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

by R. A. Lafferty

“We understand you,” Morgan and Jane said together.

  “May the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, ah—the God of Ishmael—the God of Jacob be with you, and may He fulfill in you His blessings,” the Papster said; then he said other things, and they married each other before him.

  The background didn't mean much immediately after that. It could have been still on the plateau; it could have been on a mountain or in a deep ravine or over the sea. What happened was gaiety. Morgan and Janine cut up in their lives. No, no, not the dwarfed singing and jittery whining of the Gentle World grown old so gracelessly. This was the song-central thing. They joked, they carried on, they startled, they set fires in what had been too dry, too lacking in substance, even to burn. Like magic they came to know other couples of their same state, ten of them, twenty of them, all in subservient positions and none of them servile. All of them hidden, all of them dangerously open. They were a new thing in the air. The Official Instigators flared their nostrils at the new scent; and the nothoi-hunters caught wind of a new strong prey and shook in their hate and anticipation. Morgan and Jane the Crane even joked about which of them would run out his string first. “It will be you, Janine,” Morgan jibed. “I will sweep you up one morning. ‘Is it Agar?’ I will ask, ‘or is it the Crane?’ And I will say, ‘Oh, she bends hard in the middle!’ And I will stuff you into my canister. And then there will be another girl tending flowers, and I will begin to carry on with her.”

  “Be in not so much hurry to sweep me up,” Janine said, “or you will have to bear Ishmael yourself. It will be hard on you, Morgan, you so narrow in the pelvic girdle, you lacking in so many ways. When you come to give birth to him, you will wish that I were back alive to do it.”

  “Oh, we will keep you alive a little while then,” Morgan said, “and I will try to stay alive myself. A doubly posthumous child always has a hard time of it. At least one of us should be around. Ah, the hunters shoot me through with their eyes a dozen times a day, and the Instigators are fashioning the last seal for my certificate. What is taking Ishmael so long anyhow? Mayhap he'll be a monster. They have longer gestation periods. Better a monster than the sort of dwarfs that abound now.”

  “He will be a wild ass of a man, and that is surely monster enough,” Janine said. “Get gone. The flower-care inspector has been plaguing me, and he is coming now. I love you more than the sky itself. Not much more, but a little. Get gone.”

  The flower-care inspector was always in a great fury with Janine now. “Do you not know that the flower-care girl over on Western Avenue had her tongue cut out for talking overly much with a sweeper?” he asked. “Yellow-card morning people have not the right to talk freely. And why are you so clothed? Why are you so overclothed? There is scarcely a square foot of flesh showing on you. What do your silly affectations work toward anyhow?”

  “The world clothed and in its right mind,” said Janine Pervicacia.

  “Clothes sometimes hide things!” the flower-care inspector shrilled.

  “Oh, they do!” Janine beamed. “They do.”

  Those were tall days. When you rise above the plateau you rise above it in all ways. There was hope everywhere; and there was no single detail that could give any possible hope. There was a man from over the sea (as was Morgan of that name) who said that things were much the same elsewhere, congealed, dwarfed, and vapid. Yet he was full of sunny strength and quick laughs. There was a man there from over the prairies. He said that the prairies were disaster areas now for all free and illegal people. They were hunted down and killed from the air by fog poisons that had first been tried out on coyotes. There was a man there from the north woods. He said that the nothoi-hunters up there were real hunters, and there was no bag limit. They didn't seem to care if they did hunt out the game. It would be replenished, they said, or they would hunt elsewhere when they had done with it. There was a man there from that ghetto that is under the ghetto, from the sewers that are under the sewers. He said that the very small pockets of free and illegal people underground were being systematically killed by spray poisons that had first been tried out on rats. But still there was high hope: not for long life, of course, but for bright and embattled life, and for issue. But the way was getting mighty narrow.

  “All joking aside,” Morgan told Janine one morning, “you win our little bet and game. This is the last morning of my life. They get me today.” “Take some of them with you, man!” Janine spat with her forky tongue.

  “No. We won't go to the same place; but I may send some of them another way.”

  “Break for the Barrens, man!” Janine sounded. “In short months I and the boy will come to you there.”

  “Oh, I break to them now,” Morgan said, “but I must pass through an Instigator and a circle of hunters first. This world, my love, is only temporary, of time. We have another one. But we are appointed to this world first. It is of ourselves, part of our bodies. It is mean, and are we not also? It is not better, because we did not make it any better. This withered world is both our ancestry and our issue, however deformed it may be. Remember, Janine (and this is important) never hate this world; but it will be hateful. Remember also, we always loved the early mornings.”

  “I will remember, Morgan. Go happy with it now. See how joyful I say it! Your dead ears may hear me shrilling like a demented woman fifteen minutes from now; do not believe them. Remember that I said, ‘Go happy with it.’ ”

  Morgan Saunders slid through the early morning streets toward the edge of the city in the direction of the Barrens. He was a moving man with cat-springs in him. It was his last morning by all the odds, but he would give them a run or a fight for it. Then his own particular Official Instigator loomed up in front of him, the Ancient Hippie of the more-than-a-hundred-years class, the nemesis who had already obtained the warrant for Morgan's death and who would turn the hunters loose on him whenever he wanted to. “Get out of my way, old hip,” Morgan warned. “I'm in a hurry.”

  “Oh, do not be in a hurry, man,” the old Instigator protested. “Talk to me. It is you who are going to die today. It is you of the illegitimate life that we have enough to kill a dozen times. If I were you I would say, ‘Let them be impatient; let them wait a little.’ They cannot kill you till I give the word. Talk to me, man.”

  “Talking won't change a thing, oldster. And I go to a better thing than this, whether I get to the Barrens or to my death. Why shouldn't I be in a hurry for a better thing?”

  “Talking did change everything once, Morgan-Sorgen. We whipped you once by talk alone, not even very good talk. We won the world to our way by our talk. And now you are nothing at all but a remnant and a sport. You are less than the tenth of one percent. If I were of the tenth of one percent I would be silent. And we can extinguish even that minuscule of you whenever we wish.”

  “But we reappear. You will not be rid of us. We grow back. Why are you afraid to let the tenth of one percent speak? You shake, you fume, you slander, you vilify.”

  “You are our prey and you have no right to opinion or voice. We keep a very few of you for the hunting only. You will not grow back if we decide to end the game. Why have you never accepted our consensus world? It is really rather interesting, rather arty, rather gentle, rather novel.”

  Several sets of nothoi-hunters were waiting in the near distance. There was in particular the set of Peeler and Slickstock and Quickcoiner; these had claim on Morgan Saunders as their special game.

  “The same novelties for a hundred years are no longer novel, old man,” Morgan said, shifting nervously but having to endure the talk. “And divergent art is of some interest for a while, as long as there is a main thing for it to diverge from. Yes, you even had a touch of humor and a touch of kindness once. But now you are cut flowers, no more than that; worse, you are artificial cut flowers. It is your loss of nerve, it is your regression, it is your dwarfing yourselves and creeping into strange wombs for shelter. You lost your courage first of all, then your honesty and your common sense. As false
hood and ugliness are equated, you set out to create a world of unsurpassed ugliness. Painting and sculpture were perverted first. Then music withered and whimpered into stringed idiocy. Then all the arts went and all the life ambients. You claimed that it was an opening up, a meaningful development. It wasn't. It was an end, and there is no meaning or development in a dead end. These are the Terminal Days that you have brought about.”

  “You are jealous of our success, little Morgan from over the sea. Judge us by our beautiful divergence that works. Recognize us by our results.”

  “Aye, by your fruits we may know you,” Morgan said. It was an unkind jibe, and it got under the Instigator's skin. That Ancient Hippie paled in anger.

  “We are irreconcilables!” he howled. “You are impossible, not to be reformed, not to be converted. You are impossible unto death.”

  The Ancient Hippie made a downward sign with his arm, and there was a clatter of armament coming alive from every direction. Morgan smashed the Ancient Hippie in the face (an unkind and illegal thing); he feinted and ran like a bolt of rabbits in three directions at once.

  “He is a deformity,” Morgan spoke in his churning head about the Ancient Hippie, who still lingered in his mind. “He is perfect in his logic to the system with the central thing left out. There is no meeting ground at all in this life. Impossible, irreconcilable!”

  A street-sweeper knows the streets. A moving cat-spring man can get the jump on blood-hungry nothoi-hunters. Bullets banged and clattered into walls of buildings, but Morgan had movements that the prediction scopes of the nothoi-hunters' rifles could not predict. And the hunters really weren't very good at movement shot, no matter how fancy the wrappings of their cult. Mostly they had hunted down and killed very small children and heavy and distraught women. It was higher sport to bring down a prime man, but they were less practiced at it.

  Morgan was away from the first circle of them, going like ragged lightning, striking and vanishing. He sent several of the hunters on their dead way. He seemed always to go toward the inner city, and yet he retreated two steps toward the fringe and the Barrens for every conspicuous step that he took toward the center.

  But they were all out after him now. Jazzbo horns sounded to call all hunters. Dogs of the two-legged variety took up the bay after him to trap him or tree him or sound him for the hunters. This was no illegitimate child to be hunted down. It was an illegitimate man, grown and known, illegal and illicit in his tongue and his life. They would have him in their dully murderous way. There was novelty (almost the only remaining one) and diversion in a nothoi-hunt; but there was no heroism, not in the hunters, not even in the prey.

  For Morgan Saunders certainly had nothing heroic in him now. He ran sick and scared; he had believed it would be otherwise. He was a man of no special ability or intelligence. He had come to the old central way of things quite late, and by accident or intuition. He had no magic; he had no plan or program now but to run and evade. He had the unworldly hope and peace, but he hadn't them immediately or vividly as he came to the end; only as buried certainties. He ran himself to weariness. The cat-springs and the movement died in him, and when he could no longer evade and elude, the nothoi-hunters had him and killed him on the edge of the city within sight of the miserable Barrens.

  Jane the Crane found him a little later, still in the early morning. She picked him up in sudden strong arms. She walked and keened, carrying the dead Morgan in her arms and the live Ishmael under her belly, walking back into the city and among her flowers, trampling them (which was illegal), shrilling and wailing, a walking forky-tongued and agonizing pietá. Morning crows gathered about her and followed her; and even some of the folks from the regular swing-hours world were up and blinking at the spooky sunlight and the keening woman. They jeered and defamed her, and she came back with her forky tongue and harangued them all.

  “Bedamned with you all and the fouled nest of you!” she cried. “You are vermin, you are no longer people. And the Instigators are lice on the body of the world.”

  And already the Instigators were holding council about her.

  “Why not now?” some asked. “She is certainly illegitimate in her conduct, and she carries one illegitimate burden in her arms and one in her belly. Why not now?”

  “The hunting has come to be too slim,” others of them said. “The nothoi-hunters insist that a small bit of it must be reserved. Here is an additional quarry for them, in two years from now, or at most three. There is prescience about the unborn one. It is sworn that he will be prime game. And the hunters must retain a small reserve.”

  Another yellow-card street-sweeper, a man very like Morgan Saunders and a friend of his, came by with his working things. With great compassion he took Morgan from Janine's arms, bent him difficultly in the middle, and stuffed him into his wheeled canister. He also spoke some words to Janine in a low voice. We do not know what words they were, but they were like a flame. And now Janine became a new sort of flame. She brightened, she burned, she erupted with laughter.

  What? What? With laughter?

  Yes, with laughter and with a quick spate of gay words:

  “But why am I mourning like one who doesn't believe?” she sparked. “It's the dawn of the world to me! I am a birthing woman, and I will give merriment with my milk. I take the old motto ‘This is the first day of the rest of my life.’ It's a new dawn, and I have loved the dawns. To be otherwise would be to miss the main things as they have missed them. Hurry, Ishmael, you leaping lump in my belly! We have to get you born and agile before they come to eat us up. But by tomorrow's morning we will see each other's faces. God knows the wonder of it, to send births in the early mornings.”

  She went to her hidden shanty-room in the ghetto under the ghetto, singing and whistling. Really, she was an odd one in those flat False Terminal Days of the world.

  (A question, perhaps out of context: Why were those False Terminal Days not truly terminal to the race and the world? O, there were other movements and powers that had not been taken into account. And the plateau, as a matter of fact, that low, level, artificial construction, had been built atop an area of old volcanic and earthquake movement. There was a great underlying fault, and it would erupt there. But this is not an account of termination of the Terminal Stasis.)

  3

  I'll climb Sinai's rocks to the thunder-clad crest

  And learn all that Moses forgot,

  And see if the Bush is at Hebron or Hest

  And if it is burning or not.

  — Archipelago

  Here are some pages which possibly do not belong here at all. If that is so, then it is the fault of the randoming machines. This illegal private account of Janine Pervicacia and Morgan Saunders and their illegal issue Ishmael was first composed by a grieving friend and was printed (as everything was printed then) in scatter-print. The unnumbered pages, even of a private journal, had to go through a randoming machine and be randomized; the print machine would not function otherwise. Now, in sorting them out as best we can (for we are reader and not depth-comprehender), a certain section falls together that is not directly a part of the account of Janine and Morgan. Yet this section was mixed up with their account, whether or not it was also written by the hand of the grieving friend, and it will be given here. We do not know whether this intrusive section is comic or ironic or straight. There is even a chance that it may be a sample of a rare and secret form of the period, a satire upon a satire: an ironic counterpoise of a stereotyped satire form. We nominate this misfit section, “The Interlude of the Odd Man and the Odd God,” and it is as follows:

  “In the early springtime of the year 2040 of the common era, the original sparse population having been removed from the area, three hundred persons of a troubling sort were sealed into the Vale of Pailliun, which is in the Knockmealdown Mountains of the Disunited Commonwealth of Ireland. These three hundred persons included certain fossils, diehards, and “yesterday's leaders” of an irreformable religious and ethic sort,
among them the last “Pope” who strangely insisted that he was not the last of them. These three hundred persons, families and singletons, were allowed the sheep and kine of the valley and such primitive tools as they chose to bring in. Seals were set for one thousand years (we do have the historical sense) on both the upper and lower entrances of the valley. All communications with the persons of the vale are evermore prohibited under pain of death. Nothing may go into the vale by earth or by air, and nothing may come out. If there is increase in the valley, then let that increase choke on itself.”

  — Joint statement of the United Nations Obsolescence and Terminating Board and of the One Ecumenical Liberal and Secular Church, May 1, 2040.

  Matteo Mattutine (Matthew Morning — what kind of a name is that?) who was Pope Paul XIII, had said mass before dawn for the twelve who still adhered to him out of this remnant; they had assisted standing with tapers and rushlights. Then he had brought one flock of sheep (150 of them) up to the high pasture just a little before sunrise. He was a rugged old man and barefoot (for the ground of the vale was holy ground), though it was sharp November. The high grass of this pasture had browned and cured itself where it stood, making winter hay, and the sheep would be kept on such pastures till May when the close-grazed river meadow turned green again. Paul XIII had a hammer, a pestle, and a mattock sort of tool, which the Italians call zappa. He was mending a little stone sheep-bridge over the stream there. What? Is it odd that a shepherd should herd sheep and that a pontiff should maintain bridges?

  And Paul XIII talked with the Odd God there in the high pasture, as he talked with Him every morning:

  “When we first came into this valley (our desert, our prison; our delight if You say it is our delight), we found certain beings here who were more ghost than flesh, who were not on the manifest of the proper fauna of this valley. I had seen such strange half-creatures (neither proper flesh nor yet honest brimstone) in the high mountain valleys of Italy. We always believed them to be the shades of the old supplanted Italic gods and their devotees. But what are we to think when we find them here in Ireland? They are awkward and ungainly and not all there, either in mind or body. You must know of them, for You made them, though they deny it. They are not quite like men, not quite like devils; still less are they like angels. Yet they have some knowledge of the old established things.