The people from Quiz Ship were on Paleder for part of three days. They held conversations with several dozens of the Paleder people in that time. Or else they held several dozen different conversations with a smaller number of these people. Why were the people of Paleder, those people of most surpassing accomplishments, of such undistinguished presence and appearance? Thirty seconds after speaking to one, you would remember only most vaguely what he looked like. And certainly the science and technology of Paleder was unutterably advanced. Why then did it seem so trivial? Why were the Quiz Ship people so unamazed by it?
Take the weather. One could turn the “manual override” on the weather box at any Paleder City street corner, and the indicated weather would happen at once. One could turn it to “rain,” and it would rain instantly. One could turn it to “rain harder” and it would rain harder. But the visitors from Gaea were made to feel that there was something gauche about using the “manual overrides” on everything. The programmed, automatic way of everything was the best. The “manual overrides” were there only in case of error in the automatic. But there were no errors.
“After all, we do have perfect weather,” a Paleder person said. “Perfect weather is weather that is not noticed at all. Perfection is anything that passes absolutely without notice.”
“I must disagree with that,” Questor Shannon argued. “Perfect weather is that of which one might say ‘Ah, this is a beautiful day!’ I can find no fault at all with your controlled and flawless weather of Paleder; but I am not impelled to cry out ‘This is a beautiful day!’. I wonder why I'm not?”
There was the “hand-of-death” feeling on all things on Paleder. How to explain it? It was as if the people of Paleder had simply decided to stop living, their problems all being solved. And this decision to stop living was reflected in all their handiwork. Dead man stuff, yes. Puzzling.
“Both the impulse and the expression seem a little bit sticky to me,” the Paleder person said in answer to Questor's “This is a beautiful day” thesis. “I am glad that our flawless weather does not provoke such jejune outbursts.”
Everything on Paleder was flawless. But was that the same thing as being perfect? Maybe. Was it the same thing as being excellent? Maybe. But there were surely some things that it was not. Perhaps it was not inspiring.
There was no impulse to revel in the flawlessness of things here on Paleder. Why then, on Gaea or most other worlds, was there often the impulse to revel and to hold high celebration for things that were hardly half this good?
The persons of Paleder traveled hardly at all. And this seemed unappreciative of them, since they could travel as much as they wanted, as far as they liked, as comfortably and as instantly as they wanted; and they could do it at no cost at all.
“Your ‘Travel Tricks’ are something on the line of our ‘Instant Chutes’, farther up on the same line,” Bodicea Crag was saying to a Paleder adult. “And yours are, yes, flawless. Our device uses a staggering amount of power to transport just five of us only ten thousand meters in an instant. But a million times as many of you could go a million times that far with the consumption of hardly any energy. I notice though that you do not use (I get the impression that you have the feature but no longer employ it) the ‘particular-excellence’ factor in selecting destinations. For instance, we instructed our ‘Instant Chute’ to set us down at the ‘nexus of the most intense intellectual activity’ of this city. As it happened, the chute goofed and set us down we know not where. It failed or misunderstood, but, usually it succeeds with pleasant results. Now, you could have yourselves transported to ‘the most pleasurable site and circumstance of this world, at this moment’. You could always have the best of the best. Why don't you?”
“We do, but not by selection. To do that, we would have to accept the view that one thing is ever more pleasurable than another, that one thing is ever better than another. We don't accept that.”
“You don't?” Jingo Blood asked in amazement. “But things have to be better or worse than others. Such differences are what makes the world go around.”
“Not this world,” the Paleder person said.
“You amaze me,” Jingo pursued it. “Don't you believe that one thing may be more interesting than another, that one person may be wittier than another, that one hill may be higher than another, that one song may be more musical than another?”
“No, no,” the Paleder person said. “We believed and acted on these things on our way up. But when we got to the top, we saw it all more clearly, so we did away with the top. All these apparent differences are mere illusions, to be cast aside.”
“Well dammit, don't you, master illusionists that you are, believe that one illusion may be more illusory than another?” George Blood demanded in full voice.
“No, no,” the person said. “We don't accept illusion even about illusions. On Paleder World, one hill may not be higher than another. We no longer have any hills or mountains. They caused elements of randomness in our world, so we did away with them.”
“Did you really level your hills and mountains?” Questor asked in amazement.
“No, of course we didn't. That is to look at it backwards. We raised our plains. Everything on Paleder is at highest point. ‘Highest and most equal’ is our motto,” the Paleder person said.
Food on Paleder was, well, flawless. And it was always locally sufficient. But would you ever cry out, in the midst of devouring some of it, “Hey, this is good!”? Well, why wouldn't you?
Most of the consummate technology of Paleder was invisible. And, according to the Paleder persons, this general invisibility of unnoticeability was the sure sign of perfection. It is only imperfect things that draw attention to themselves.
“How does that tail belong to this animal?” Jingo Blood wailed in sudden frustration early on their last day there. “What is the atrocious imbalance here all about anyhow?” “My modified love, what are you talking about?” George Blood asked her.
“These citizens of Paleder, these possessors of the highest sophistry and equipment, they are a bunch of sleepwalkers! There is just no other word for them. What sort of animal is Paleder anyhow?”
“As you imply, jingo, it is the animal whose tail is its most interesting part,” George Blood said.
By the “tail” of Paleder, the Quiz Ship people seemed to mean the weird children of that world. Oh, the strange children of Paleder, lurking and flickering and burning, and seldom to be seen straight off!
“These people have their world set up so that no one is permitted to be too cold or too hot,” Jingo puzzled, “or too wet or too dry; so that no one is allowed to be hungry or in bad health; where no one — this curdles me — is allowed to be unhappy. No one is permitted to be worried or uneasy, or ill-clad or unintelligent. Isn't that exciting? No, it isn't. But why isn't it?”
“Well, these people here will answer us anything we ask,” Bodicea said. “Let's ask them more questions then. Yeah, and come to more dead ends.”
“With us, of course, there is no division between our psychology and our technology,” was the answer that one of the Paleder persons gave to an awkwardly-asked question. “You cannot have our technology without also having our psychology. You cannot have our attainments without being like us. Ours is not a technology for conscious persons.” “It is not a technology for whom?” Manbreaker crackled. But the High Galactic word which the person used, “syneidos,” “conscious,” was unmistakable.
“The ‘dragons’ with us as with you, though you may not understand it of your own cultus, the ‘dragons’ are no more than aspects or alternate morpha of our own children. Oh, yes, they are often the murderous aspects of our children. They are often solidly, though unnaturally, fleshed dragons. And they can be mean! The dragon and the child are always one. But the child, given a little time, will usually outgrow its dragon. Or, less frequently, the dragon will outgrow its child and will then become the viable form.”
That is what another Paleder per
son said in answer to another awkwardly-phrased question from one of the Quiz Ship people. But the kid-dragons on Paleder were more often visible than Gaea.
“You say that we should control our children better? You say that our children should all be in bed by this hour of night? People of Gaea, we do control them, they are all in bed right now. I will wager that every child in Paleder City has been in his bed for two hours already tonight,” said another Paleder person in answer to another set of questions. “Ah, but you ask who then are those small and savage persons or creatures congregating murderously in the small parks and stalking so devilishly through the darkened streets? Oh, those are our same children, sleeping in their beds in one of their aspects, and ravening in the tangled night in another. Small children often have more than one aspect to them.”
“I thought,” Questor said lamely, “that the ‘dragons’ were really only small rubber devices made by the children.”
“There are many ways of looking at it. The little rubber dragons or monsters are entry points for most of them. They pass through them. They are the talismans or triggers. They are their conceptions of how they will look. And then they become those conceptions for a while.”
“The reason we get such wraithy answers is that we ask all the wrong questions,” Jingo Blood complained to her companions. “Well, on the one end we can only fight dragons with dragons. And on the other end we can only seek the right questions to ask.” So they set up “Project Fight-Dragon-With-Dragon.” They implemented it with what talent of that sort they could discover in themselves. And they found that talent to be quite abundant, once it started to flow.
And they asked more, and still more awkward, questions. But it was Bodicea Crag (Queen Bodicea) who finally asked the key question.
“Are you people conscious?” she asked a group of Paleder people, and she was amazed at herself for asking it.
“No, of course not,” one of those person said. “We are entirely too civilized for that. Consciousness is a short and awkward interval that many persons and many races pass through. Other persons and races, less fortunate than these, remain in the state of consciousness and do not pass through it. Another group, ourselves, are now able to avoid consciousness entirely in our adult forms. Centuries ago, we passed through it, as a race. We still pass through it as small children. But there is no reason for us to repeat that passage in our adult forms.”
“If you are not conscious, then you are—unconscious,” Jingo Blood said as if pronouncing a great truth.
“That is the silliest attempt at logic that I have ever heard,” a Paleder person said. “But how can we explain her silliness to a completely silly person? We are not conscious. We are not unconscious. We are post-conscious. And ours is a post-conscious world.”
“If you are post-conscious, then you are not conscious that you are here talking to us,” George Blood said. “You don't know that you are here. You don't know that we are here.”
“No, we're not conscious of these things. We don't know that we're talking to you. But there's a ‘pattern’ on our world that responds to you correctly, through us, or in other ways. That saves us trouble.”
“If you don't know that we're here, then we can insult you with impunity,” Manbreaker Crag said with a big grin on his big face.
“You can try it,” one of the Paleder persons said. “But our ‘pattern’ may react to your insults, either through ourselves or otherwise. When our ‘pattern’ reacts, you can get hurt badly.”
“Then all your vaunted technology will serve only post-conscious persons,” Questor Shannon said.
“Yes, our flawless technology will serve only flawless persons—ourselves.”
“Then you are no more than zombies!” Manbreaker chortled.
“No, we went through the zombie phase, in our race, a little while after we went through the conscious phase. But now we are post-zombie as post-conscious. Really, now that we have arrived at our destination, we don't much care to remember the roads by which we arrived.”
“Will you prevent, or try to prevent, our leaving Paleder World?” George Blood asked.
“No, we will not,” one of those post-conscious persons answered. “But something may try to prevent your leaving, perhaps the ‘pattern,’ perhaps the dragon-children.”
The Quiz Ship persons withdrew from the post-conscious aggregation. It was late at night of the last (but they did not know that it would be the last) night of their visit to Paleder World.
“There's a psychological imbalance in all this,” Jingo Blood said. “Becoming post-conscious is going to have a devastating kick-back through the whole psychic web. It has to be counter-balanced somewhere. What is it that must proceed from such an imbalance?”
“Nothing will proceed from it,” George Blood said. “The kick will be a backward one. Nothing will follow. But, oh, what will go before! The seemly adults will throw it all back onto the childhood. The dragon-children are not post-conscious. They are conscious, and murderously pre-conscious. All the psychic lumber cast off by their fastidious parents comes clattering down upon them. It has to land on someone. What power, what twisted power those kids must have!”
So the Quiz Ship people concentrated all their energies on ‘Project Fight-Dragon-With-Dragon’.
“Our ‘Instant Chute’ did not fail or misunderstand when we came down here,” Jingo said now. “The little quagmire park that seemed so large to us, it really was the nexus of the most intellectual activity in town. Wherever the morphic children are concentrating in their psychic monsterness, that will be the nexus of what intellectual activity there is here. Everywhere else, things are post-intense and post-intellectual and post-active.”
“Yes,” George Blood agreed.
“They got rid of such a lot of clutter when they became post-people,” Jingo went on, “and it all comes down upon their children.”
“We have the picture now,” Manbreaker blasted with his strong voice. “All their brains are in their tail now, and the tail has a murderous flick to it. Let's take the Chute and get to Quiz Ship as soon as possible. And let us get away from this world. The Chancel party got away. The Ambler party got away. A lot of the others must have failed. Let's make a break for it.”
“We can try,” Bodicea said. “Maybe we can get the ship loose.”
The midnight town was lively. And post-people do not usually indulge in night life very much. What was reveling through the town tonight were great numbers of monsters and dragons, and those small creatures who seemed to be human children and also to be tearing monsters. Fanged kids, poisonous kids, mean kids. Aye, and the damnable aspects of them!
Roving ghosts and ghost-animals. Flying foxes attaching with hollow, blood-sucking teeth. Swamp dragons. A sleek head on a very long neck came out of the slimy darkness and took three of Questor's fingers and part of the palm of his hand. This was the same flesh and bone that he had lost on their arrival. And Questor Shannon sniffled and whimpered and shook with the pain of it.
“The unthinkable calm of the post-persons must be paid for in some more jittery coin,” a pleasant dragon said. “It is paid for, or recompense is made for it, by this delirious chaos here in the undermind of this world. It is the children who compose the undermind now, and their creatures, and their creatures' creatures. It is the howling irrationality.”
“Dragon,” George Blood spoke dangerously, “you speak with my wife's voice. Have you devoured my wife?”
“Oh, it's myself, George,” the dragon said in the voice of Jingo Blood. “The dragon and I are one. It's part of the ‘Project Fight-Dragon-With-Dragon,’ but it's a difficult projection when it's done consciously rather than unconsciously. I suspected, while I was still an undergraduate in psychology, that children of our own world were sometimes able to incarnate their dragons, but those one-in-ten-thousand cases of it were always explained away as something else. I can't do it very well yet. I notice that Bodicea is doing it a little better, but not really well. And you othe
r three are total busts.
“Oh, by the Great Clamminess, here comes that Glowering Glob again!”
It was much as it had been during that first minute after their arrival. The glob of clammy gloop, drifting in the low air, came upon them and swallowed them whole with its fetid breath. There were aerial snakes in that glob, and they struck out of it with paralyzing pain. There was the saturation of mental and emotional depression, the stark consternation and unbearable fearfulness and contradiction. There was the dread. There was the fear of falling forever.
“No, no, no, no, I cannot go through this again,” Manbreaker Crag yowled.
“Is the end of it all, the dirty end of it,” George Blood roared.
There were fer-de-lance snakes. There were swamp-dragons and jag-toothed monsters.
“I do hate a dragged-out death,” Jingo keened as her dragonness slipped away from her. “Come quickly, end of it! Oh, come quickly!”
“Be of stout hearts, Gaea guys,” a little giggling dragon cried in a clear and boyish voice. “Some of us are with you. We're on your side.”
They had heard that voice before.
But the Gaea people were being struck and gobbled and slashed. They were drowning in hot, searing, vividly inhabited and attacking mud.
“I'm Glic,” the clear, boyish voice sounded again. “I'm pleased to meet all of you.”
“Oh Lord,” Manbreaker moaned. “Is it the amenities that we meet again in this, our final passion?”
“Voice of Glic, how did the people of the Chancel Expedition escape from this world?” Questor Shannon was imploring. “How did the people of the Ambler Expedition escape?”
“How would I know?” Glic's voice sang. “I'm just a little kid. Move it along though, folks! Don't block the concourse! We're going too. Some of us are going to get on Quiz Ship whether you make it or not. We want loose from here.”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 124
