Such orchestration as was employed was of a natural sort. Usually it was the whistling coneys (who are very early risers) who would set the aeolian strings to going: then the several nations of birds would begin to intone; the people, whether waking or sleeping, would soon come in with their composite solos. Or sometimes it was one of the persons who began a music.
“Think a tune, father,” Heros Planda might call. And his father Rushmore, afternoon dreaming somewhere in the blue-stem hills, would think of one. Heros would begin to blow a few notes of it, though he might be several kilometers distant from his father. It might be taken up then by boom-birds or by surfacing riverfish with their quick sounding that was between a whistle and a bark. There was a lot of music in this World Abounding culture, but it was never formal and never forced.
There was a sculpture culture, though Fairbridge warned that it was a dangerous thing. World Abounding was so plastic a place, he said, that one might create more than he had intended by the most simple shaping or free-cutting. “Half the things alive here have no business being alive,” he said. “One is not to trust the stones, especially not trust any stones of the Volcano.”
Nevertheless, the sculpture culture, done in high and low relief, or in the free or the round, was mostly on the south face of that trustless volcano. Whenever the Volcano exuded a new flow-wall during the night, all the people would be at the bright and soft surface in the morning, before it had cooled. These flow-walls were of mingled colors, of bright jagged colors sometimes, or soft colors at other times, then again of shouting colors: it was a very varied and chemical Volcano and it bled like rock rainbows.
Usually the Volcano himself set the motif for a sculpture-mass. He could do good and powerful work in the rough. He could form out large intimations of creatures and people and events. But he was like a geniused artist who had only stubs, no hands. It was the human persons who had to do all the fine and finishing work of the almost living murals.
The performed dramas of this culture fell into a half-dozen cycles. They were mostly variations or continuations of things done by groups of the dead Terrace peoples, or by primordials before them. They were always part of an endless continuity. Here they might be in scene five of act four hundred of one of the Volcano cycles. Earlier acts had been performed by earlier peoples, by the primordials, by Aphthonian bears, by characters or manifestations which had had no life of their own outside of the dramas.
Poetry wasn't a separate act here. The people of World Abundant were poetry, they lived poetry, they ate poetry, they drank it out of cups. All the persons were in rime with each other, so they had no need of the sound of it.
Eating was an art. No two meals on World Abounding had ever been the same. Every one of them was a banquet, beyond duplication, beyond imitation.
So it went on for a long while (by local standards); it went along for near three standard months. All the persons of the native World Abounding generations now appeared to be about the same age, this in spite of the fact that some of them were parents of others of them.
3
“We have done absolutely everything,” Chara Kerwin said one day. “Some of us, or other of us, or all of us have done everything. Now we will wind it up wonderfully. Is it not a stunning thing to have done everything?” “But you haven't done everything, you bumptious child,” Lisetta told her. “You haven't borne children, as your mother has, as myself your grandmother has.”
“But I have. I have borne myself, I have borne my mother Kora, I have borne you, my grandmother Lisetta, I have borne every person ever birthed on World Abounding or elsewhere. What we do not do as individuals, we do in common. All of our nation has now done everything, as I have. So we will wind it up.”
All eight of the gilded youths of the World Abounding nation came at the same time to the realization that they had done everything. They called it back and forth, they echoed the information from the blue-stem hills to the orchards to the mountains. They all came together full of the information. They assembled on the top of the Terraces. They sat down at table there, and demanded that the elder World-Gaea nation should serve them.
“Out-do yourselves!” Least Lass Exendine called to all those elders. “Give us a banquet better than any you ever invented before. But you may not share it with us. It is for ourselves only. Serve us. And eat ashes yourselves.”
So the oldsters, those who had not been born on World Abounding, served the assembled younglings, and did it with delight. There seemed to be a wonderful windup fermenting for all of them.
The Comedy of Horror, perhaps, showed a little stronger than it had recently on the face and form of Fairbridge, but it was still only one of that complex of deep comedies. Fairbridge had a very stark and terrible intuition now. He had a horrifying premonition of the real substance of those twin Comedies of World Ending and of Love Transcending. But even horror is a subject of comedy on World Abounding, and it is supposed to have that jagged edge to it.
“Bring all our things, bring all our artifacts,” Chara ordered when they were still deep in the wining and dining. “Bring all our instruments and robes and plaques and free sculptures. Pile up enough food for a dozen banquets. Bring our green shroud-robes.”
“It may be that you have not really done everything,” Fairbridge said once in white agony while all the things were being piled up. “Let us think if there is not something left that you haven't done.” “No, no, good father, good husband, good lover, good ancestor, good descendant, good Fairbridge mine,” Least Lass was saying, “we have done everything. We have done everything that could be in your mind, for plumbing the Fairbridge mind to its total depth is one of the many things we have done. And if there is some thing that we really have not done, then we will do it after we are dead. We do all sorts of communicating things in our sleep. Well, we will also do them in our deaths, as do the other dead people living in the Terraces. Fairbridge, my passion, my patsy, my toy, my love, go tell the Volcano that it is time.”
“How should I talk to a Volcano?” Fairbridge asked.
“Why, you will speak to it directly, Fairbridge. Is it not a Gaea proverb that a man may talk to a volcano just as a beggar may talk to a horse or a cat to a king?”
“And I should say what to the Volcano?”
“Simply tell him that it is time.”
Fairbridge Exendine climbed up from the Terraces onto the steep eastern slope of the Volcano Misericors. He climbed clear to the cone. The cone was a ragged laughing mouth; the whole face was a distorted laugh. One eye of that face was far down the north slope, and the other eye was over in the blue-stem hills. The ears were sundered off somewhere; the brow was exploded; the jaw was shattered all over the scree slopes. It was a fine merry face that the Volcano had, even though it was a little disjointed and disparate. Something overly glandular about this Volcano, though. Ah, it was great-glanded. The Gorgos gland that supplied all of World Abounding was a part of this Volcano.
“Are you sure that it is as funny as all that?” Fairbridge gruffed at this open-mawed mountain. “It strains my idea of the comic a little. It could stand some revision.”
They both were silent for a little while.
“Ah, the young persons told me to tell you that it is time,” Fairbridge said glumly. The Volcano belched a bit of fire. There was something of cruel laugh in that sound: a snort, really. Fairbridge suspected that the Volcano was more animal than man.
Then the Volcano became somewhat raucous, foul-mouthed (“that quip is my own, my last,” Fairbridge said in his throat), rumbling and roaring, smoky and sulphurous, scorching, sooty. Fairbridge left it in his own passion.
He came down towards the shouldering Terraces again. All the World-Gaea people were calling him to come to the plain below where the hovercraft was at the ready. He ignored them. He continued to the high Terraces and to the native generations of World Abounding. It was like hot snakes hissing at his heels as he went, pouring streams of lava. The air had become like a fur
nace, like a forge with bellows puffing.
The river Festinatio had become quite excited. It palpitated in running shivers of waves. It was a-leap with all its fishy fauna, with all its bold turtles and squids. The Volcano always invaded the river at the climax of its eruptions: each successive Terrace ran further into the River. Nobody should have been surprised at the excitement of the River, nobody who had watched or taken part in the dramas of the Volcano cycles.
Fairbridge came down to the death-edge young people on the Terraces.
“You must not be here with us,” Heros told him. “There is no way that you can earn that right. We are completed, but you are not.”
Fairbridge threw himself down on the Terraces, however, and the ground of the Terraces had already begun to smoke.
“You cannot stay here, my other love, my other life,” Least Lass told him. But he lay at her feet. He embraced her ankles.
“Shall we allow them to stay on the Terraces and be burned to death and buried with ashes?” Judy Brindlesby asked uneasily on the land below.
“Yes. We must allow it,” Hilary said.
“But there is a whole world that will not be covered. Only the Terraces will be covered and burned.”
“Yes.”
“They sit there eating and drinking, and already we can smell the scorched flesh of their feet. They are all so young, and they could live so long and so happy anywhere else on this world.”
“We don't know that they could live any longer. We don't understand it.”
“But they are our children.”
“Yes.”
“Shall I feed you scraps from the table as though you were a dog at my feet?” Least Lass asked Fairbridge. “Go at once now. You have no business dying here. Go with them. They come in great danger and pain to themselves to get you.”
Rushmore Planda and Blase Kerwin came and dragged Fairbridge off the top of the smoking Terraces and down the slopes where lava and ash flow ran like lizards. All were burned, and Fairbridge was dangerously burned.
They went into the hovercraft, the seven persons who had not been born on World Abounding. They rose into the smoky volcanic air, and they hovered.
The young people, the World Abounding people, still sat and wined and dined themselves on the scorched Terraces. The hot ash and the fiery liquid shoved in upon them and rose to engulf them. They were encapsuled and preserved in the caking hot ash. Least Lass, at the rivermost edge of the Terraces, was the last of them to be completely covered. She made a happy signal to them in the hovercraft, and her mother Judy signaled back.
Hot ash filled the banquet plate of Least Lass by then, and hot lava filled her cup. Smiling and easy, she ate and drank the living coals to her pleasant death. Then she had disappeared completely under the flow of it, as the rest of them had done.
The Volcano covered them with another two meters of fill. Then he pushed on to have his will with the river.
“It did not happen, it could not have happened, it must not be allowed to have happened,” Fairbridge Exendine was mumbling inanely, but Fairbridge was mind out of body now. His mind was at the feet of Least Lass in the merciful ashes of the new topmost Terrace. “The report will be a difficult one,” Hilary hazarded. “Just how are we to explain that a normal human settlement is impossible here? How explain that it will always end in such swift short generations? How explain that every World Abounding culture is, by its nature, a terminal culture?”
“Why bother?” asked Erma Planda of the still golden body and emerald eyes. “We will make the entry that several of the other expeditions have made. Yes, and we will be classed as such disgraceful failures as they have been. What else to do?”
She wrote the damning entry quickly.
“We were warned that there would be some necks wrung if that phrase was used in our report,” Rushmore said sourly.
“Wring my neck who can,” Erma challenged. “There. It's done. And they really wouldn't have believed it, you know.”
Quiz Ship Loose
There were five persons on Quiz Ship. The ship's interior is shown as a functional lounge and wardroom, with food center, game center, navigation center, and problem and project center. There are three doors in the back bulkhead of this functional lounge: the triangle-sign door of the Crags, the circle-sign door of the Bloods, and the square-sign door of Questor Shannon. At back left is the “Instant Chute.” The five persons are Manbreaker and Bodicea Crag with the power of their earthiness (of whatever earth they are down on); George and Jingo Blood with their “movement-as-power”; and Questor Shannon, a slight man who expresses an oceanic massiveness and depth. Four of these people seem completely relaxed, but one of them, Questor Shannon, does not.
“Each time we go into an adventure, we go relaxed,” Questor was saying. “Some day we're going to get smeared when going in so relaxed. I feel we should go tensed on this one.”
“Relax, Questor,” the other four said, as they said so often. “This is an easy one,” Bodicea Crag (Queen Bodicea) gave the relaxed opinion. “Paleder World has no reputation for danger. Two other parties have been here, and they have left it unscathed.”
“The logs of both parties show them to have been a bit scathed,” Questor still argued. “Persons of both those parties have sworn that Paleder is a murderous world behind its smiling and open face. And their own words have been contradictory. The most open of all the worlds: one of them said. Well, why does it remain a closed world then? What has been the obstacle? Why have we come here to solve, in relaxed fashion, an enigma that some have called murderous? Coming to any other world that has been called murderous, even in minority report, we would come with much greater caution.”
“Murderous it does not seem to be,” Manbreaker Crag spoke with assurance. “No one of either previous party was killed. Well, yes, it is a puzzle. I like puzzles. The John Chancel Party — Chancel was always essentially a one-man party, but he did have three companions with him here — recorded that Paleder World was an absolute puzzle, that they did not know what they had seen after they had seen it, that they did not remember what they had been told after it had been explained to them. Chancel was good at puzzles, but he did not solve the puzzle here. He said that this world had the most advanced technology of any world known, so advanced that the world seemed to deprecate it a bit and keep it in the background.”
“I know what Chancel wrote in his ship's log,” Questor said tensely. “ ‘It has a rich hoard,’ he wrote. ‘Like every hoard, it is guarded by a sleeping dragon. Unlike most cases, this is a corporate dragon. And unlike other corporate dragons, this one has a sting in its tail. It can murder you with that sting.’ So there is something to this puzzle to be tense about.”
“Chancel filled his log books with riddles and with enigmatic statements,” Jingo Blood (the Empress Jingo) said. “But he didn't solve this riddle. I will.”
“How will you solve what John Chancel couldn't, Jingo?” Questor asked. “How will you figure out what Vitus Ambler misfigured? What special attributes do you have for this?”
“I'm smarter than they were,” Jingo Blood said. “Relax, Questor.”
“But we shoot in just nine seconds”
“So, relax for nine seconds, then,” Jingo told him.
The nine-second interval ran its course. The five persons shot into the “Instant Chute” at back left. The Quiz Ship went into a “blank-out hover.”
The “Instant Chute” was itself a piece of very advanced technology. Much of the technology of Gaea — also known as Eretz or Earth — was quite advanced. The chute brought the five Quiz Ship persons down through ten thousand meters of space instantly, and it set them onto Paleder World. The requirements set into the chute in this case were simple: “That the persons be brought down within Paleder City, on solid footing, in an outdoor place near or at the nexus of the most intense intellectual activity of the city.” Well any sufficiently sophisticated “Chute” could do that. They landed without a jolt. But did they
come down safely?
“This is wrong, abysmally wrong!” Questor croaked fearfully as he came to ground in totally unacceptable surroundings. “There is not supposed to be any such jungle or miasma as this in Paleder City. We have overview pictures. It is not supposed to be like this. Something is very wrong.” He beat what seemed to be a fanged bird away from his face. And these were not acceptable surroundings. No one could dream of worse.
“There sure are not supposed to be any fer-de-lance snakes like that one,” Manbreaker Crag barked, “not in the middle of the leading city of one of the most civilized planets ever reported.” He flipped his swagger stick into a bolo or machete. “We have landed solidly, but barely so. This is quicksand all around us, and all the poisonous-looking flora are floating plants on that quicksand. Ah, look at the jag-rocks protruding from the quagmire! And there is a jag-toothed monster perched on every one of those rocks or snags. A person would lose a hand or an arm if he reached for anything to keep from sinking in this bog. What went wrong with our landing anyhow? Is this even Paleder World at all? The Chute has goofed. But there cannot be any such outrageous malfunction as this!”
“It isn't my idea of beautiful downtown Paleder City either,” George Blood growled. “There hasn't been such a miasmal landscape anywhere since the Devonian period on Gaea. And we were exactly over central Paleder City. Neither the Chancel nor the Ambler expeditions mentioned anything like this, and there are no such extensive, endless, I might say, areas of desolation in our photographs, the rougher sections of this world, certainly not in Paleder City. This is a very sticky malfunction. Let's back out of it. Let's go back and do it again.”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 122
