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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “A great shapeless hulk of one such spook ran to me on my first morning in this vale. I could see the dew on the grass sparkling through him; and yet he had substance, for he kicked the rocks about with his big splay feet. He was in torment then, but was not I also in torment? ‘Has Rome fallen?’ he cried out to me in anguish. ‘Is it true that Rome has fallen? Are all the golden walls and towers flung down?’ ‘Yes, fallen,’ I said sadly. ‘Rome had fallen before, but now she falls again in a special way.’ At hearing that it was as if his outsized pumpkin-shaped head broke. His lumpish face cracked and he cried. He went back up into his rocks with a roaring and sobbing like dragons wailing their dead. And some of the stones in this valley also cried out at the news that Rome had fallen.

  “What I would like to know, though, is whether we now become as they are. Do we (our remnant here) become like them: not quite like men, not quite like devils, even less like angels? Do we become here no more than ancient haunts, devotees of vanished gods, spooks of the waste places? Assure me that we are more than just one more layer of the stratified fossil formation. Assure me that we will be something more than this, even in our exile.”

  The Odd God spoke and assured Paul that they were something more than that. He spoke by a still-green thorn-bush bursting into flame.

  Paul XIII spoke again, for only this one Person really listened to him:

  “I have a little theory,” said Paul XIII. “The first offense was the taking of the forbidden fruit. The second offense (which I believe is more grievous than the first) is the refusing of the bidden fruit. It is even the hacking down of the tree of the fruit. I believe that all the noisome oddities of the present world are entwined with this refusal and hacking. They kill an entire ecology when they hack down the growth tree. The people starve now in every aspect and do not even know that the name of their unease is starvation, that their pale fever is the starvation fever. Because they have food and ease they do not realize that they starve.

  “Did you know that there is no landscape any more in the world? That there are no longer any real rocks or towns out there? Instead there are only weak splotchy pictures of them. A countryside vanishes, and in its place is a poster dizzy with scatter-print that says, ‘This represents a countryside.’ A town goes down, and in its place is a psychedelic blob proclaiming, ‘This stands for a town.’ People are terminated, and in their place are walking spooks with signs around their necks: ‘We are we instead of people.’ In place of life there is narcosis. Hack back the growth enough, and the thing dies. Cut a foot length from the top of a child, and it goes badly with that child. ‘Oh, but the child would grow till he overflowed the world and broke the sky,’ is what they said. ‘How else to regularize the child and the world than to cut off their heads?’ This I believe, is the wrong way.

  “But will You not bid the fruit again to us? Offer it. Offer it again and again! In some way that only You understand it will be accepted. Will You not still bid the fruit to fruit?”

  A fruity breath; a clear glitter of green leaves; a flash of blossoms that hung and then fell like snow; and a runty dead tree was red with apples. Remember that this was sharp November and the tree had not previously leaved that year.

  “You remember the child who found a root and said he would pull it out?” Paul XIII continued. “But when he tried to pull it out, distant people and buildings shriveled and collapsed and were pulled down to nothing and died. The child pulled down the whole world but couldn't pull out that root. It was a special root; it was the root of everything. And for seven decades now, men have tried to pull out that same root; and instead they have pulled down that same world.

  “They did it all to us with catchwords,” Paul continued his morning conversation. “ ‘We accept it all,’ they said, ‘except the flesh and blood of it. We are for all these things. We are only against the structure and body of them.’ I had a little jibe for the critics who said they loved the Church Itself but hated the Institutional Church. ‘What was the verb that God did about the Church?’ I would ask in my guileless way. ‘He instituted the Church, and therefore it is Institutional.’ But perhaps I cheated a little in my jibe. For the verb that in the Vulgate is instituo is actually in the Greek — but I always forget, You know more Greek than I do. Is it true that there is one construction in the Greek Historical Optative that is now understood only by the Devil and Yourself? But tell me, are we now in an Historical Optative time? And what are the options? Will Thou not reveal them to me?”

  There were other early and devout men about in the vale. A kaftaned Jew had a stone shed there in the upper pasture where he prepared parchments from sheepskins, and he had set to work now with a low merry chanting. A Hard-Shell from the southern United States was there looking for a lost calf, having left the ninety-nine to find the one (having left them, however, in the careful care of another Hard-Shell). A Mosulman came down from the height of the sealed upper entrance of the valley where he had just performed his morning rites.

  The several men looked up and about with a slight impatience. It was time.

  “Must You always be reminded?” asked the Hard-Shell.

  “We do not even ask the manna which You gave the Fathers,” the kaftaned Jew said.

  “Only the plain morning fare of this country,” said Paul XIII.

  Quick fire came down on a smoothed stone. And the browned oaten pancakes were there, rampant with ewe butter and honey and aroma. The several men began to eat them.

  “I have to laugh at the late line of us from that Paul to this,” Paul XIII reminisced. “I swear that we infuriated the world eleven times in these seven and a half decades. We were all known for our proclivities toward the accommodating secularism, we were all devoted to the soft surrogate thing, we were all intending to voice the easy agreement and be done with it, we were all elected to do so. And then You touched each of our tongues in turn with a burning coal. You think our actions bewildered and angered the world? I tell you that they bewildered ourselves a thousand times over. How does the speaking horn know what words will be spoken through him? Oh, well, I suppose You have Your reasons, but it has been a little hard on each of us, each being the only transcendent man living in the world in his time.” Paul XIII ran on with other talk because he was old and garrulous. It was sunlight on the high pastures now and soon the sun would reach down to the depths of the valley. Tinkle bells on the animals filled the air. Kids of sheep and goats and human were everywhere. Women were at work stone-grinding oats and barley. A smith was hammering copper and tin together into orange-colored tools and ornaments. Clipping men were long-clipping sheep. It was sharp November, and the sheep would not be short-clipped again till late spring. The sealed vale in the Knockmealdown Mountains was a busy and burgeoning place.

  “I believe that we should have a little of the special this morning,” Paul XIII wheedled. “We can make it ourselves, of course,” he flattered, “but we cannot make it nearly as good as You can. And I have forgotten. I have not so much as brought a pot for it this morning. We can make pots ourselves, of course, but we cannot make them anywhere as good as You can.”

  There was a sigh in the wind over the vale, almost a sigh of exasperation, if He were capable of exasperation. But of a sudden a three-measure stone crusca-jar stood there, full of the most extraordinary Wine Ordinary, the blood that ever bled from the earth. And several of them drank of it.

  “Leave it off for a while, Paul the Thirteenth,” the Hard-Shell growled. The Hard-Shell only half approved of the extraordinary Wine Ordinary, and he seldom took more than a sip of it. He was stricter than the Odd God but only by a little. “He has talked to you as to a child, Paul,” the Hard-Shell said, “and it wearies Him after a while, if He could be wearied. It is my turn now. This morning He may talk to me as to a man.”

  “I am a child,” said Paul XIII. “I even flatter myself that I am a child of grace.”

  Then Paul returned to mending the stone sheep-bridge, and the Hard-Shell talked to th
e Odd God in his own way. And later the kaftaned Jew came and talked to Him, deeply like low music, shivering with fear and quaking with merriment at the same time. Old Jews are said to have several private jokes between themselves and the Odd God.

  And again later the Mosulman came and talked to Him in the desert manner which He especially understands.

  They were an odd clutch in that valley of the Knockmealdown Mountains, and it was an Odd God who provided for them.

  4

  Lo, blessed are our ears for they have heard;

  Yes, blessed are our eyes for they have seen:

  Let thunder break on man and beast and bird

  And the lightning. It is something to have been.

  — G. K. Chesterton

  Jane the Crane had the boy Ishmael born and agile in less time than might be believed. There was a very great hurry now. A baby is vulnerable: not Ishmael, perhaps, but most babies. But he was not born ignorant or uninstructed. For the many months of Janine's carrying him (well, it had been long; he was part monster, surely, and their period is a longer one), she had instructed him all the hours of the day and night, speaking to him silently or loudly when she was working over her flowers, when gawking about in the street, when abiding in her hidden shanty-room. Especially in the afternoons (these were her nights, when she slept) she instructed him, for they shared the same dreams just as they shared the same blood.

  “I tell you, I don't know whether I can hide you better inside or out, she would say to him. “I leave it to you now. Come out when you're ready. You are already bigger than I am. I tell you to get smart fast, to get fast fast. Are you listening to me? You must learn to hide and to disguise. You must learn to look like this one and that one. You will live in the sewers and on the roofs and in the trees. Let me tell you one thing: it is better even to have lived in the dankest agony and fear than never to have lived at all. It is better to be a vermin than never to be anything. It is better to be weird and deformed (I do not mean deformed as the world is deformed now) than to be empty and without form. It is better to be conscious in horror and delirium than to miss consciousness. If you have a nomination and a soul, then nothing else matters greatly. This I believe. If you can hear and understand me, whistle.”

  And the boy Ishmael always whistled from out of her belly. He always heard and he always understood. Then, when they both realized that it was no longer possible to hide him within, he was born. When they both realized immediately that it would not do to have him newborn and helpless, he became agile. The open eyes of Ishmael were clouded for only short instants after birth. Then they cleared; he understood; he knew. Nobody ever heard him cry like a human child. He had more sense than that. Sometimes he chirped and whistled like a chimney bird, sometimes he whined like a dog pup. (Dogs, as surrogate to human persons and human affections, were everywhere privileged.) Sometimes Ishmael gurgled like sewer water; but he was always able to communicate — even to communicate without sound.

  But where could Ishmael hide? Illegal stories attached to his mother, Jane the Crane. She was watched and followed and checked. All the shanty rooms of the city were searched from time to time by the “rat-catchers” who anticipated the nothoi-hunters with the not yet mobile illegals. Ishmael lived in the sewers and on the roofs and in the trees. But mostly he lived under the floors and in the walls. All the shanties were fifty to eighty years old. Nothing was ever built now, only cobbled up a little just before it tumbled down. Inside the walls was the best place. A young boy not yet able to walk could still climb about inside the walls. And not even the dogs of the rat-catchers would snuffle him out from them. Ishmael could whine and rattle and yap in the dogs' own talk. He could pass for a dog in the dark corners, under the floors, inside the walls. When Ishmael seemed like this one or that one, he seemed so to every sense.

  But how did Jane the Crane feed him? However did other illegitimate mothers feed their offspring? Oh, there had never been any shortage of food. The swing-time people wasted far more food than they ate. The illegitimate mothers, mostly servile workers to the swingers or morning yellow-card workers, had only to carry leavings home “for the dogs.” It wasn't starvation that killed the illegal children; it was the “scatter eyes” and the rat-catchers prowling to find and kill them, doing the work voluntarily mostly, from some inner need of theirs.

  Ishmael, however, passed all the other illegal children in earliness and agility. He was one of the few authentic geniuses born in the first half of the twenty-first century: thinking like a pot-a-boil before he could talk; reading minds before he could read the simplest scatter-print; imitating animals by sound and scent and movement; imitating legal children by face before he ever saw the reflection of his own face. He was a wild colt of a boy destined, should he live, to be a wild ass of a man. And he had fame. He was known everywhere before he was seen. Fame is a weed that grows up overnight and can be rooted in anything or nothing.

  Some of the nothoi-hunters already talked about the agile Ishmael, possibly before he was ever out of the womb, certainly soon afterward. There was Peeler, a big man among the hunters. There was Slickstock. There was Quickcoiner, a tipster gentleman such as was always a part of a hunter team. These three were now dining together on the popular Chinese dish, egg gone wrong.

  “There's a new one, I tell you!” Peeler gloated and rubbed his long hands together. “I can feel him like a new wind ruffling my hackles. He's the dog that barks different, he's the bird that whistles different, he's the sewer rat that squeaks different. He's the one of the kind we always hoped for. It will make our season whenever we kill him. The next best thing to killing that seven-year-old male would be to kill this new one.”

  “He's under the streets, he's in the trees,” said Slickstock, “and I tell you he's mine! His father killed a teammate of mine at his own hunting-down. How had we missed his father all his years? Where did he come from?”

  “This new one is out of Jane the Crane, the forky-tongued flower woman,” Quickcoiner said. “Is she not game yet, now that he is born? Is she not game? Why must we hold off? He is named Ishmael.”

  It was known, even before his father came to this city, that there would be a boy named Ishmael.

  “But nobody has ever seen this Ishmael,” Peeler said. “We hear him, we sense him, but we do not see him. We know that he is the wild ass of a creature who climbed in the trees and crawled under the streets before he could walk. We know that he dog-sounded and bird-whistled in code before he could talk. We know also that he imitated the talk of our own children before he could talk himself. We do not know his age, though he must be about two years old. But we know that he will be the wildest of them all, even wilder than the seven-year-old male that we have never been able to kill.”

  “And we have not been able to get Jane the Crane declared open game,” Slickstock complained. “The Instigators claim that there is no evidence of a child. No evidence! Have they no senses except the regular ones?”

  When he was three years old, Ishmael slipped off during the swing-hours and got clear to the Barrens where he met the eight-year-old male that the nothoi-hunters had never been able to kill. So it was all over then, the little drama? The boy had got free and gained his own hunted kind. And whatever happened to the wild children in the Barrens, how they were hunted down and almost extinguished again and again, is surely of another account. Then we are finished with the wild boy Ishmael?

  No. He didn't stay in the Barrens. He came back to Janine's slanty room in the ghetto under the ghetto, back to the sewers and the spaces in the walls and under the floors and streets, back to the trees.

  Three swing-periods later, Ishmael got clear to the Barrens again, taking another small boy with him. It was harder with another boy (though Ishmael had instructed him well) and they made it barely. They ran atangle of a set of nothoi-hunters (not the Peeler set, however), not a quick-sensing set that know there was an Ishmael. But the wild-ass boy had a shot lodged behind his ear just where his wiry mane r
ose highest. He left it there for memento though it festered him. He received this shot in memory of his father, who hadn't been able to leave him anything tangible.

  Three swing periods later, Ishmael got clear to the Barrens again, taking three small boys with him. This incursion was without incident. He repeated the feat after the same interval. Then he repeated it again. It took him about three days to instruct and train the children properly. Many two- and three- and four-year-old children are slow learners and inattentive, though Ishmael selected only the most promising of them to smuggle to the Barrens.

  Then they had their first fatalities. During one of their swing-period journeys they ran atangle of a set of nothoi-hunters, and this was the Peeler set; this was the quick-sensing set that knew there was an Ishmael. Four of the six boys that Ishmael was leading were killed, and both of the girls. Ishmael cursed Peeler and his cronies.

  Ishmael had taken a hundred children into the Barrens, and the rampant eight-year-old male who ruled the region now had real material for his talents. Then Peeler led an incursion into the Barrens that killed fifty young nothoi. It was announced (as it had been announced many times before) that the young nothoi in the Barrens had now been extinguished. But they hadn't been.