the seventh day had no evening. For better or worse, for many thousands of years we have lived in the afternoon of the seventh day, maybe even in the morning of it. And we live in it yet. Will I see you here tomorrow?”

  “No. Not for several days, or weeks, or months. I will do a thing, and I will not tell you what it is till it's done. Goodbye, then, for some days or weeks or months, or forever.”

  2

  What things a man or a world believes or disbelieves will permeate every corner and shadow and detail of life and style, will give a shape to every person and personifact and plant of that world. They will form or they will disorder, they will open or close. A world that believes in open things is at least fertile to every sort of adventure or disaster. A world that believes in a closed way will shrivel and raven and sputter out in frosty cruelty.

  — Audifax O'Hanlon

  When Morgan saw Janine no more in the mornings the world became still more a deprived place. He was still plagued by the nothoi-hunters, who mocked him, and by the official instigators, who conversed with him. One afternoon, after he had put away his brooms and rakes and shovels and was on his rest period, he walked out into the Barrens, which was illegal. He found no nothoi there at all nor any trace of them. He did find cattle that had gone feral, wild swine, and rabbits and deer. He found streams that were full of fish and frogs; he found berries and fruits and hazelnuts. He found patches of wild wheat and rye, and sweet corn and melons.

  “What is the reason I could not live here?” he asked himself out loud. “I could come here with Janine and we could live and flourish, away from the clang of industry and the clatter of the guitar-makers' factories. What is the reason I could not live here?”

  But his left ear left his head at that moment, and immediately afterward he heard (with his right ear) the sound of the shot. Angry and scared, he clawed and crawled and rolled and made his way out of the Barrens and back to the fringes of the city.

  “The reason I ca
nnot live in the Barrens is that the nothoi-hunters will kill me as a nothos if they see me there,” he said quietly. “They will kill any illegal person they find in the Barrens. And it was no mistake they made. They could see plainly that I was a grown man and not a nothos. Here I am now, one-eared and sad-hearted and — oh, oh, oh — here is an even sadder thing come to worry me!” It was an Official Instigator wishing to talk to him. Morgan could not be sure whether it was the same Instigator who had talked to him several times before. Those Instigators who belong to the Ancient Hippie aristocracy (the one-hundred-years-and-older class) all look pretty much alike.

  “We get you piece by piece, Morgan afraid to wander.” the Instigator said. “Today an ear, tomorrow another thing, and very soon we will get you all and entire. If you would not listen to reason with two ears, how can you listen with one? There was a question that arose many years before you were born, so it does not really concern you at all. The question arose, and the answer was given. The question was simply, ‘What will we do when there are too many people in the world?’ And the answer given was, ‘We will pass edict so that there never will be allowed too many people in the world.’ Why do you not accept the gentle and wise answer?”

  “The answer was out of order. Your whole complex is out of order in several senses of the term. That is why you will not accept order in any of the central things. That is why you must substitute deformity for form. I do not accept your answer because it is the wrong answer.”

  “How is it wrong, one-eared Morgan? What could possibly be wrong with it?”

  “It is the static answer to a dynamic question and therefore the wrong answer.”

  “Could you have given a righter answer?”

  “Of course not. But I could have contributed to it, and you could have also. The answer would have to grow like an organism. And it would have grown.”

  “There was no time to permit an organism to grow. It was a matter of great hurry.”

  “No, there was no great hurry, and the answer was already growing apace until it was hacked to death. There had been some signs of a full blooming springtime for mankind, and this frightened them. The Population Blessing was a challenge, as all large and fine things are. There was only one question: whether we were a good enough people to accept the greatest gift ever offered. And the answer given was, No, we are not.”

  “But we splendid ones in our youth gave another answer, little die-hard Morgan,” the Instigator said. “We will not abide a clutter of people, we said. Chop them off; there are enough and too many, we said. Really, it was a splendid answer, and I tell you that we were a splendid people.”

  “ ‘Evil always wins through the strength of its Splendid Dupes’, as a wise man said, and yet I doubt that you were ever splendid. You aren't now.”

  “But we are, little Morgan the philosopher of the street-sweepers, we are splendid and talented, gentle and random, creative and inventive.”

  “No, old man, you know that creativity and invention have disappeared completely. Why should they not? Residue technique will suffice to maintain a plateau. It is only for mountain-building that creativity and invention are required. You were the loss-of-nerve people. And it is hard for a small remnant to restore that nerve when every thing has flowed the other way for near a hundred years.”

  “Morgan of the remnant, your pieces are so little that they cannot even find each other. You lost everything completely before you were born. Listen to me: I am a wise and long-lived man. The old sophistry that there are two sides to every question has long passed away. Instead of that, there are mutual exclusions that cannot live in the same world with each other. The great consensus and the small remnant can no longer live in the same world. What odds could you post, little Morgan, on our going and your remaining?”

  “Very weak odds, but I am more and more inclined to play them out.”

  “We have recorded almost enough on you to terminate you right now. Is it not curious that a man shot in the ear will bleed out of the mouth — in words? The nothoi-hunters are better shots than that, you know. They but practice of you till we give them the final word on you. We have checked your own ancestry. You yourself are a nothos, for all that we can find to the contrary. No kid-card was ever issued for you. We could classify you for extinction at any time, but we will wait a little while and have spectacle out of you.”

  The nothoi-hunters in fact were very good shots. They had prediction scopes on their rifles. These small directors had the evasion patterns of many small animals and of the small nothoi worked out: the rush, the scurry, the broken pace, the double, the zigzag. With the pattern of those built into a scope the hunters could hardly miss.

  The nothoi-hunters themselves were square pegs who happened to fit into certain square holes of the Gentle World. They were not gentle (not every one can be gentle even on that low plateau); they were naturally troublesome and warlike. Now their proclivities were channeled to a special job. They exterminated certain unlawful things. They did it thoroughly and well. And they made high sport out of it.

  And there were other summary things in the system of the Gentle World. This very afternoon, right at the beginning of the swing hours, there were several executions under the recusancy laws. Many persons refused to take part in the swing hours. This was the same as refusal to be happy. To the offenders, first there was warning, then there was mutilation, then there was death. A half dozen of such public hangings would usually minimize the absences from swing time for a while.

  There was a stubborn girl ready to be hanged, and at first Morgan thought that she was Janine. She was much the same type. She refused to recant; she refused to take her dutiful place in the Gentle World. She had refused three times to join the swing fun. Likely she was mad, but her madness might be dangerous and contagious.

  “You refuse to have fun with the funsters?” an Ancient Instigator asked her almost tearfully.

  “I always have fun,” the girl said loudly. “It's more fun to be me dead than you alive. And I will not endure anything as stifling as the swing times. Drop dead, old man!”

  “You might at least respect my position is Ancient Instigator.”

  “I'd see the last Instigator strangled with the strings of the last guitar!”

  So the girl was hanged, drawn, and quartered. Morgan, though he had often seen these little dramas, was deeply shocked: not so much by the girl's bad-mannered defiance as by the punishment itself. She looked so like Janine and talked so like her that it was frightening.

  Then Janine came back and was busy with her flowers again one morning. The flowers remembered her (it had not really been such a long time), and they came alive to her. Janine was not impassioned with the flowers (as many in the Gentle World had the pose of being), but they were impassioned with her. They always had been. “Where have you been this while?” Morgan asked her. “At the end of every morning I examined all the bodies gathered up by all the sweepers, and yours was never among them.”

  “I hid awhile. And I had an illegal operation performed on myself.”

  “Which?” Morgan asked. “What did it do to you?”

  “It undid,” Janine said. “It undid the earlier operation. Now I am open to life once more.”

  “And under the automatic sentence of death you are! And I am if I say the word. I say the word. I am.”

  “I know a Papster priest,” said Janine.

  “And I know one,” said Morgan. “We will go to mine.”

  “No, we will go to mine,” she insisted. But they couldn't have quarreled over that or over anything. There wasn't room for that in the narrow margin of life left to them. Besides, it happened that it was the same Papster priest they both knew. There weren't more than two or three of those hidden ones in that city of a million.

  They went to the Papster priest and were married, which was illegal.

  The Papster must have been lonesome for the central things, so he brought out his eloquence, which had grown rusty, and gave a doct
rine to their act.

  “What you do is right,” he said, “no matter how illegal it is. This world had become a stunted plant, and it was not meant to be. Deformity can never be the norm. The basic and evil theory was: that (by restriction) fewer people could live better and more justified. But they did not. Fewer people live, and they live as dwarfs. Not even China in the thousand years it was frozen (it also muchly in an opium dream) was as deprived and listless as this world. The Cities of the Plateau may be destroyed as were the Cities of the Plain, I do not know. We live in that which calls itself a biological world, but no one seems to understand the one central fact of biology, of the life complex.

  “This is the one biological fact that all present biologists ignore to their own incompetence: that every life is called into being by God and maintained in being by God at every instant of that life; that without God there is no bios, no life, and certainly no biology. There can never be an unwanted life or an unwanted person, ever, anywhere. If a person were not wanted by God, God would not call him into being. There can never be too many persons, because it is God who counts and records and decides how many there should be. There can never be a person unprovided for, because it is God who provides. Whoever does not believe in this Providence does not believe in God. Once there was some nonsense on this subject. Now it is pretty well dispelled, and the pretense of believing in one and not the other has about vanished.”

  The priest wrinkled his nose for the sweat running down it. It was a hot underground hole that they came to for the secret marriage.

  “But they bug me, the biologists and their dwarfed biota,” the priest went on “If they cannot see the central fact of their own science, if they cannot see this fact in the knotted tangle of chromosomes and in the ladders of the double helices, then they have eyes in vain. Ah — I talk too much, and perhaps you do not understand me.”