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

by R. A. Lafferty

  The Oganta of Paravata were large. They looked like a cross between humans and frogs. They themselves said that they were analogous to the tadpoles who had been unable to make the frog leap. But to human Earth eyes they looked like frogs and they leapt like frogs.

  “But every frog is really a prince enchanted,” Bonta Chrysalis said.

  “I'd say that every prince is rather a frog in disguise,” Philip Blax countered, “except that I'm sure it's been said before, and probably by me.”

  “Come here, Prince,” Bonta Chrysalis cried suddenly, and one of the big Oganta leapt into her arms and wrapped long froggy legs around her till Bonta herself could hardly be seen. But she'd made her choice. She'd taken one of the grinning gape-faced Oganta for her subject (subject for her study, and willing subject to her real whims) and she would not fail in this.

  The Oganta were intelligent: or perhaps they only pretended to be, for a joke. They imbibed Earth knowledge easily and literally, but they didn't take it too seriously. Their own culture was deliberately anti-intellectual, but they understood pretty well all that they rejected. They had an easy way with languages and lingos. They even had an easy way with the psychology texts that lay about there, fingering through them quickly, then burlesquing not only the words but also the ideas of them. The Oganta also had (this is not fully understood, it is one of the mysteries that must be solved) that light way and that heavy way with weight.

  The Oganta played one abominable instrument, the stringed hittur. But the five young Earthlings did not find it as offensive as older Earthlings would have. They knew that the whining tastelessness of it was an essential part of the Oganta. And they knew that even the vigorous Oganta could not be vigorous in everything. Even the hittur would be accepted, as one of the things that must be studied.

  Helen Damalis had also acquired a boyfriend, an oaf friend, a leaping frog friend, from among the Oganta there in the mountain inn. She hadn't done it as deftly or as regally as Bonta had taken hers. Perhaps it was that Helen was acquired by the Oganta. Helen wasn't regal, she wasn't strong, she wasn't much of anything at the moment. She looked like a very small sofa with a very large Oganta lounging on her. The Oganta liked the Earth folks. They slavered over them, they kissed them with great slurping sounds, they frog-leapt upon them. They insisted that the Earth folks should play the leaping game also. This was the mystic game of leapfrog, the oldest game of the worlds. The leaping is always upon and not over, and the fun of the game is in going from weightlessness to staggering weight at just the wrong moment.

  “We'll need neither notebooks nor recordings.” Christopher Bullock was saying very solemnly (yet he was very unsolemnly a-romp and a-tromp on a playful and trollish female Oganta), “for the Marsala Plasmi will serve for both. They are the crystal balls, crystal even in their gaseous state, and they record everything of the particular Oganta they attach to. We'll have everything down in the most solid recordings ever, petrified dream and person blobs.”

  There were five of these young psychologs from Earth.

  There was this Christopher Bullock: we will have to call him a young man of muscular mind; there's no other term that will serve. The playful and trollish female Oganta had now picked Christopher up and draped him about her neck like a scarf: like a light scarf at first, then like a staggeringly heavy scarf. Christopher himself was learning a little about the light way and the heavy way with weight. There has always been something doubled about that name of Christopher, especially when it doubles into the name of Cristobal. There was once a man named Cristobal Colon (an old necromancer of Earth who doubled the Earth), though his name was regularized to Christopher Columbus. Though Christopher means Christ-Bearer, yet Cristobal is the phonetic equivalent of Crystal Ball and it has unchristly connotations. Just what is the real meaning of the crystal ball, and why was Christopher Bullock so interested in it?

  The second of the young psychologs from Earth was George Oneiron. George was a split person, and the two halves of him were stark idealism and total depravity. In each half George was a nice enough fellow, but the contrast within him was awkward. The halves of George were at the moment served by two female Oganta, one of them as spiritual, one of them as carnal as it is possible for neotenic frog-humans to be.

  The third of the young psychologs from Earth was Philip Blax. Philip had healed his own split and had become (in advance) a very little like one of the Oganta in appearance and attitude. Nothing special about Philip really.

  But the fourth of the psychologs from Earth was Bonta Chrysalis and she was something special. She was everything. She was magnificent in mind and body, splendid, soaring, regal, almost a flame. She was beauty and grace combined with power. She had always known the light way and the heavy way with things. The Oganta frog, who might be the prince enchanted, had frog-leapt onto her shoulder and perched there, and he was the largest of them all. But what is weight to a flame? And that big one, if he wasn't enchanted before, he was now, completely enchanted by Bonta.

  And from Bonta Chrysalis we go to Helen Damalis, who suffers by the comparison. Helen wasn't much. She had less substance than any of them, less even than Philip. Helen wasn't distinguished by the primary brain in her head or by the secondary spinal brain which all good psychologs must have. She hadn't beauty of face or grace of body, not by Earth standards, not even by Paravata-Oganta standards. She was plastic, perhaps, and she might take the impression of these things, but she hadn't them of herself. She was an empty receptacle, an inelegant piece of pottery; yet she had a sullen intensity and an eagerness to be filled. She had a real hunger for life. One thing more: the Marsala Plasma, those gaseous blobs that were really crystal balls that could shatter into heavy fragments, followed and clung to Helen, as they did to all the Oganta, as they did not to the Earth people. And Helen clung very closely to her Oganta boyfriend, oaf friend, frog friend.

  The fifth of the psychologs from Earth was Margaret Mondo. She had an earthiness beyond any of them. This wasn't necessarily a roughness. Earth is more than that. It wasn't a lowness of any sort. Earth is much more than that. It was a primordial variety that she had, a many-rootedness. It was not true that Paravata was more earthy than Earth; you knew that was not true when you looked at Margaret who was Earth itself. She could contain them all, but nobody could contain her. So it wasn't an Oganta singling that she attracted, but a group, a trio of Oganta, two males and a female. She was too complex and vital to waste on a singling.

  Ah, the young scientists had gathered up, or in some cases been gathered up by, their subjects. They went off with them now, riding them or ridden by them, in groups and tangles; off for study and for fun and for exploratory experience and for science.

  The Oganta, so coarse and so open that they had their dreams on the outside.

  And the five young mind-scientists from Earth.

  Five? Not six? Christopher, George. Philip, Bonta, Helen, Margaret. Do they not come to six?

  No. There are five of them. Count them again carefully. See, there are five of them.

  The crystal ball, it is everywhere phony in its every form, and nowhere has it so many or such unusual forms as on Paravata. On Earth, as far back as one wants to go, to Babylon, to Chaldee, the crystal ball is in solid (though cloud-filled) form only, and it is the tool and scope of charlatans and oneiromancers. Even in those beginnings its users didn't understand its real form, and yet they preserved some slight pre-Earth memory of its various phases. On Paravata, by accident, it has its full phases. It may be in gas or liquid or plastic or solid form; it may go from one to the other in a twinkling (the phrase was coined for that change in that thing).

  But what can really be seen in any crystal ball? Futures? Yes, futures, pasts, presents, scenes, dreams, images, dramas, primary persons, secondary persons. The ball may go tricky and freeze forever any of these fleeting things. Very often it will seize a secondary person and freeze this person forever. That person, then, will never have had any existence except in the bal
l, it will never have been anything except petrified.

  To say that the crystal ball is everywhere phony is not to say that it is ineffectual. It is to say that it has misshapen or phony effect. But it does have effect. It works, it works.

  —From the Notebooks of Christopher Bullock

  (Wasn't he the one who said they would need neither notebooks or recordings?)

  Bonta Chrysalis and Margaret Mondo perhaps had the most success with their projects. Bonta's, it would turn out, would be a badly twisted success. Helen Damalis surely had the least success, though she believed she was having the greatest. She was realizing herself at least, she claimed. In a limited way that was true. Christopher Bullock may have had the most fun, what with that playful and trollish female Oganta of his, but even this is to be doubted. There was something unexpected to be found even in the troll. All the projects suffered in having no aim other than the mere study of the Oganta.

  Could they be studied apart from their planet of Paravata? Were the Oganta isolated and discrete individuals? Were they interlinked groups with the personality residing in the groups? Were they mere fauna of their planet, a mobile grass of their world, manifestations, fungi? That was the trouble with the Oganta: they changed under the different points of view. As drops of water they were one thing, as small seas they were something quite opposite; as planetary oceans they might have a third and vastly different substance.

  Philip Blax said that the Oganta themselves had no problems, that they were completely uninhibited and uncomplicated, that they were interchangeable modules of an unstructured society that knew neither anxiety nor doubt. Bonta said that in this Philip was wrong in a way unusual even for Philip. She said that the Oganta did have extreme anxieties, and that the better the intelligence and personality of the individual Oganta the greater was his anxiety. She said they had these anxieties because they had lost their adult form.

  “It is well lost,” Philip had said, “and I might wish that we could lose our own.”

  “You never had one and never will,” Bonta told him. “I haven't my own completely yet, but I will have it. You are yourself like an Oganta, and it's yourself you see when you look at them. You're emptier than they are. You're not like the ones who are superior in intelligence and personality.”

  The plasma balls, the crystal balls, did make good notebooks and recorders; Christopher Bullock had been correct on that. The Oganta were such uninhibited (on the surface anyhow) and open creatures that they had their dreams on the outside of them: the psychologs from Earth had said that from the beginning but without really understanding what they meant. “The plasma ball is a bucket,” Margaret Mondo said now. “It can become a bucketful of dreams, and it becomes heavier as it becomes fuller.”

  No need for other apparatus to study Oganta dreams. Allow a new and fresh Marsala Plasma to hover over an Oganta as he slept, either in the daytime or at night, and watch the plasma globe. The parade of dreams would be shown and sensed in that globe, vividly and colorfully, pungently and resoundingly. The Oganta dreamed better than they knew. Their dreams were more finely structured than their lives and had a greater diversity. They were real pageants, full of symbols and outright creations, enormous, overwhelming, spooky, powerful. Each superseded dream of the parade gathered itself like broken smoke and retreated into the center of the plasma to make way for more current presentations on the spherical stage nearest the surface. But all the dreams were recorded for all the senses and not one of them was lost.

  George Oneiron made first discovery of a method of reconstructing the dissolved Oganta dreams. He'd affront a plasma ball that had been beside one of his Oganta subjects during her sleep period; he'd affront it and make it go heavy. He'd affront it still more and make it shatter into pieces. And each jagged broken fragment of it would display one of those bright jagged dreams. Turn one of those jagged fragments to another angle, and there was the same dream in another aspect, one that might have been completely missed at first viewing. George himself was very strong in the dreams of his two Oganta subjects, in a distorted form always, or in his two distorted forms.

  Margaret Mondo said that George was doing it all wrong. She quickly discovered that there was no reason to affront the globes, still less reason to shatter them. There was no need to make them go heavy permanently; they received less well when they were always heavy. Let them go heavy and light, and heavy and light again. Margaret herself could resurrect out of the globes any dream or constellation of dreams by caressing them with her own magic hands. She could reconstruct them in sequence or out of sequence, any way she wished.

  Having three Oganta subjects, Margaret sometimes used three globes. But she could make the three globes merge into one, and emerge out of it again. Sometimes there would then be four globes and not three: one composite globe, three discrete globes. Margaret was studying three individuals as well as one small nation.

  After a while she maintained master globes. The individual globes, after each dream period, were merged with their master globes; and then they were emerged from them again, emptied and ready for reuse. There was no limit to the amount of data that a globe might hold.

  Indexing and recovering the data were other matters. Margaret could effect these things with her magic hands. The others hadn't hands so magic as Margaret's, but they managed. Except Helen Damalis. She managed her material not at all; it managed her.

  The Oganta needn't be sleeping to project these dream sequences. They projected always, when leaping or shouting, when slavering or loving, when guzzling or gorging, while wrestling or rolling, while rattling the air with their whining unmusic, while burlesquing and buffooning, while unstructuring themselves and their minds. Even their waking dreams were better than their waking lives. Why did the Oganta put themselves down so?

  There was a certain pathos in the pageanted dreams of Christopher Bullock's subject, the playful and trollish Oganta girl. Oh, she was playful enough, cloud-shatteringly playful! Sequences taken from her playful dreams and reveries (reverie is the wrong word, it implies quietness and musing; there should be a word to express the whooping happy calamities and catastrophes of this alien girl) would later be enjoyed by a certain clientele of Earth fellows in the manner of old stag movies. And she was trollish enough. She enjoyed her massive and misshapen burlesque of a body; it was the house she lived in. But there were other levels and aspects to the data that streamed and fountained up from this girl. There were odd caves and grottos in the mountain of her, some of them secluded and quite unexpected, rare ones, puzzling ones. It's a dull mountain that can labor (even trollishly) without bringing forth at least a small heap of gemstones.

  There was nobility in the interaction of Bonta Chrysalis and her enchanted Oganta subject. There was something cracked or usurping about that nobility though.

  “But they do put it on a little thick,” George Oneiron said correctly of them.

  “Blunt as I am, I was never that blunt, or that empty,” Philip Blax attacked them, and with justice.

  “Oh, climb down from it, Bonta,” Christopher mocked. “You'll get too high for your own head.”

  Even the ever kind and ever magic Margaret Mondo wrung her hands and shook her head over the affair and said: “May I never be so pretentious as that! May God Himself never be! There are limits to things, and they pass the limit.”

  Helen Damalis perhaps said the strangest thing of all about the affair: “If they can make a thing like that come alive, is it helpless for myself? Air lives and turns into talking and walking crystal. Stones live, and float like air in air. Frogs live. Imaginary princes live. All I ever wanted was to live. Is there magic enough for some of it to fall on me?”

  Were they really so pretentious and outrageous, the things that Bonta and her charmed frog were attempting? This frog-Oganta had intimations and even expectations of adulthood now. Whether he had already had these intimations of himself or whether Bonta had given them to him is unknown, but he had them strongly.

/>   There was now no more than one out of ten thousand Oganta who ever attained the old Rogha form, the old adult form. And these few who attained it were isolated in it, without mate or breed, and usually very old. All the other Earth psychologs felt that this thing gone once should be gone forever. All the other Oganta felt that whatever state one should reach all should reach; that if they did break out of the top of themselves to a new state and development it should not now be that old and lost state. There must have been something wrong with that old advanced state or it would never have been lost. Perhaps it was too pretentious in itself, and too contemptuous of its underlay.

  It was strange that Bonta Chrysalis, that everything Earthling girl, didn't understand this. Perhaps her own state was in her name and she was looking for a developed state for herself as well as for her subject. Perhaps, for all her easy attainments and brilliances, she herself was not adult and would not soon be.

  It was strange that the enchanted Oganta himself, more intelligent and personable than the other Oganta, didn't realize that the old effective advanced form was now impossible. If attained now it would be mere sterility. On the word of the other Oganta of the immediate group, this one was the most gifted of them all. Why had he a faulty gift of vision in this?

  Helen Damalis had the rockiest time of them all. She seemed, though, to be the most avid for the experience, even the very rocky experience. She had become attached to her subject, not he to her. And he was cruel to her with that offhanded and amazing cruelty of which only the Oganta are capable. He was a complete egotist and most of his dream sequences were parades and pageants of himself only or himself against a dim background of other Oganta: other Oganta and a flurry of inferior creatures that were not easy to identify. “Like a cross between an Oganta and a chicken.” Was that more offensive than the Earthlings' way of seeing the Oganta? “Like a cross between a human and a frog.” It was Margaret who pointed out that this was the Oganta way (or this particular Oganta's way) of seeing the Earth-humans.