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

by R. A. Lafferty

The judgment place was an open space by the furnaces, by the common pads, by the concert crater, a little to the north of the restless ribbon.

  “Shall we?” Quick Mick asked. He was asking Annina of the Horns, perhaps, and Dan; or he may have been asking someone a little taller than either. “There is something felt, somewhere, about holy ground, and about either wearing shoes or taking them off.”

  “It'll make the ground mighty hot,” Dan grinned with deadly seriousness. “Judge, have a care for your judgments.”

  “It'll scorch the ground for them, not for us,” cried Annina of the Horns. “Take them off, take them off! We'll see how it goes.”

  They were four bright and shining, and at the same time very dirty children. You don't go into rapports in the flint-thorn-dust country and stay clean. The four of them took off their shoes. There was a slight anticipatory giggle from Quick Mick. And—

  —And what a howling outrageous trick it was that they played! There was dark and gleaming delight in the very manifestation of their frightening powers. For the ground did become very hot: not for them, but for everybody else.

  There is something undignified in the great Lion-Men, the Enforcers, dancing on one foot and then the other: and howling. And disordered dignity has always been the forte of these lawless rulers.

  “Fox-fire running, cloned and downed,

  Singes the Lions and singes the ground.”

  Azorro's laughing chant was very like fox-fire, and the horns on his temples were more like sticks of white fire than like hair now.

  “Put them back on!” the biggest Lion of them all roared. And the children, in most insincere obedience, put their shoes back on. Ah, the ground had been burning hot for a long moment though! But had anybody noticed, had anybody ascertained in the brief interval when the children had their shoes off, whether their feet were indeed cloven hoofs?

  “The second part of the judgment is a question and a demand,” the biggest Lion roared, but a bit lamely now. “The question and the demand: ‘Do you abjure the burning bush?’ We don't remember the meaning of this, but we're required to ask it.” The four kids rolled eight eyes like rakish unmatched jewels at each other. Why, they had the Lions themselves inventing devices for them to use. This was too good to throw away.

  “We abjure the burning bush completely,” Quick Mick gleed. “We fling it away from us. We'll not see it with eyes. The true bush comes some other while. Let all the false bush burn now for the backward sign of it!”

  And the false bush burned. It burned hotly, quickly, searingly in more than five hundred points of discord. Chin-whiskers and chop-whiskers, bushwhackers and Fu Manchus, burnsides and brodignags, tom-balls and cascades, lank-locks and bush-heads, those bushes were on fire; beards and moustaches, manes and crines, long-hair and frizz-hair were all aflame. And the fires were not beaten out until the kids said that they might be extinguished.

  “That's enough,” Annina of the Horns laughed the order after a bit. So the shattered people, the Jackal-People and the Lion-People, put out their own fires with whimpering and trepidation. Ah, it was pleasantly sharp, though, in the nostrils of the four children, if not of the furious folk: that acrid tang of scorched flesh and seared skin, that fuzzy and bitter smell of burnt hair. The horned children were now horned with rays of white light and were themselves almost radiant.

  “The judgment goes on,” growled the largest and possibly the most scorched of the Lion-Men. “Now you will do the doings or you will die the deaths. Will you now take pot and hemp and acid and snow to show your solidity with the free people? To show that you're not seed of the Devil?”

  “I'll not take them,” Annina sang.

  “You others?”

  “No. No. Never, scorched Lion, never,” the three male kids denied.

  “Will you don the pig-wigs?” the Lion asked in rising thunder.

  “We will not,” cried the children of the ray-light-horn temples.

  “Will you Sing the Thing?” the Lion roared, and five hundred guitars strummed and whined in anticipation.

  “We'll not Sing the Thing,” the four said.

  “It would be a desecration of the Real Thing,” Dan explained.

  The judgment place was in an open space by the common pads and the furnaces. The largest furnace had now been fired to seven times hot and was like molten liquid flame.

  “We come very near to the end of it then,” the judging Lion said sadly, with that sadness that is peculiar to singed lions. “What is the name of your father?”

  “Our father's name may not be spoken,” Azorro stated. “Your father's name is legion.”

  “Your father's name is Devil. He had hoofs and horns,” the big Lion accused.

  “Not so,” Quick Mick answered. “That one is your father, not ours. And all those things are the false brag of your father. His head isn't holy enough to bear horns. His stubs aren't earthy enough to have either feet or hoofs on the ends of them. He's a hobble. He's not lord of sky or earth or under-earth, not of any of them. He's lord of lies and flies and order and disorder, but no other things. He's not even lord of fire, for all his vaunt. He's not even able to live in it in joy.”

  “Are you able to?” the singed Lion asked with a flash of leonine humor.

  “We are!” the kids shouted solidly.

  “Your father is dead. That is the only fact of the world,” the Lion stated.

  “Dead Lion, tell us not who is dead,” Azorro laughed.

  “Into the furnace with the four of them,” all the Jackal-People and Lion-People cried.

  “With the three of them,” the biggest Lion said. “Dan is a special case, a case not well understood. He's to be eaten alive, and we special Lions will eat him. That's the way it's been ordained. Your tricks end now, evil children.”

  “No. Our tricks begin now,” Annina contradicted. “You'd never have believed such tricks. Ah, the furnace! That's a fun I hadn't even thought of.”

  So they all arranged for the judgment and the end of the thing.

  Well, had the children hoofs on their feet? This hasn't been quite settled.

  Oh yes. They had shadows of hoofs, at least. They had shadows of pads and of claws also. Yes, and old vestiges of fish tails and even of dragon tails on their extremities. But what they had really and finally, and not as vestige, was fine feet.

  And horns on their heads, real horns, white-fire horns, white-light horns, Moses-horns!

  Danny was surrounded by two dozen large and savage men who'd eat him alive with their very teeth. They were in a passion for it. No, that is not strictly accurate. Daniel had two dozen trembling and fearful Lion-Men of the streets surrounded. Their teeth chattered, but were they chattering out of fear or were they chattering to eat Dan alive?

  And the other three prepared to step into the seven-times hot molten flame of the furnace.

  “Stand you back, the people,” Annina called. “We come to our high-tricks now. When we go into the fire you'll see some fun. But stand back or you'll be crisped by it.”

  “Stand how far back?” the people hooted.

  “A hundred meters, a thousand, a mile of meters,” Annina called. “And that won't be enough.”

  “Burn, kids, burn,” the people mocked. “The furnace is seven times brick and seven times stone and seven times iron. Burn, seed, burn.” But some of the more timid ones did stand back, far back.

  Not far enough, though. The children stepped down into the molten fire and the fun began. And the people reeled back in abysmal fear. A hundred meters back. A thousand.

  A mile of meters back.

  It wasn't far enough back though.

  In Outraged Stone

  The look of indignation on the face of that artifact was matched only by the total outrage of her whole figure. Oh, she was a mad one! She was the comic masterpiece of the Oganta Collection. If stone could speak she would be shrilling. She was a newly catalogued item among the grotesque alien stonery called the Paravata Oneirougma. “You'd almos
t believe that she was alive!” was the laughing comment of many who watched her there in the display. “Oh, it's that she was alive once, and now she is furious at finding herself frozen in stone.”

  But that was the whole missed point of her outrage. She wasn't alive; and she never had been.

  It was the cultural discovery time of the Oganta of Paravata. The Oganta had become things both in and interesting. Earth people had taken a seasonable delight in their rough culture, in their hominess, in their froggishness. Many Earth people from the scientific simmer were now visiting them and studying them. In particular were those of the psychologic phratry involved in this. A quick trip to Paravata would yield such theses as enhance reputations and make names. There the mysterious human undermind and underbody was atop and open to explore. There was no way that one could miss if he had the energy for the encounter. The energy for it, though; that was the thing that separated the bulls from the steers and the horned heifers from the freemartins.

  “Paravata has half again Earth's gravity, so it calls out our strength. It has an atmosphere that keeps one on an oxygen binge, so it gives that strength something to draw on,” so had Garamask, that most vigorous Earthman, said of the planet.

  Many Earth people wilted on Paravata. They couldn't stand the weight (there was something wrong about the weight) and the weirdness; they hadn't the strength for it. But others (and not always the ones you would guess) found a new strength and excitement there. It was bigger than life and rougher. It was vulgar and misshapen. It was a grinning challenge and it would smash anyone who wasn't up to it.

  But if you could make it there you could make it big. The loins bulged with new energy for these fortunates, and the adrenaline ran in rivers. It was a common and shouting and delirious world for those who could match it, and it was not only the body juices that were called into fresh spate. The mind juices sang their new tunes also, and the ideas came in tumbling torrents. They were pretty shaggy, some of those ideas, but there was nothing tired about them. Mind and body appetites grew steeply, almost exploded. There was an absolute horniness that came onto such visitors as had the capacity to take it. And a froggishness. What is the mystique about frogs?

  The horned frog of Earth is a miserable sleepy little antediluvian and has nothing to do with these vigorous whorls. Let us take the name away from it and give it to another. Somewhere, on some world, there is a real horned frog, rampant with green comedy, outrageous in its assumptions, able to get away with worse than murder. The Oganta of Paravata were really such horned frogs, except that they hadn't actual visible horns, except that they were frogs only in a manner of speaking.

  Five young Earth psychologists (they all had the capacity and ruggedness for Paravata) were dining in one of those gape-walled inns on a ridge above the small town of Mountain Foot, on one of the stunning Paravata plateaus. Dining wasn't the proper word for it: they were gorging. They were gorging with Oganta friends (an Oganta had to be your friend or one of you would be dead quickly). And they didn't sit at table for their stupendous eating. This would be unthinkable to the Oganta, and it was immediately unthinkable to the Earth people. For such action, they stood, they strode, they rollicked; they tromped about on the big tables from giant bowl to giant bowl, and they grabbed and ate commonly from these common caldrons. They dipped and slurped, they toothed great joints of flesh-meat, they went muzzle-deep into musky mixtures. They were as mannerless as the Oganta themselves. They were already full of the coarse Oganta spirit and had even taken on something of the Oganta appearance.

  On Paravata, one never reclined when he could stand (the Oganta even took their carnal pleasure leaping and hopping); one never sauntered where he could stride, nor walked when he could run. Aimless it all might be, but there was a burning energy and action in the very aimlessness.

  They wrestled, they rolled, they walked upon one another and sat upon one another. “Och, I could hardly eat another bellyful,” Margaret Mondo groaned happily as she rolled on one of the big tables among the bowls. Then a huge male Oganta landed in the middle of her belly with both feet and bounced. Ah, he'd have gone three hundred pounds on Earth, and things were half again as heavy on Paravata. “Och, now I can eat again. How I can eat!” Margaret chortled. We knew that Margaret, the earthiest of them all, wouldn't really give out so quickly. The dining customs on Paravata are extreme. If you can't take them, don't go there.

  It was just at frost-bite and there was a light snow sifting. The five youngish Earth-folk were dressed near as barely as the Oganta. It would be many degrees colder than this before the walls of this mountain inn would be raised. The open air is always to be praised. On Paravata there were no heating fires ever, except the internal ones: and these burned hot.

  “It's much more earthy than Earth,” George Oneiron was saying. He was almost shouting. “It's everything, it's all through everything. The butterflies here are absolutely rampant, they're rutting, they're ravening. We know that ‘psyche’ originally meant butterfly as well as soul. The psyche, the soul-mind-person, is our field of study, and here it is grossly material, fleshed and blooded. Even the Marsala Plasma of this place (there's no counterpart to it on Earth, there couldn't be), though it floats and drifts and jostles in the air, has a heaviness and materiality about it that startles one. Don't turn your back on one of those floating blobs or it'll crash down on you like nine tons of rock. We'll solve the mystery of these plasma balls, or we will not solve any other mystery here.”

  The Oganta themselves had this sometimes weightlessness and this sometimes great weight. It was a part of the jokes they played. And the Earth people discovered that now they had it too, sometimes, mostly when they were in contact with the oafish Oganta. You are light or heavy when you think light or heavy.

  The floating globs, the air balls, had more mysteries than their weight. There was their sound, the most raucous dissonance ever, when one caught it only out of the corner of the ear. But turn full ear on one, and it was all innocence and quiet. Incredible scenes flashed and lounged inside the balls when taken at a careless glance, but they murked over when looked at straight. The globs made lascivious gestures, but what was lascivious about them? They were only charged air drifting in uncharged air (if there was any uncharged air on Paravata). The lasciviousness must be in the eye of the beholder. But what were the globs anyhow? “Oh, they're persons, some of our own persons, persons that we're not using right now,” one of the Oganta tried to explain it.

  George Oneiron, still avid to solve the mystery, was trying to take one of these plasma balloons into his hands. It was a yellowish, greenish, translucent, transparent glob of crystal gas (crystal gas? yes, crystal gas) the size of his own head. It challenged him. It was as if it shook its horns at him. He had it, it escaped him, he had it again, he grunted and grappled with it, he seized it out of the shimmering air and he didn't seize it easily.

  “It'll go heavy on you,” one of the Oganta grinned. “It'll cut you to shreds. Its weight is polaroid, just as ours is, just as yours begins to be. If it's in alignment it hasn't any weight; if it isn't it's crushing. You match it or it breaks you down. You shape with it or one of you breaks to pieces.”

  George Oneiron was quite strong, and the thing, after all, was only a floating glob of gas. “I have you now!” he cried when he had it. “Why do you follow and cling to the Oganta while you evade ourselves? I have you, and you'll spill your secrets to me.”

  “Poor George is reduced to talking to globs of air,” Helen Damalis jibed, but Helen was no great one at understanding deep things.

  Actually, it was a giant wrestle, and it was close there for a moment. But it was the plasma ball, and not George, that broke to pieces. The Marsala Plasma shattered in George's hands, broke jaggedly into a hundred edged pieces, and clattered and crashed heavily on the stony ground. And George was cut badly on the hands and forearms and chest by the jagged slivers of it.

  George cursed, he howled with quick pain, he laughed at the crashing
puzzle of it: the floating balloon that turned into jagged rock. And he laughed at the half dozen Oganta of both sexes who came with hasty bowls and cries of “Here, here, to me, to mine.”

  George shook and dribbled his running blood into the Oganta's bowls. The big oafs loved the tang of blood, human blood or their own, in their strong stew. It was salt and condiment to them. And to George too. For he leapt barefooted onto the shoulders of the chuckling Oganta girls and trod them. It was bloody revel.

  “Here, here, to me, to mine,” the Earth girls also cried, partly in comedy, partly in novel passion. George Oneiron dribbled his blood into the crocks of Helen Damalis and Margaret Mondo and Bonta Chrysalis, and leapt onto their shoulders also. Then, borne there by Margaret he poured his blood into the common caldrons on the largest table.

  George was bleeding a surprising quantity of blood from the cuts of the gas globule, that floating thing that had shattered so quickly into vitreous daggers that were heavier than stone or metal. The loss of blood made him light-headed and gave him the froggish passion. But he quickly received more blood. All the Oganta, then the other four of the Earth people, slashed themselves with the dagger-shards of the broken globule and gave him their blood to drink. Now they were of one blood forever.

  All five of the Earth psychologists were quite young adults. This would give them closer and quicker understanding of the Oganta, who were such vivid and outgoing oafs that even their dreams were on the outside. There was no denying that there was an abnormality about the Oganta, even beyond the differences of worlds and the differences of species.

  The Oganta were a neotenic species who had lost, or almost lost, their adult form. As well as it can be explained in Earth context, they were teenagers forever whatever their age: and they seemed to age not at all after they had attained their high oafishness. There is no thing to which they might be compared in this: but imagine, if you dare, teenager attitudes and activities continued by certain individuals to a far greater age, twenty-two years, twenty-three, twenty-four, even further. If such things happened on Earth where would Earth be? Imagine neotenics breeding, reproducing, and never attaining an adult form. That was the state on Paravata.