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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “I don't know, Icarus. Oh, I think I'll go up again, straight up.”

  “No, you've sailed and dived enough for one morning. Welkin, did you even open your chute?”

  “I don't know.”

  High on Sky, they went up again the next morning. The little plane named Shrike flew up as no plane had ever flown before, up through Storm. The storm-shrouded Earth shrank to the size of a pea-doogie. “We will play a trick on it,” said Welkin. “When you're on Sky you can play a trick on anything and make it abide by it. I will say that the pea-doogie that was the world is nothing. See, it is gone. Then I will select another pea-doogie, that one there, and I will call it the world. And that is the world that we will come down to in a little while. I've switched worlds on the world, and it doesn't know what happened to it.”

  “It's uneasy, though,” Joseph Alzarsi spoke through flared nostrils. “You shook it. No wonder the world has its moments of self-doubt.”

  They were one million feet high. The altimeter didn't go that high, but Ronald Kolibri, the pilot, wrote out the extended figure in chalk to make it correct. Welkin stepped out. Karl and Icarus and Joseph stepped out. Ronald Kolibri stepped out, but only for a while. Then he remembered that he was the pilot and got back in the plane. They were so high that the air was black and star-filled instead of blue. It was so cold that the empty space was full of cracks and potholes. They dived half a million feet in no time at all. They pulled up laughing.

  It was invigorating, it was vivifying. They stamped on the clouds, and the clouds rang like frosty ground. This was the ancestral country of all hoarfrost, of all grained-snow and glare-ice. Here was weather-maker, here was wind-son. They came into caves of ice mixed with moraine; they found antler hatchets and Hemicyon bones; they found coals still glowing. The winds bayed and hunted in packs through the chasms. These were the cold Fortean clouds, and their location is commonly quite high.

  They came down below Storm, finding new sun and new air. It was pumpkin-summer, it was deep autumn in the sky.

  They dropped again, miles and millennia, to full Sky-summer: the air so blue that it grew a violet patina on it to save the surface. Their own space formed about them again, as it did every day, and time stopped.

  But not motion! Motion never stopped with them. Do you realize that nothingness in a void can still be in motion? And how much more they of the great centrality! There was Dynamic; there was sustaining vortex; there was the high serenity of fevered motion.

  But is not motion merely a relationship of space to time? No. That is an idea that is common to people who live on worlds, but it is a subjective idea. Here, beyond the possible influence of any worlds, there was living motion without reference.

  “Welkin, you look quite different today,” Joseph Alzarsi spoke in wonder. “What is it?”

  “I don't know. It's wonderful to be different and I'm wonderful.”

  “It is something missing from you,” said Icarus. “I believe it is a defect missing.”

  “But I hadn't any, Icarus.”

  They were in central and eternal moment, and it did not end, it could not end, it goes on yet. Whatever else seems to happen, it is merely in parentheses to that moment.

  “It is time to consider again,” Icarus mused after a while. There is no time or while in the Moment, but there is in the parentheses. “I hope it is the last time we will ever have to consider. We, of course, are in our own space and beyond time or tangent. But the earth, such as it is, is approaching with great presumption and speed.”

  “But it's nothing to us!” Karl Vlieger suddenly raged out in a chthonic and phallic passion. “We can shatter it! We can shoot it to pieces like a clay pigeon! It cannot rush onto us like a slashing dog. Get down, world! Heel, you cur! Heel, I say!”

  “We say to one world ‘rise’ and it rises, and to another one ‘heel’ and it heels,” Icarus Sky-spoke in his dynamic serenity.

  “Not yet,” Joseph Alzarsi warned. “Tomorrow we will be total. Today we are not yet. Possibly we could shatter the world like a clay pigeon if we wished, but we would not be lords of it if we had to shatter it.”

  “We could always make another world,” said Welkin reasonably.

  “Certainly, but this one is our testing. We will go to it when it is crouched down. We cannot allow it to come ravening to us. Hold! Hold there, we order you!”

  And the uprushing world halted, cowed.

  “We go down,” said Joseph. “We will let it come up only when it is properly broken.”

  (“And they inclined the heavens and came down.”)

  Once more, three of them pulled the rings. And the chutes unpeeled, flowered, and jerked. They had been like a sheaf together in their moment; but now, coming to earth, they were suddenly scattered out over five hundred yards.

  “Welkin, you didn't have your chute at all today!” Icarus gaped with some awe when they had assembled again. “That is what was different about you.” “No, I guess I didn't have it. There was no reason to have it if I didn't need it. Really, there was never any reason for me to have used one at all, ever.”

  “Ah, we were total today and didn't know it,” Joseph ventured. “Tomorrow none of us will wear chutes. This is easier than I had believed.”

  Welkin went to the Sky-Seller to buy new Sky that night. Not finding him in the nearer shadows of the Rocks, she went down and down, drawn by the fungoid odor and the echoing dampness of the underground. She went through passages that were man-made, through passages that were natural, through passages that were unnatural. Some of these corridors, it is true, had once been built by men, but now they had reverted and became most unnatural deep-earth caverns. Welkin went down into the total blackness where there were certain small things that still mumbled out a faint white color; but it was the wrong color white, and the things were all of a wrong shape. There was the dead white shape of Mycelium masses, the grotesqueness of Agaricus, the deformity of Deadly Amanita and of Morel. The gray-milky Lactarius glowed like lightless lanterns in the dark; there was the blue-white of the Deceiving Clitocybe and the yellow-white of the Caesar Agaric. There was the insane ghost-white of the deadliest and queerest of them all, the Fly Amanita, and a mole was gathering this.

  “Mole, bring Sky for the Thing Serene, for the Minions tall and the Airy Queen,” Welkin jangled. She was still high on Sky, but it had begun to leave her a little and she had the veriest touch of the desolate sickness.

  “Sky for the Queen of the buzzing drones, with her hollow heart and her hollow bones,” the Sky-Seller intoned hollowly.

  “And fresh, Oh I want it fresh, fresh Sky!” Welkin cried.

  “With these creatures there is no such thing as fresh,” the Sky-Seller told her. “You want it stale, Oh so stale! Ingrown and aged and with its own mold grown moldy.”

  “Which is it?” Welkin demanded. “What is the name of the one you gather it from?”

  “The Fly Amanita.”

  “But isn't that simply a poisonous mushroom?”

  “It has passed beyond that. It has sublimated. Its simple poison has had its second fermenting into narcotic.”

  “But it sounds so cheap that it be merely narcotic.”

  “Not merely narcotic. It is something very special in narcotic.”

  “No, no, not narcotic at all!” Welkin protested. “It is liberating, it is world-shattering. It is Height Absolute. It is motion and detachment itself. It is the ultimate. It is mastery.”

  “Why, then it is mastery, lady. It is the highest and lowest of all created things.”

  “No, no,” Welkin protested again, “not created. It is not born, it is not made. I couldn't stand that. It is the highest of all uncreated things.”

  “Take it, take it,” the Sky-Seller growled, “and be gone. Something begins to curl up inside me.”

  “I go!” Welkin said, “and I will be back many times for more.”

  “No, you will not be. Nobody ever comes back many times for Sky. You will be back never.
Or one time. I think that you will be back one time.”

  They went up again the next morning, the last morning. But why should we say that it was the last morning? Because there would no longer be divisions or days for them. It would be one last eternal day for them now, and nothing could break it. They went up in the plane that had once been named Shrike and was now named Eternal Eagle. The plane had repainted itself during the night with new name and new symbols, some of them not immediately understandable. The plane snuffled Sky into its manifolds, and grinned and roared. And the plane went up!

  Oh! Jerusalem in the Sky! How it went up!

  They were all certainly perfect now and would never need Sky again. They were Sky.

  “How little the world is!” Welkin rang out. “The towns are like fly-specks and the cities are like flies.”

  “It is wrong that so ignoble a creature as the Fly should have the exalted name,” Icarus complained.

  “I'll fix that,” Welkin sang. “I give edict: That all the flies on earth be dead!” And all the flies on earth died in that instant.

  “I wasn't sure you could do that,” said Joseph Alzarsi. “The wrong is righted. Now we ourselves assume the noble name of Flies. There are no Flies but us!”

  The five of them, including the pilot, Ronald Kolibri, stepped chuteless out of the Eternal Eagle. “Will you be all right?” Ronald asked the rollicking plane. “Certainly,” the plane said. “I believe I know where there are other Eternal Eagles. I will mate.”

  It was cloudless, or else they had developed the facility of seeing through clouds. Or perhaps it was that, the earth having become as small as a marble, the clouds around it were insignificant.

  Pure light that had an everywhere source! (The sun also had become insignificant and didn't contribute much to the light.) Pure and intense motion that had no location reference. They weren't going anywhere with their intense motion (they already were everywhere, or at the super-charged center of everything).

  Pure cold fever. Pure serenity. Impure hyper-space passion of Karl Vlieger, and then of all of them; but it was purely rampant at least. Stunning beauty in all things along with a towering cragginess that was just ugly enough to create an ecstasy.

  Welkin Alauda was mythic with nenuphars in her hair. And it shall not be told what Joseph Alzarsi wore in his own hair. An always-instant, a million or a billion years!

  Not monotony, no! Presentation! Living sets! Scenery! The scenes were formed for the splinter of a moment; or they were formed forever. Whole worlds formed in a pregnant void: not spherical worlds merely, but dodeka-spherical, and those much more intricate than that. Not merely seven colors to play with, but seven to the seventh and to the seventh again.

  Stars vivid in the bright light. You who have seen stars only in darkness be silent! Asteroids that they ate like peanuts, for now they were all metamorphic giants. Galaxies like herds of rampaging elephants. Bridges so long that both ends of them receded over the light-speed edges. Waterfalls, of a finer water, that bounced off galaxy clusters as if they were boulders.

  Through a certain ineptitude of handling, Welkin extinguished the old sun with one such leaping torrent.

  “It does not matter,” Icarus told her. “Either a million or a billion years had passed according to the time-scale of the bodies, and surely the sun had already come onto dim days. You can always make other suns.”

  Karl Vlieger was casting lightning bolts millions of parsecs long and making looping contact with clustered galaxies with them.

  “Are you sure that we are not using up any time?” Welkin asked them with some apprehension.

  “Oh, time still uses itself up, but we are safely out of the reach of it all,” Joseph explained. “Time is only one very inefficient method of counting numbers. It is inefficient because it is limited in its numbers, and because the counter by such a system must die when he has come to the end of his series. That alone should weigh against it as a mathematical system; it really shouldn't be taught.”

  “Then nothing can hurt us ever?” Welkin wanted to be reassured.

  “No, nothing can come at us except inside time and we are outside it. Nothing can collide with us except in space and we disdain space. Stop it, Karl! As you do it that's buggery.”

  “I have a worm in my own tract and it gnaws at me a little,” the pilot Ronald Kolibri said. “It's in my internal space and it's crunching along at a pretty good rate.”

  “No, no, that's impossible. Nothing can reach or hurt us,” Joseph insisted.

  “I have a worm of my own in a still more interior tract,” said Icarus, “the tract that they never quite located in the head or the heart or the bowels. Maybe this tract always was outside space. Oh, my worm doesn't gnaw, but it stirs. Maybe I'm tired of being out of reach of everything.”

  “Where do these doubts rise from?” Joseph sounded querulous. “You hadn't them an instant ago, you hadn't them as recently as ten million years ago. How can you have them now when there isn't any now?”

  “Well, as to that—” Icarus began — (and a million years went by) — “as to that I have a sort of cosmic curiosity about an object in my own past” — (another million years went by) — “an object called world.”

  “Well, satisfy your curiosity then,” Karl Vlieger snapped. “Don't you even know how to make a world?”

  “Certainly I know how, but will it be the same?”

  “Yes, if you're good enough. It will be the same if you make it the same.”

  Icarus Riley made a world. He wasn't very good at it and it wasn't quite the same, but it did resemble the old world a little.

  “I want to see if some things are still there,” Welkin clamored. “Bring it closer.”

  “It's unlikely your things are still there,” Joseph said, “Remember that billions of years may have passed.”

  “The things will be there if I put them there,” Icarus insisted.

  “And you cannot bring it closer since all distance is now infinite,” Karl maintained.

  “At least I can focus it better,” Icarus insisted, and he did. The world appeared quite near.

  “It remembers us like a puppy would,” Welkin said. “See, it jumps up at us.”

  “It's more like a lion leaping for a treed hunter just out of reach,” Icarus grudged. “But we are not treed.”

  “It can't ever reach us, and it wants to,” Welkin piqued. “Let's reach down to it.”

  (“And they inclined the heavens and went down.”)

  A most peculiar thing happened to Ronald Kolibri as he touched Earth. He seemed to have a seizure. He went slack-faced, almost horror-faced, and he would not answer the others. “What is it, Ronald?” Welkin begged in kindred anguish. “Oh, what is it? Somebody help him!”

  Then Ronald Kolibri did an even more peculiar thing. He began to fold up and break up from the bottom. Bones slowly splintered and pierced out of him and his entrails gushed out. He compressed. He shattered. He splashed. Can a man splash?

  The same sort of seizure overtook Karl Vlieger: the identical slack-face horror-face, the same folding up and breaking up from the bottom, the same hideous sequence.

  And Joseph Alzarsi went into the same sundering state, baffled and breaking up.

  “Icarus, what's happened to them?” Welkin screamed. “What is the slow loud booming?”

  “They're dead. How could that be?” Icarus puzzled trembling. “Death is in time, and we are not.”

  Icarus himself passed through time as he crashed Earth, breaking up, spilling out more odiously than any of them.

  And Welkin touched Earth, crashed, then what? She heard her own slow loud booming as she hit.

  (Another million years went by, or some weeks.)

  A shaky old woman on crutches was going down the middle-of-the-night passages that are under the Rocks. She was too old a woman to be Welkin Alauda, but not too old for a Welkin who had lived millions of years outside of time. She had not died. She was lighter than the others, and besid
es she had done it twice before unscathed. But that was before she had known fear.

  Naturally they had told her that she would never walk again; and now most unnaturally she was walking with crutches. Drawn by the fungoid odor and the echoing dampness she went down in the total dark to where small things were growing with the wrong color white and were all of the wrong shape. She wanted one thing only, and she would die without it.

  “Sky for salving the broken Crone! Sky for the weal of my hollow bone!” she crackled in an old-woman voice. But it was only her own voice that echoed back to her.

  Should a Sky-Seller live forever?

  When All The Lands Pour Out Again

  Anybody want to get away from it all? To make a total change? You had better want to do it: you will do it anyhow. Now is the time. Today is the day.

  Three learned men were in the academic center of a learned metropolis, talking about a thing that hadn't happened for thousands of years, which perhaps had never happened. You will already know of these men, by reputation at least, if there is anything academic about you at all.

  “It wasn't understood the first time it happened, or any of the other times,” Professor George Ruil offered. “In spite of a few studies, it has been understood even less since those times. The accounts of the happenings have been rationalized, falsified, belittled, and that makes it all wrong: it was never rational, it was never false, and it certainly was not little.” “It is interesting, George, in the way that so many secondary footprints in the clay of time are interesting,” Dr. Ralph Amerce told his friend, “but it is of no more present importance than are bear burrows or gravels of the third ice age. And it can't come back.”

  “I'm not sure that George here won't be able to connect it with bear burrows and gravels of the third ice age,” Nobelist Professor Wilburton Romer jibed. (These were three very learned men: would we tune in on them otherwise?) “But you can't find any real traces of it, George, only traces of traces. It hasn't a form we can grasp, it hasn't any handle we can take hold of, it hasn't any name we can call it by.”