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

by R. A. Lafferty

  Hilary Brindlesby scolded the children because they showed no sign of the scientific approach or method. But the scientific approach with its systematic study would not have brought them along nearly as fast as they did go. They all had the intuitive approach and it brought them rapidly to a great body of knowledge.

  The children were well acquainted with the dead people in the Terraces (Fairbridge, in his horror-filled distracting work, had excavated almost all the Terrace levels now). The children named the names of all the dead people and told of their intricate relationships. Lisetta Kerwin recorded all this from the children. It tied in remarkably with the surnames of the people of the various expeditions.

  “You can't really communicate with the dead people of the Terraces,” Blase Kerwin told his daughter Kora. “It is just a bit of flamboyant imagination that you all seem to have.”

  “Oh, they say pretty much the same thing about you and us, father,” Kora said. “They tell us that we can't really communicate with such stuffy folks as you who weren't even born on World Abounding. We do communicate with you, though; a little bit, sometimes.”

  And then one evening, Heros Planda and Kora Kerwin said that they were married. “Isn't twenty-two days old a little young to marry?” Rushmore Planda asked his son.

  “No, I don't believe so, father,” Heros said. “It is the regular age on World Abounding.”

  “Who married you?” Lisetta Kerwin asked. After all, it had to be somebody who had done it, and there were no human persons on the world except those of the party.

  “We don't know his name,” Kora said. “We call him Marrying Sam in fun, but lots of the Terrace people have called him that too. We might suppose that that is his name now.”

  “He isn't a human person? Then what species does he belong to?”

  “He doesn't belong to any species, mother, since he is the only one of his kind. The Volcano says that Marrying Sam is his—the Volcano's—dog. He doesn't look like a dog, as I intuit dogs, though. He can't very well look like anything else, since he is the only one of his kind.”

  “I see,” Lisetta Kerwin said, but she saw it a little cockeyed. She was vaguely disappointed. She had always wanted a grand wedding for her daughter, if she had ever had a daughter. And now the daughter and the wedding had come so close together that something seemed lacking. She didn't know that it had been a very grand wedding, with elementals such as a Volcano and an Ocean participating; she didn't even know that she had participated, along with everything else on World Abounding.

  “I thought you would be pleased, mother, that we had married and regularized our relationship,” Kora suggested hopefully.

  “Of course I'm pleased. It's just that you seem so young.”

  Actually, the wedding celebration was not yet completed. Part of it was tangled with an event that involved almost all of them that night. It was similar to the mysterious carnal happenings of the first night of the party on World Abounding.

  It was another of those extraordinary enlivening events. It got them. It got Erma Planda of the golden body, and Judy Brindlesby of the sometime incredible hair. It got Lisetta Kerwin of the now shattered serenity; it got Rushmore and Hilary and Blase.

  Perhaps it had been thought that connubial passion happened without regard to place or planet. Such is not the case. And the case on World Abounding was very different from the case on Gaea or Camiroi or Dahae. There was a pleasantness at all times on World Abounding, there was a constant passion of a sort, an almost pantheistic communion of all things together. But there was something else that came on much stronger at special times, that was triggered by special events without an exact time arriving, that was wild and rampant and blood-and-seed-pungent.

  It was the rutting reason.

  Ah, we deck it out better than that. It was a night, or a day and a night, of powerful interior poetry and music, of personal affirmation, of physical and moral and psychic overflowing, of aesthetic burgeoning. It was clear crystal passion.

  But let us not deck it out so nice that we won't know it. It was the horniest business ever, and it went on all night and all day and all night. Hilary and Judy Brindlesby: he had the length and the strength; she had the fullness and the abundance. They made such laughing love that it sounded like chuckling thunder in the reed-brakes. Even the birds and the coneys took up the cadence of it.

  Rushmore and Erma Planda: he of the buffalo bulk and the impression of swooping Moses-horns on his head; she of the golden body and the emerald eyes. “They should take the two of us for models,” Erma had said on that memorable time twenty-seven nights before. “Nobody has ever done it as we have. We should give lessons.”

  And then Blase and Lisetta Kerwin — no one will ever know just how it was with them. They had a thing that was too good to share (except in the planet-sharing aspect of it), that was too good to tell about, that was too good even to hint at. But, after such pleasures, they seemed the most pleasured of all the couples.

  But Kora and Heros were at home in this. World Abounding was really a third flesh of their union in a way that it couldn't be for the others. They held their own pleasures atop the volcanic Terraces, not in the reeds or the blue-stem hills or the orchards as the World-Gaea couples did.

  World Abounding is the most passionate of worlds, with the possible exception of Klepsis of the Trader Planets where the rapacity in all things is so towering. The Miracle-Maker of legend and fact on World Abounding was always shocked and bewildered by such coming together as that of Heros and Kora, even though it was a licit relationship and done in the licit manner. It was the depth and violence of it that was beyond law, that almost made the Miracle-Maker doubt that he had made such an indomitable thing as this. Really, it was the Abounding Time, the name-thing of the world.

  The only discordant (ill-fitting, but not completely unpleasant) elements in the thunderous season-time of World Abounding were Fairbridge Exendine and Least Lass Brindlesby. “Now I am an old maid out of joint with the time,” Least Lass said as she wandered on the hills of her home. Both the smaller moon Ancilla and the larger moon Matrona were a-shine. “My proper mate is unready and unbelieving. My third parent, World Abounding, who is also the third lover of our love, is not sufficiently penetrating. Father of Planets, help us! You gave us here the special instruction ‘What you do, do quickly,’ yet it isn't with us as with other places. Answer me, answer me right now!”

  Least Lass threw angry rocks at the sky when she was not answered right now. But there is no time for slow answers on World Abounding.

  And Fairbridge (still in the horror that would never leave him, but now touched by something both brighter and deeper) could only bark harshly to himself, “I am a human man. These things cannot be, have not been, must not be allowed to be. They are all hallucination, and this is an hallucinatory world. The monster-child remains monstrous, breathtakingly monstrous. It would be the only love I had ever had, if it could have been, if the cause of it were real. How could a human man mate with an imagination, how with a monster, be she a demon or an angel?”

  It did not come to these two incongruities, in proper season, as it came to the other persons there.

  By second morning, the partaking couples were in a state of dazzling exhaustion. But they knew that they were well fruited, fruited forever. Then there came the several days of golden desuetude. Even the letdowns on World Abounding were wonderful. All the folks sympathized, of course, with the passion-impounded Fairbridge and with the lost-in-a-maze Least Lass. The case of Fairbridge and Least Lass was comical with the sort of cloud-high comedy that is found on World Abounding. There was everything ludicrous about it. There was a poignancy and a real agony about it also, but the betting was that these qualities would give way. You drive the sharp poignancy staff into the ground of World Abounding and it will grow green leaves on it before you can blink; yes, and grotesque blooms like monkey faces. But it won't lose any of its sharpness when it blooms.

  Fairbridge Exendine was a
rough-featured man, in no way handsome. He missed being clumsy only by the overriding power of his movements. He had always been a singling. He could hardly be called a woman-hater, since he was infinitely courteous and respecting to women, but he must be set down as a woman-avoider. Either he had been burned badly once, or the singling nature was in his roots and bones.

  He was an abrupt man with a harsh sound to him. There was seldom in itself anything harsh about his acts or his words; the harshness was in the shell of him, in the rind that wrapped him up.

  And Least Lass Brindlesby:—Fairbridge believed that she wasn't real; and she was. She had been the most beautiful child that anyone had ever seen for no more than an hour or two; until the birth of the children Kora and Heros those twenty-four days ago. She was still of almost perfect beauty; she could only be faulted for a certain heartiness bursting out, too big to be contained in the beauty. She wasn't really the Least Lass anymore; she was as large as her mother; she was bigger than either Kora or Heros. She had a shapeliness and grace superior even to that of her mother, for she was born on World Abounding.

  But she looked like Fairbridge Exendine, for all her elegant beauty and for all his craggy ugliness. She looked like him as a daughter will look like a father, as a wife may sometimes come to look like a husband. She had ‘grown towards him’ in the World Abounding phrase, and all such growths here had to be very swift.

  She had a great deal of humor, this girl Least Lass, and she needed it. She was not of flimsy growth: none of the children (children no longer) were. On some worlds and quasi-worlds of rapid growth, there is a defect of quality. The quick-grown tree-sized things will really be no more than giant weeds; the quick-grown creatures will not have much to them. On World Abounding that wasn't so. The quick-grown plants and creatures here were fine-grained and intricate and complete. The persons were so, and especially Least Lass.

  She was no weed. Weeds have no humor (except the Aphthonia Sneezeweed, of course). But Least Lass sometimes pursued Fairbridge with humor that would make one shiver.

  “My good man holds me in horror,” she'd say. “He likes me really, but he believes that I am unnatural, and he has a real horror for the unnatural. Oh, I will turn him ash-gray and I will turn him fruit-purple! I will turn him swollen blood-black. I'll give him all the seven horrors, and I love him. Fairbridge, Fairbridge, even the rocks are laughing at your horror and your plight, and mine is the rockiest laugh of them all.”

  Ah, the rocks laughed like clattering hyenas at the poor distraught man.

  Sometimes, Least Lass cried a little, though. There is a quick gushiness about tears on World Abounding, a voluminousness that would drown the world if continued more than a short instant. She cried a cupful there one day, actually filled a big blue crystal cup with her tears. Then, in a swift change of mood, she set it at Fairbridge's place at the dinner. And when he, puzzled, tasted it and sputtered, the composite laughter of all assembled nearby shattered his spirit. (Tears on World Abundant are quite pungent, more than just salty.)

  Fairbridge Exendine then did a strange thing. He covered the cup with a nap, then wrapped it in a towel and carried it away to his singling quarters to preserve it just as it was.

  Then Least Lass cried at least another cupful on the ground. But that was only a matter of seconds. She was always the sunniest girl ever, immediately after tears.

  Things wound themselves up in the thirty-first day of the expedition on World Abounding. It was a clear and exuberant day. Both the Grian sun and the Alpha sun could be seen like bright stars in the daylight sky. This is always a good sign. And the Beta sun itself was pleasantly scorching. A good strong day. We cannot know just how it happened. The fields themselves announced that there was a special and privileged rutting time, not for all, only for a select two. The sand squeaked oestrius sounds. Kora had talked to the Volcano and to the one-of-a-kind subcreature called Marrying Sam, and had learned that the ceremony itself had been a rather stilted one. There was something of very deep emotion cloaked over with layers of rock hard reserve, world deep passion covered with a careful crust. The volcano was familiar with such things in his own person, and explained that such surface covering is often necessary to very deep people.

  Then, somewhere on World Abounding, Fairbridge and Least Lass and the Planet itself had their private experience (an orgy, actually, but their privacy extends even to the selection of the word); they had their time of it, and it may have been a high old time. The others could admire from a distance, and from secondary evidence; but they had no direct evidence, only the planetary resonances and the ghostly reports.

  When it was over with, the day and the night of it, when the whole double Nation of those folks was together again, Fairbridge still had that look of horror (it would never leave him). But now it was only one element of many. It was one part of a look or a play more properly named The Comedy of Horror; and this was but a portion of a whole assembly of deep comedies: The Comedy of Soul Agony, the Comedy of Quick Growth (one new furrow in the Fairbridge face represented the almost pun that ‘quick’ here means ‘alive,’ means it specially on World Abounding), the Comedies of World Ending, of Love Transcending, or Death and Deep Burial.

  Fairbridge hadn't been loosed of any of his own agonies, but at least he had learned that they were funny.

  And Least Lass had a look of almost total happiness, it being understood that almost-total happiness is often a shaggy clown-looking thing, with at least a slight touch of insanity, and a more than slight touch of death's-head. Quite a gay girl she was and would always be: she had been born knowing that death is open at both ends.

  The end of the world, the end of a discrete culture comes quickly. Lisetta Kerwin worried about a certain impossibility here. (Four children had been born on the same day; then, two days later, a fifth. That made eight persons of the half nation, the World Abounding Nation; and, of course, there were still the seven persons of the World-Gaea Nation.)

  “We have been here for just thirty-six days,” Lisetta worried, “and we have more than doubled our population. What if there should be (What is the phrase they used back in the Era of Wonderful Nonsense?) a People Explosion?”

  “You know that is impossible, mother,” Kora said. “World Abounding sets its own lines, as is the habit of worlds.”

  “Yes, it is quite impossible, grandmother,” Chara Kerwin, the newborn daughter of Kora, said. “This is all there will be for this particular world. I myself, and those of my generation, will not experience it all directly. We will experience part of it by sharing. Our present numbers are our final numbers. It is less than some worlds have, I know, so we must make up for it by being as vital as we can be.”

  “But, in another twenty days or so,” Lisetta protested, “there will be another passion period, and then—”

  “No, there will not be,” Kora tried to explain. “To do a thing more than once, to do a thing more than twice (twice is sometimes necessary when there is an intersection of two worlds), that is to become repetitious, and to be repetitious is the unforgivable sin. Touch stone, mother, kick sand, knock wood (as you report is said on Gaea), and pray that it may never happen to any of us.”

  “But of course it will happen, children, and it will become an increasingly compounded happening. Consider how many there will be in even one year—”

  “A year!” Chara shrilled from the arms of Kora her mother. “Has anyone ever lived for a year?”

  “I don't know,” Kora puzzled. “Has anyone? Have you, mother?”

  “Yes, I'm afraid that I have,” Lisetta admitted. But why should she be apologetic at having lived more than one year?

  “I had no idea, mother,” Kora mumbled in half-embarrassment. “I guess this is the reason for the gaps in our communication, however hard we try to close them.”

  Then, for a long while (by local standards), it was all an easygoing time on World Abounding. It was a period of action packed leisure (though not all will be able to understand t
his); it was crammed full of events, the outcomings and incomings of a new maturing fruitful culture. There was not room in the concentrated leisured hours of any of them to experience it all directly; each one must simultaneously live in the mind and body of everyone to be able to contain it all. There was the unhurried rapidity of thought and act and enjoyment. There was little difference in the day and night hours: sleep and wakefulness were merged; dreaming and experience were intermingled. The fulfilled persons would sometimes sleep while walking or even running, especially those of the full World Abounding generations. “Are we awake or sleeping?” Least Lass asked her lover one day, or night.

  “That I do not know,” Fairbridge said, or thought, in whatever state he was in. “But we are together. May the Planet Plucker grant that we be always together.”

  “We are together,” Least Lass agreed, “and yet I am climbing and leaping on the north ridges of the Volcano Misericors, and I am sound asleep. And you are swimming in the estuary of the River Festinatio, very deep below the surface where it is ocean water below the running water, and you also are asleep. Give me your hand. There! On a false level of reality it might seem that my hand was closed on the meaty bloom of a rock crocus, but that rock crocus is a part of yourself. It might seem, to an observer of no understanding, that your own hand has closed on an Aphthonia Blue-Fish (the Blue-Fish himself is such an observer and he believes this), but that Blue-Fish is really myself with the scales still on his eyes and on his whole fishness. But the scales have fallen from our own eyes a little bit so that we may see reality. Grip my hand very hard.”

  They gripped hands very hard. They were together.

  Ceramic flutes! The flutes were one signature of the present World Abounding culture. They have a tone of their own that cannot be touched by either wooden or brass horns. This light, hard, airy ceramic is made from the deposits of windblown loess from the ocher hills, from the limey mud of the plashes of the River Festinatio, from the ash and the pumice of the Volcano Misericors. This makes a ceramic like no other; there will always be old tunes nesting in every horn and pipe of it. There were also green-wood clarinets with tendrils still growing on them; aeolian stringed boxes that played themselves in harmonic to whistling; snakeskin drums; hammered electrum trumpets (what a rich sound they had!); and honey-wood violins.