“Something fishy here,” Flaherty said, and he went off on the spoor of Dr. Silbersporen. He found the rather elderly doctor at his home in a secluded neighborhood. He received a friendly but somewhat breathless welcome from him.
“You are in trouble, of course,” the good doctor said “Only those in real trouble still come to see me. Now, then, tell me your trouble and I will get you out of it immediately.” The doctor wheezed when he talked, but it was a kindly wheeze.
“I understand that you are, were, the finest heart doctor in the region,” Flaherty said. “I also understand that you no longer practice. Ah, what is your own trouble, emphysema?”
“Not a trace of it. I've been to all the throat, lung, and thorax experts and they say that there is nothing at all wrong with me, that I must feel wonderful. I feel rotten. What really troubles me, though, is a small red Indian. And you?”
Then Flaherty broke down and told Dr. Silbersporen all about his troubles, about the gnomes (who were not gnomes) who inhabited the narrow border between wakefulness and honest sleep, about the foolish quarrel over the slipper, about the gnome's throwing the lasso around the vein in the middle of his heart, about the heart doctors' insisting that there was no such vein as the one that Flaherty rather guardedly described to them.
“Why, if that's all that's troubling you, we'll fix it in a minute,” Dr. Silbersporen wheezed and gasped. “They are right that there's nothing wrong with your heart. Once we take that little noose from around the conduit, you'll be as sound as ever. Oh, of course there's such a vein as you describe. I taught those heart experts, every one of them, but I wasn't able to teach them everything. It takes fine eyes to see that vein, I tell you that.” Dr. Silbersporen himself had rheumy and blood-veined eyes, as well as trembling hands. He seemed a very sick man.
“This vein, which the lesser experts don't know about, is quite vulnerable to unusual attack. Sometimes a very small mole will get inside a person and gnaw on the vein. Sometimes a cocklebur gets inside the heart and afflicts the vein. No, there's nothing unlikely about a gnome's putting a noose around it and pulling it tight. Every now and then, you'll find one of those little guys with a mean streak in him. Take your shirt off and I'll cut that loop out of your heart in a minute.”
Flaherty took his shirt off, but he was a little doubtful.
“It is said that you no longer practice,” he objected, “and you don't seem to have instruments or facilities here. How will you do it?”
“A real expert doesn't need many instruments, Mr. Flaherty. Here's a little paring knife that I was just cutting up an apple with. That'll get us inside. And here's a little scissors I was trimming my hair with. I cut my own hair, you know. Don't go to the barbers anymore. The prices, for one thing, and then the little red Indian says he'll make the barber cut my throat if I go to one. I never know whether that Indian's kidding or not, but he sure kids mean. The scissors will do quite well to cut the gnome's loop, though, and then your troubles will be over.”
“But is it sanitary?” Flaherty asked. There was something about this whole business that made him uneasy.
“No, of course it isn't,” the good doctor admitted. “Neither is it sanitary to have that gnome's lasso inside you all the time. Gnomes have no concept at all of hygiene. Ah, one of my own seizures is upon me. He always allows me enough breath to go through the rite. Then I'll be ready for you.”
Dr. Silbersporen was opening all the windows and doors in his house. “Easy, you little bugger, easy,” he was wheezing. “I'll say it, I'll say it loud, just let me have my breath for a bit.”
Then the good old doctor began to make sounds somewhere between those of a hyena and those of a rooster, very loud, very weird, very high and continuing for a long time: Shak shakowey shahoo! It wasn't the words themselves so much as the way the doctor intoned them that set the ears on edge.
Shak shakowey shahoo!
SHAK SHAKOWEY SHAHOO!
It went on for a long time and the neighbors were grumbling loudly. Then the doctor was finished with it for a while and he was smiling sadly.
“One learns to live with a thing like that,” he said. “What it is is a small red Indian, less than an inch tall, with whom I quarreled irrevocably. He put a little rawhide thong around my glottis. He chokes me with this, so that it appears that I suffer from emphysema. I don't suffer from emphysema at all, I suffer from a small red Indian. Naturally, the experts can find nothing wrong with me. For some reason, they are unable to see either Indian or rawhide thong. Ah, well, ready for you now, Flaherty.”
The doctor came with the paring knife in his trembling hand to lay open a passage to Flaherty's heart. He peered with his rheumy and blood-veined eyes, and it was necessary to remember that he was the foremost heart expert in that region. Even so, Flaherty found himself to be highly nervous. The doctor with the shaking hands hadn't made the cut a quarter of an inch deep when Flaherty gave it all up and threw away his chance of being freed from the lasso.
He cried out in quick terror and he ran out of the house. For Flaherty did have something the matter with his heart. He was chicken-hearted.
He had twinges, he had pangs, he had palpitations from the strange turn of events. And there, in front of the secluded home of Dr. Silbersporen, Flaherty ran smack into a tree. This is something one should always avoid.
It didn't knock him clear out. It did something much worse. It knocked him into that narrow borderland between wakefulness and honest sleep. And the gnome was able to trap him there.
“Louder!”
“Rang dang kaloof.”
“Louder, I said.”
“RANG DANG KALOOF.”
This went on for a long time. Then uniformed men were there with a paddy wagon. They took Flaherty away.
It is nice where they have him now. He still has heart twinges and pangs and the gnome still sets him to whooping every now and then. But Flaherty doesn't feel as isolated as he did before. There are other folks there who can see the gnomes in that narrow borderland between wakefulness and sleep. There are other folks there who suffer from them.
And Walk Now Gently Through The Fire
1
“The Ichtyans or Queer Fish are the oddest species to be found in any of the worlds. They are pseudo-human, perhaps, but not android. The sign of the fish is not easily seen on them, and they pass as human whenever they wish: a peculiarity of them is that they often do not wish to pass as human even when their lives depend on it. They have blood in their veins, but an additional serum also. It's only when the organizational sickness is upon them (for these organizing and building proclivities they are sometimes known as the Queer Builders or the Ants of God), that they can really be told from humans. There is also the fact that most of them are very young, or at least of a youthful appearance. Their threat to us is more real than apparent and we tend to minimize it. This we must not do. In our unstructured, destructed, destroyed society, they must be counted as the enemies to be exterminated. It's a double danger they offer us: to fight them on their own grounds, or to neglect to fight them. They'd almost trick us into organizing to hunt down their organization.
“Oh, they can live near as loosely as ourselves in their deception. These builders can abandon buildings in their trickery. They'll live in tents, they'll live in huts, they'll live under the open sky as easily as do ourselves, the regular people. But observe (they trick us there again: observation is a quality of theirs, not of ours), notice that everything they do is structured. There is always something structured about their very tents; there is something peculiarly structured about their huts; they even maintain that there is something structured about the open sky. They are the Institutional People.
“The Queer Fish claim that Gaea (Earth) is the most anciently peopled of the worlds and that they themselves are the most ancient people. But they set their own first appearance in quite late times, and they contradict the true ancientness of humans and proto-humans.
“The Queer Fis
h have been bloody and warlike in their times. They have been Oceanic as well as Sky-Faring, in some cases beyond ourselves in that phase. They have even been, in several peculiar contexts, creative. They are not now creative in the arts (they do not even recognize the same arts as we do). They are certainly not creative in the one remaining genuine art, that of unstructured music. They are something much worse than creative now: they are procreative in the flesh. Their fishy flesh would have already become dominant if they hadn't been ordered hunted to extinction. Even in this they force us to come out of ourselves, to use one of their own words.
“They force us to play their game. We have to set up certain structures ourselves to effect their destruction. We even need to institute certain movements and establishments to combat their Institutionalism and Establishmentalism. They are, let us put it plainly, the plague-carriers. Shall we, the Proud Champions of the Destroyed Worlds, have to abandon a part of our thesis to bring about their unstructuring, their real destruction? Must we take unseemly means to balk their fishy plague? We must.”
“Problem of the Queer Fish.”
Analects. — The Putty Dwarf
Judy Thatcher was moving upcountry in a cover of cattle. The millions of feral cattle were on all the plains. Most of these cattle were wobble-eyed and unordered. But an ordered person, such as Judy, would have ordered cattle; she could draw them about her like a cloak with a sense of structure, whole droves of them. A person could manipulate whole valleys of these cattle, could turn them (the smaller units turning the larger), could head them any way required, could use them for concealment or protection, could employ their great horned phalanxes as a threat. Judy Thatcher had some hundreds of her own ordered bulls. Being magic (she was one of the Twelve) she could manipulate almost anything whatsoever.
But most of the cattle of the plains were not quite cattle, were not ordered cattle. Most of the horses were not quite horses, nor the dogs dogs. Most of the people were no longer quite people (this from the viewpoint of the Queer Fish; Judy was a Queer Fish).
Judy was a young and handsome woman of rowdy intellect. She had, by special arrangement, two eyes outside of her bead, and these now traveled on the two horizons. These eyes were her daughter, traveling now about two miles to the East and right of her on a ridge, and her son moving on another ridge three miles to her left and West. She was a plague carrier, she and hers. All three of them were Queer Fish.
The son, on her West and left, worked along a North-running ridge in those high plains and he could scan the filled plain still farther to the West. He could mark every disordered creature on that plain, and he had also been marking for some time one creature that was wrongly ordered but moving toward him with a purpose.
This son, Gregory, was twelve years old. Being of that age, he knew it was time for a certain encounter. He knew that the creature, wrongly ordered and moving towards him with a purpose, would be a party to that encounter. This always happens to boys of that age, when they are of the ripe time for the Confirmation or the Initiation of whatever sort. Many boys, unstructured boys, amazed boys of the regular species, boys of the Queer Fish even, are not conscious of the encounter when it comes. It may come to them so casually that they miss its import. It may come as wobble-eyed as themselves and they accept it without question. It may even come to them in dream state (whether in waking or walking dream, or in night dream), and then it sinks down, yeasting and festering a little bit but not really remembered, into their dream underlay. But many boys, particularly those of the Queer Fish species, know it consciously when it comes, and they negotiate with it.
(As to the ritual temptation of girls, that is of another matter, and perhaps it is of earlier or later years. Any information must come from a girl, or from a woman who remembers when she was a girl. Many do not seem to remember it at all. Most will deny it. Some will talk around it, but they do not talk of it directly. You may find an exceptional one who will. You may be an exceptional one who knows about it. But it isn't in the records.)
Gregory Thatcher, being twelve years old and in his wits, was tempted by a devil on a high spot on that ridge. There had been a cow, a white-eyed or glare-eyed cow, coming blindly towards him. The cow had no order or purpose, but someone in the cow came on purpose. Then the cow was standing, stock-still, blind-still, too stupid to graze, too balkish to collapse, less animate than a stone cow. Whoever had been in her had come out of her now. Where was he?
There was a little flicker of black lightning, a slight snigger, and he was there.
“Command that these stones be made bread,” he said (his heart not quite in it). He was a minor devil; his name was Azazel. He wasn't the great one of that name, but one of the numerous nephews. There is an economy of names among the devils.
“Does it always have to start with those same words?” Gregory asked him.
“That's the way the rubric runs, boy,” Azazel jibed. “You Fish are strong on rubric yourselves, you're full of it. Play the game.”
“We are the rubric,” Gregory said easily, “in the first meaning, the red meaning. We're the red ocher, the red earth.”
“A smart Fish I have, have I? You heard the words ‘Command that these stones be made bread.’ Do it, or confess that you are unable to do it. You Fish claim powers.”
“It is easy enough to make bread with these stones,” said Gregory. “Even you can see that they are all roughly quern stones, grinding stones. They are all flat or dished limestones and almost any two will fit together. And the wild wheat stands plentiful and in full head. It's easy enough to thresh it out by rubbing the ears in my hands, to grind it to meal or to flour between your stones, to mix with water from my flask and salt from my pack, to build a fire of cow chips and make bread cakes on one of the flat rocks put to cap the fire. I've dined on this twice today. I'd dine with you on it now if fraternizing were allowed.”
“It isn't, Greg. You twist the words. They are ‘Command that these stones be made bread,’ not ‘Command that these stones make bread.’ You fail it.”
“I fail nothing, Azazel.” (The two of them seemed about the same age, but that was not possible.) “You'll not command me to command. On with it, though.”
“Cast thyself down from this height,” Azazel ordered. “If you are one of the elect you'll not be dashed to pieces by it.”
“I'll not be dashed to pieces yet. It's high but not really steep. Not a good selection, Azazel.”
“We work with what we are given. The final one then—the world and all that is in it—.” Here Azazel went into a dazzle. He was real enough, but now he went into contrived form and became the Argyros Daimon, the Silver Demon who was himself a literary device and diversion. He waved a shimmering silvery band. “The world and all that is in it, all this I will give you, if—.” Then they both had to laugh.
“It isn't much of a world you have to offer,” Greg Thatcher grinned. “Really, where is the temptation?”
“No, it doesn't look like much,” Azazel grinned. “Oh the temptation is quite real, but it's subtle and long-term. It's quite likely that you'll be had by it, Greg. Almost all are had by it along the way. You can see it as wheat-colored, or as green-grass colored, or as limestone and dust, or as shimmering. It isn't a simple world, and you haven't seen it all. Already you love it, and you believe you have it. You haven't it yet, not till I give it to you. You're a stranger on it. And you're blind to its main characteristic.”
“What characteristic am I blind to?”
“The surface name of it is freedom.”
“I have the ordered sort of freedom now,” Gregory said rather stiffly. The Odd Fish have always had this somewhat stiff and pompous and superior way of setting forth their views. Whether it is a strength or a weakness is disputed but it is essential to them. They'd not be the Odd Fish without it. “Have you Freedom in Hell?” he asked Azazel. “Have you Order there?”
“Would we offer you something we don't have ourselves?” Azazel asked with his own pomposi
ty. (The Devils and the Odd Fish both have this stilted way of talking, and they have other similarities, but in most ways they are quite different.) “Certainly we have Freedom, with the same Freedom that all others have on Earth, the Freedom that you Queer Fish deny yourselves. And Order, here you touch us in a sore spot, Greg. It is here that we offer you a little more than we do have ourselves, for we offer you freedom from order. Aye, regrettably we suffer order of a sort, but you needn't. There's a line in one of the old poets of your own Queer Fish species: ‘They order things so damnably in Hell.’ He's right, in his way. There is a damnable order still surviving there.
“Let me explain something to you though, Greg. Let me ask you a favor. I'll even appeal to the ‘good side’ of you. You Queer Fish make much of that ‘good side’ business. If I am able to disorder you, by that same measure I am allowed to escape into disorder myself. I've made good progress in my time. I've disordered very many. Look not at me like that! You are almost critical of me. I want you. You're to a great prize.” (The Queer Fish are almost as susceptible to flattery as are the Devils themselves, and Gregory had flushed slightly from this pleasure.)
“But I have it all, the world and its fruits,” he explained to Azazel. “And I have things that are beyond the world. I walk in light.”
“Here's a pair of blued sunglasses you can use then, Greg. The light is always over-bright. You haven't it all. You're afraid of so much of it. I'll take away your fear. All flesh is grass, it is said by some old authority, I forget whether by one of yours or ours. Why do you refuse the more spirited grasses and hemps then? Even the cattle know enough to enjoy them.”
“The wobble-eyed cattle and the wobble-eyed people are on the loco. I'll not be on it.”
“Come along with our thing, Greg, and we'll help both ourselves into Freedom and Disorder. You can have it the other way also: All grass is flesh. What flesh!”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 138
