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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “The early Indian legends, Don Caetano, did they say where the Long Picture came from or who painted it?”

  “Sure. They say it was painted by a very peculiar great being, and his name (hold onto your capelo) was Great River Shore Picture Painter. I'm sure that will help you. About the false or cheap-jack imitations for which you seem to have contempt, don't. They are not what they seem to you, and they were not done for money. These cheap-jack imitations are of Mexican origin, just as the staining originals were born in the states. They were done for the new great families in their aping of the old great families, in the hope of also sharing in ancient treasure and ancient luck. Having myself just left off aping great families of another sort, I have a bitter understanding of these imitations. Unfortunately, they were done in an age that lacked art, but the contrast would have been as great in any case: all art would seem insufficient beside that of the Great River Shore Picture Painter himself.

  “The cheap-jack imitation pictures were looted by gringo soldiers of the U.S. Army during the Mexican War, as they seemed to be valued by certain Mexican families. From the looters they found their way to mid-century carnivals in the States.”

  “Don Caetano, do you know that the picture segments stand up under great magnification, that there are details in them far too fine to be seen by the unaided eye?”

  “I am glad you say so. I leave always had this on faith but I've never had enough faith to put it to the test. Yes, we have always believed the pictures contained depths within depths.”

  “Why are there Mexican wild pigs in this view, Don Caetano? It's as though this one had a peculiar Mexican slant to it.”

  “No, the peccary was an all-American pig, Leo. It went all the way north to the ice. But it's been replaced by the European pig everywhere but in our own wilds. You want the picture? I will have my man load it and ship it to your place.”

  “Ah, I would give you something for it surely—”

  “No, Leo, I give it freely. You are a man that I like. Receive it, and God be with you! Ah, Leo, in parting, and since you collect strange things, I have here a box of bright things I think you might like. I believe they are no more than worthless garnets, but are they not pretty?”

  Garnets? They were not garnets. Worthless? Then why did Leo Nation's eyes dazzle and his heart come up in his throat? With trembling hands he turned the stones over and worshipped. And when Don Caetano gave them to him for the token price of one thousand dollars, his heart rejoiced.

  You know what? They really were worthless garnets. But what had Leo Nation thought that they were in that fateful moment? What spell had Don Caetano put on him to make him think they were something else?

  Oh well, you win here and you lose there. And Don Caetano really did ship the treasured picture to him free.

  Leo Nation came home after five months of wandering and collecting. “I stand it without you for five months,” Ginger said. “I could not have stood it for six months, I sure could not have stood it for seven. I kidded. I didn't really fool around with the fellows. I had the carpenter build another hay barn to hold the pieces of picture you sent in. There were more than fifty of them.”

  Leo Nation had his friend Charles Longbank come out.

  “Fifty seven new ones, Charley,” Leo said. “That makes sixty with what I had before. Sixty miles of river shore I have now, I think. Analyze them, Charley. Get the data out of them somehow and feed it to your computers. First I want to know what order they go in, south to north, and how big the gaps between them are.”

  “Leo, I tried to explain before, that would require (besides the presumption of authenticity) that they were all done at the same hour of the same day.”

  “Presume it all, Charley. They were all done at the same time, or we will assume that they were. We will work on that presumption.”

  “Leo, ah — I had hoped that you would fail in your collecting. I still believe we should drop it all.”

  “Me, I hoped we would succeed, Charley, and I hoped harder. Why are you afraid of spooks? Me, I meet them every hour of my life. That's what keeps the air fresh.”

  “I'm afraid of it, Leo. All right, I'll get some equipment out here tomorrow, but I'm afraid of it. Damn it, Leo, who was here?”

  “Wasn't anybody here,” Ginger said. “I tell you like I tell Charley, I was only kidding, I don't really fool around with fellows.”

  Charles Longbank got some equipment out there the next day. Charles himself was looking bad, maybe whiskeyed up a little bit, jerky, and looking over his shoulder all the time as though he had an owl perched on the back of his neck. But he did work several days running the picture segments and got them all down on scan film. Then he would program his computer and feed the data from the scan films to it.

  “There's a shadow, like a thin cloud on several of the pictures,” Leo Nation said. “You any idea what it is, Charley?”

  “Leo, I got out of bed late last night and ran two miles up and down that rocky back road of yours to shake myself up. I was afraid I was getting an idea of what those thin clouds were. Lord, Leo, who was here?”

  Charles Longbank took the data into town and fed it to his computers.

  He was back in several days with the answers.

  “Leo, this spooks me more than ever,” he said, and he looked as if the spooks had chewed him from end to end. “Let's drop the whole thing. I'll even give you back your retainer fee.”

  “No, man, no. You took the retainer fee and you are retained. Have you the order they go in, Charley, south to north?”

  “Yes, here it is. But don't do it, Leo, don't do it.”

  “Charley, I only shuffle them around with my lift fork and put them in order. I'll have it done in an hour.” And in an hour he had it done.

  “Now, let's look at the south one first, and then the north one, Charley.”

  “No, Leo, no, no! Don't do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it scares me. They really do fall into an order. They really could have been done all at the same hour of the same day. Who was here, Leo? Who is the giant looking over my shoulder?”

  “Yeah, he's a big one, isn't he, Charley? But he was a good artist and artists have the right to be a little peculiar. He looks over my shoulder a lot too.”

  Leo Nation ran the southernmost segment of the Long Picture. It was mixed land and water, islands, bayou and swamp, estuary and ocean mixed with muddy river.

  “It's pretty, but it isn't the Mississippi,” said Leo as it ran. “It's that other river down there. I'd know it after all these years too.”

  “Yes,” Charles Longbank gulped. “It's the Atchafalaya River. By the comparative sun angle of the pieces that had been closely identified, the computer was able to give close bearings on all the segments. This is the mouth of the Atchafalaya River which has several times in the geological past been the main mouth of the Mississippi. But how did he know if he wasn't here? Gah, the ogre is looking over my shoulder again. It scares me, Leo.”

  “Yeah, Charley, I say a man ought to be really scared at least once a day so he can sleep that night. Me, I'm scared for at least a week now, and I like the big guy. Well, that's one end of it, or mighty close to it. Now we take the north end.

  “Yes, Charley, yes. The only thing that scares you is that they're real. I don't know why he has to look over our shoulders when we run them, though. If he's who I think he is he's already seen it all.”

  Leo Nation began to run the northernmost segment of the river that he had.

  “How far north are we in this, Charley?” he asked.

  “Along about where the Cedar River and the Iowa River later came in.”

  “That all the farther north? Then I don't have any segment of the north third of the river?”

  “Yes, this is the furthest north it went, Leo. Oh god, this is the last one.”

  “A cloud on this segment too, Charley? What are they anyhow? Say, this is a pretty crisp scene for springtime on the Mis
sissippi.”

  “You look sick, Long-Charley-Bank,” Ginger Nation said. “You think a little whiskey with possum's blood would help you?”

  “Could I have the one without the other? Oh, yes, both together, that may be what I need. Hurry, Ginger.”

  “It bedevils me still how any painting could be so wonderful,” Leo wondered.

  “Haven't you caught on yet, Leo?” Charles shivered. “It isn't a painting.”

  “I tell you that at the beginning if you only listen to me,” Ginger Nation said. “I tell you it isn't either one, canvas or paint, it is only picture. And Leo said the same thing once, but then he forgets. Drink this, old Charley.”

  Charles Longbank drank the healing mixture of good whiskey and possum's blood, and the northernmost section of the river rolled on.

  “Another cloud on the picture, Charley,” Leo said. “It's like a big smudge in the air between us and the shore.”

  “Yes, and there will be another,” Charles moaned. “It means we're getting near the end. Who were they, Leo? How long ago was it? Ah—I'm afraid I know that part pretty close—but they couldn't have been human then, could they? Leo, if this was just an inferior throwaway, why are they still hanging in the air?”

  “Easy, old Charley, easy. Man, that river gets chalky and foamy! Charley, couldn't you transfer all this to microfilm and feed it into your computers for all sorts of answers?”

  “Oh, God, Leo, it already is!”

  “Already is what? Hey what's the fog, what's the mist? What is it that bulks up behind the mist? Man, what kind of blue fog-mountain—?”

  “The glacier, you dummy, the glacier,” Charles Longbank groaned. And the northernmost segment of the river came to an end.

  “Mix up a little more of that good whiskey and possum's blood, Ginger,” Leo Nation said. “I think we're all going to need it.”

  “That old, is it?” Leo asked a little later as they were all strangling on the very strong stuff. “Yes, that old,” Charles Longbank jittered. “Oh, who was here, Leo?”

  “And, Charley, it already is what?”

  “It already is microfilm, Leo, to them. A rejected strip, I believe.”

  “Ah, I can understand why whiskey and possum's blood never caught on as a drink,” Leon said. “Was old possum here then?”

  “Old possum was, we weren't.” Charles Longbank shivered. “But it seems to me that something older than possum is snuffing around again, and with a bigger snuffer.”

  Charles Longbank was shaking badly. One more thing and he would crack. “The clouds on the — film, Charley, what are they?” Leo Nation asked.

  And Charles Longbank cracked.

  “God over my head,” he moaned out of a shivering face, “I wish they were clouds on the film. Ah, Leo, Leo, who were they, who were they?”

  “I'm cold, Charley,” said Leo Nation. “There's bone-chill draft from somewhere.”

  The marks… too exactly like something, and too big to be: the loops and whorls that were eighteen feet long…

  Sky

  The Sky-Seller was Mr. Furtive himself, fox-muzzled, ferret-eyed, slithering along like a snake, and living under the Rocks. The Rocks had not been a grand place for a long time. It had been built in the grand style on a mephitic plot of earth (to transform it), but the mephitic earth had won out. The apartments of the Rocks had lost their sparkle as they had been divided again and again, and now they were shoddy. The Rocks had weathered. Its once pastel hues were now dull grays and browns. The five underground levels had been parking places for motor vehicles when those were still common, but now these depths were turned into warrens and hovels. The Sky-Seller lurked and lived in the lowest and smallest and meanest of them all.

  He came out only at night. Daylight would have killed him; he knew that. He sold out of the darkest shadows of the night. He had only a few (though oddly select) clients, and nobody knew who his supplier was. He said that he had no supplier, that he gathered and made the stuff himself.

  Welkin Alauda, a full-bodied but light-moving girl (it was said that her bones were hollow and filled with air), came to the Sky-Seller just before first light, just when he had become highly nervous but had not yet bolted to his underground.

  “A sack of Sky from the nervous mouse. Jump, or the sun will gobble your house!” Welkin sang-song, and she was already higher than most skies.

  “Hurry, hurry!” the Sky-Seller begged, thrusting the sack to her while his black eyes trembled and glittered (if real light should ever reflect into them he'd go blind).

  Welkin took the sack of Sky, and scrambled money notes into his hands which had furred palms. (Really? Yes, really.)

  “World be flat and the Air be round, wherever the Sky grows underground,” Welkin intoned, taking the sack of Sky and soaring along with a light scamper of feet (she hadn't much weight, her bones were hollow). And the Sky-Seller darted headfirst down a black well-shaft thing to his depths.

  Four of them went Sky-Diving that morning, Welkin herself, Karl Vlieger, Icarus Riley, Joseph Alzarsi; and the pilot was—(no, not who you think, he had already threatened to turn them all in; they'd use that pilot no more)—the pilot was Ronald Kolibri in his little crop-dusting plane. But a crop-duster will not go up to the frosty heights they liked to take off from. Yes it will — if everybody is on Sky. But it isn't pressurized, and it doesn't carry oxygen. That doesn't matter, not if everybody is on Sky, not if the plane is on Sky too.

  Welkin took Sky with Mountain Whizz, a carbonated drink. Karl stuffed it into his lip like snuff. Icarus Riley rolled it and smoked it. Joseph Alzarsi needled it, mixed with drinking alcohol, into his main vein. The pilot, Ronny, tongued and chewed it like sugar dust. The plane named Shrike took it through the manifold.

  Fifty thousand feet — you can't go that high in a crop-duster. Thirty below zero — Ah, that isn't cold! Air too thin to breathe at all — with Sky, who needs such included things as air?

  Welkin stepped out, and went up, not down. It was a trick she often pulled. She hadn't much weight; she could always get higher than the rest of them. She went up and up until she disappeared. Then she drifted down again, completely enclosed in a sphere of ice crystal, sparkling inside it and making monkey faces at them.

  The wind yelled and barked, and the divers took off. They all went down, soaring and gliding and tumbling; standing still sometimes, it seemed; even rising again a little. They went down to clouds and spread out on them; dark-white clouds with the sun inside them and suffusing them both from above and below. They cracked Welkin's ice-crystal sphere and she stepped out of it. They ate the thin pieces of it, very cold and brittle and with a tang of ozone. Alzarsi took off his shirt and sunned himself on a cloud.

  “You will burn,” Welkin told him. “Nobody burns so as when sunning himself on a cloud.” That was true.

  They sank through the black-whiteness of these clouds and came into the limitless blue concourse with clouds above and below them. It was in this same concourse that Hippodameia used to race her horses, there not being room for such coursers to run on earth. The clouds below folded up and the clouds above folded down, forming a discrete space.

  “We have our own rotundity and sphere here,” said Icarus Riley (these are their Sky-Diver names, not their legal names), “and it is apart from all worlds and bodies. The worlds and bodies do not exist for as long a time as we say that they do not exist. The axis of our present space is its own concord. Therefore, it being in perfect concord, Time stops.”

  All their watches had stopped, at least.

  “But there is a world below,” said Karl. “It is an abject world, and we can keep it abject forever if we wish. But it has at least a shadowy existence, and later we will let it fill out again in our compassion for lowly things. It is flat, though, and we must insist that it remain flat.”

  “This is important,” Joseph said with the deep importance of one on Sky. “So long as our own space is bowed and globed, the world must remain flat or depresse
d. But the world must not be allowed to bow its back again. We are in danger if it ever does. So long as it is truly flat and abject it cannot crash ourselves to it.”

  “How long could we fall,” Welkin asked, “if we had not stopped time, if we let it flow at its own pace, or at ours? How long could we fall?”

  “Hephaestus once tumbled through space all day long,” Icarus Riley said, “and the days were longer then.”

  Karl Vlieger had gone wall-eyed from an interior-turned sexual passion that he often experienced in diving. Icarus Riley seemed to be on laughing gas suddenly; this is a sign that Sky is not having perfect effect. Joseph Alzarsi felt a cold wind down his spine and a series of jerky little premonitions.

  “We are not perfect,” Joseph said. “Tomorrow or the next day we may be, for we do approach perfection. We win a round. And we win another. Let us not throw away our victory today through carelessness. The earth has bowed his old back a little bit, and we make ready for him! Now, guys, now!”

  Four of them (or maybe only three of them) pulled the rings. The chutes unpeeled, flowered, and jerked. They had been together like a sheaf in close conversation. But suddenly, on coming to earth, they were spread out over five hundred yards.

  They assembled. They packed their chutes. That would be all the diving for that day.

  “Welkin, how did you pack your chute so quickly?” Icarus asked her suspiciously.

  “I don't know.”

  “You are always the slowest one of us, and the sloppiest. Someone always has to re-roll your chute for you before it is used again. And you were the last one to land just now. How were you the first one to be packed? How did you roll it so well? It has the earmarks of my own rolling, just as I rolled it for you before we took off this morning.”