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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “It is all right then,” Judy Thatcher had said. “We are still the Twelve. I make the twelfth. I was wrong ever to doubt of that; I was wrong ever to doubt of anything.”

  So they had buried John Thatcher, the father and still a young man, and rejoiced that the Twelve still survived. That had been two years ago.

  Gregory rode his circuit all night. It was his to do. It was not for his mother Judy or for his sister Trumpet. They had other roles. This was Gregory's night. It had a name which he did not know. It was the Watch Night, the night of squires on the eve of their knighting, of princes on the nocturne of their crowning, of apostles on the vigil of their appointing. There was a nervousness among the cattle here, and again there. There might be several strange bands in motion. The Thatchers had no firearms, no weapons at all that could not be excused or justified as being tools. A few of the roving gangs still had rifles, but these were sorry things near as dangerous to raider as to victim. All such things were thirty or more years old, and none had been well cared for. But the raiders always had bludgeons and knives.

  Gregory fell asleep on horseback just before dawn. This was not a violation of the Watch Night for him. It was the one thing for which he never felt guilt. Actually he was cast into deep sleep; it was done to him; it was not of his own doing or failing at all. His horse also was cast into deep sleep, standing, with head bowed down and muzzle into the stiff grass. They both slept like wind-ruffled statues.

  Then there was movement, double movement, intruded into that sleep. There was the stirring and arraying of the ordered bulls. There was the false attack; and the bulls went for the false attack, being faithful beasts only.

  Then there was the death attack, coming apparently from the West. Gregory himself was struck from his horse. One of the raiders had counted coup on him, but not death coup. He was on the ground begrimed with his own blood and his horse was dead.

  Then he heard the clear ringing voice from which his sister had her name. It rose to a happy battle cry and was cut off in quick death. The last note of the Trumpet was a gay one, though. This had been a big happy girl, as rowdy in mien and mind as her mother.

  Trumpet Thatcher was dead on the ground: and the mother Judy Thatcher was dead beyond all doubt. There was confusion all around, but there was no confusion about this fact.

  The ordered horned bulls had wheeled now on the real attackers. They wrecked them. They tossed them, men and horses, into the air, and ripped and burst them before they came to ground. And the only words that Gregory could find were the same words that his mother Judy had found two years before.

  “It is broken now. They are no longer the full Twelve. It was never supposed to be broken.”

  His mother was quite dead and she would not come alive even for a moment to accomplish what she had forgotten. This dead Thatcher was not able to say, “Bend down, boy. I am not quite dead.” She was quite dead. She would speak no more, her broken mouth would be reconstituted no more, till resurrection morning.

  “Are there no hands?” Gregory cried out, dry-eyed and wretched. “Are there no hands that might be laid upon me?”

  “Aye, boy, mine are the hands,” came a voice. A man of mature years was walking through the arrayed bulls. And they, who had been killing strange men in the air and on the ground, opened their array and let this still stranger man come through. They bowed horns down to the turf to this man.

  “You are Levi,” Gregory said.

  “I am Levi,” the man answered softly. He laid hands on Gregory. “Now you are one of the Twelve,” he said.

  4

  “There has been a long series of ‘Arrow Men’ or ‘Beshot Men’ who have been called (or who have called themselves) Sons of God. These Comet-like Men have all been exceptional in their brief periods. The Queer Fish, however, insist that their own particular Mentor ‘The Mysterious Master and Maker of the Worlds’ was unique and apart and beyond the other Arrow Men or Comet Men who have been called Sons of God. They state that he is more than Son of God: that He is God the Son.

  “We do not acknowledge this uniqueness, but we do acknowledge the splendor and destroying brilliance of all these Arrow Men. To us, there is nothing wrong with the term Son of God. There is not even anything wrong with the term God, so long as it is understood to be meaningless, so long as we take him to be an unstructured God. Our own splendor would have been less if there had not been sonic huge thing there which we unstructured. This unstructuring of God, which we have accomplished, was the greatest masterwork of man.

  “The second greatest masterwork of man was the unstructuring of man himself, the ceasing to be man, the going into the hole and pulling the hole in after him; and the unstructuring, the destroying of the very hole then.

  “We were, perhaps, the discredited cousins of man. We are not sure now what we were or are. We who were made of fire were asked to serve and salute those who were made of clay. We had been Arrow Men ourselves. Our flight was long flaming and downward, and now it has come to an end. We destroy ourselves also. We'll be no more. It is the Being that we have always objected to.

  “The collapsing of the human species was a puzzle for the anthropologists and the biologists, but both are gone now. They said though, before their going, that it is a common thing for a new species to collapse and disappear; that the collapse, in these common cases, is always sudden and complete; they said that it was an uncommon case for any species to endure. They said also that there was never anything unusual in the human species.

  “They were almost wrong in this evaluation. There was, or there very nearly was, something unusual about the human species. It was necessary that we alter and tilt things a bit to remove that unusualness. We have done that. We've blown it all for them and for ourselves.

  “Fly-blown brains and fly-flown flesh! What, have you not lusted for rotted mind and for rotted meat? Here are aphrodisiacs to aid you. Have you not lusted for unconsciousness and oblivion? You can have them both, so long as you accept them as rotted, which is the same as disordered, or unstructured, or uninstituted. This is the peaceful end of it all: the disordering, the disintegrating, the unstructuring, the rotting, the dry rot which is without issue, the nightmare which is the name of sleep without structure. Lust and lust again for this end! We offer you, while it is necessary, the means and the aids to it.”

  Mind-Blowing and World-Blowing. Aphrodisiacs. — Argyros Daimon.

  (No, really we don't know why these Unstructured Scriveners chose such oddities for calamary names.)

  Levi and Gregory were walking northward at a great easy amble. “It is no use to be bothered with horses and so be slowed,” Levi said. They moved without hurry but at unusual speed. It was a good trick. Gregory would not have been able to do it of himself, but with Levi he could do it. Levi had a magic way of delving in the earth, as for the two burials. He had this magic way of moving over the earth. “You are Levi from over the sea,” Gregory said once as they moved along over the stiff grass pastures, “but how have you come? There are no longer any planes. There are no longer any ships. Nobody comes or goes. How have you done it?”

  “Why Gregory, the world has not slumbered as deeply as you had believed. Things have not ceased completely to be done. Anything can be builded again, or builded a first time. And there are no limits to what a body can do when infused with spirit. Perhaps I walked on the water. Perhaps I traveled for three days in the belly of a whale and he brought me all this way and vomited me up on these high plains. Or perhaps I came by a different vehicle entirely. Oh, is it not a wonderful world that we walk this morning, Gregory!” They were in the dusty Dakota country, coming into that painted and barren region that is called the Bad Lands. Well, it was wonderful to the eye, perhaps, but it was dry and sterile.

  “My father and my mother, both gone in blood now, have said that the world has gone to wrack and ruin,” Gregory was speaking with some difficulty, “and that there is nothing left but to trust in God.”

  “Aye, and
I say that we can build wonderful things out of that wrack and ruin, Gregory. Do you not know that all the pieces of the world are still here and that many of them are still useable? Know that the world has been not dead but sleeping. T'was a foolish little nodding off, but we come awake again now. And this Trust is a reciprocal thing. We must trust in God, yes. And He must trust in us a little. We are the Twelve. He puzzles a bit now I think. ‘How are they going to get out of this one?’ He wonders. Yes boy, I jest, but so does the Lord sometimes. He jests, He jokes, and we be the point of His most pointed jokes. An old sage once said that there were only twelve jokes in the world. What if we be those twelve? The possible humor and richness of this idea will grow in you, Greg, when you meet the others of the Twelve. There are some sly jokes among the pack of us, I assure you of that.”

  “When will we meet others?” Gregory asked.

  “Oh, almost immediately now. It is a new day and a new year and a new rebuilding. We'll set about it almost at once, Greg.”

  “The regular people have hunted us down like the lowest animals,” Gregory vented some of his old feelings. “They say that we are the plague carriers.”

  “It is life that you carry, Greg, and life is the plague to their wobble-eyed view. But they are no great thing, boy. They are only the Manichees returned to the world for a while, those people who were born old and tired. They are the ungenerating generation and their thing always passes.”

  “In my life it has shown no sign of passing.”

  “Your life has been a short one, boy Greg. But I shouldn't call you ‘boy’; you are one of the Twelve now. Ah, those sterile parasites have always had a good press though, as the phrase used to be — the Manichees, the Albigenses, the Cathari, the Troubadors (they of the unstructured noise who couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, they in particular have had a good press), the Bogomils, parasites all, and parasites upon parasites. But the great rooted plant survives, and the parasites begin to die now.”

  “They have spirits also who work for them, Levi,” Gregory said. “They have the Putty Dwarf, the Jester King, the Silvery Demon, others.”

  “Those are parasites also, Gregory. They are mean and noisome parasites on real Devildom, just as their counterparts are parasites on humanity. Listen now to the ordered birds, Gregory, and remember that each of us is worth many birds. It bothered the disordered brotherhoods more than anything that the birds still used structured music. It bothered them in Languedoc, and in Bosnia, and in the Persia of Shapur. It bothered them in Africa, and on these very plains, and it bothers them in hell. Let them be bothered then! They are the tares in the wheat, the anti-lifers.”

  Gregory Thatcher and Levi Cain had been going along at a great easy ramble, moving without hurry but at unusual speed. But a third man was with them now, and Gregory could not say how long he had been with them.

  “You are Jim Alpha,” Gregory said (he began to have the magic or insight that his mother had had, that his father had had before her), “and you also come from overseas from over a slightly different sea than that of Levi.”

  “I am Jim Alpha, yes, and I have crossed a slightly different sea. We gather now, Gregory. There will be the full set of us, and the secondary set, and also the hundreds. And besides ourselves there will be the Other Sheep. Do not be startled by their presence. They also are under the blessing.”

  “There are bees in the air. Many thousands of bees,” Gregory was saying. “I have never seen so many.”

  “They are bringing the wax,” Jim Alpha was saying, “and a little honey also. No, I don't believe I've ever seen so many of them, not even in sabbatical year. Perhaps this is jubilee also. The bees are the most building and structuring of all creatures, and they have one primacy. They were the first creatures to adore; this was on the day before man was made. It won't be forgotten of them.”

  Other things and persons were gathering now, thousands of things, hundreds of persons. There was a remembered quality to many of them. “The remembered quality, the sense of something seen before, is only rightness recognized, Gregory,” Tom Culpa was saying in answer to Gregory's thought. Tom Culpa must be rightness recognized then, since he was a remembered quality to Gregory Thatcher, he was someone appearing as seen and known before though the thing was impossible. How did Gregory even know his name without being told? Or the names of the others?

  There was something coming on that would climax quickly. It was evening, but it was white evening: it would be white night, and then it would be morning. And the inner gathering seemed almost complete.

  To Levi and Gregory and Jim Alpha had now gathered Matty Miracle (he was a fat old man; it was a miracle that he could be moving along with them so easily, matching their rapid amble), and Simon Canon, Melchisedech Rioga (what an all-hued man he was! — what was he, Gael, Galla, Galatian, Galilean?), Tom Culpa whose name meant Tom Twin, Philip Marcach, Joanie Cromova (Daughter of Thunder her name meant: Judy Thatcher hadn't been the only woman among the Twelve), James Mollnir, Andy Johnson, and his younger brother Peter Johnson.

  “It counts to twelve of us now,” Gregory Thatcher said very sagely, “and that means—”

  “—that we have arrived to where we were going,” Peter Johnson laughed. This Peter Johnson was very young. “Most of the seventy-two are here also,” he continued. “Yes, now I see that they are all here. And many of the hundreds. We can never say whether all the hundreds are here.”

  “Peter,” Gregory tried to phrase something a little less than a warning. “There are others here whom we know in a way but do not know by name, who are not of the Twelve nor of the Seventy-Two nor of the Hundreds.”

  “Oh, many of the Other Sheep are here,” Peter Johnson said. “You remember that He said He had Other Sheep?”

  “Yes,” Gregory answered. He remembered it now. The puzzle was that this Peter Johnson was a boy no older than Gregory. There were many older men there, Levi, Jim Alpha, Matty Miracle, Simon Canon. How was it that Peter Johnson, that other twelve-year-old boy, was accepted as the Prince of them all?

  The candle molders were busy. Candle molders? Yes, ten at least of them were working away there, or ten thousand. And full ten thousand bees brought wax to each of them. There would be very many candles burning through the white evening and the white night and on into the white dawn. Then these weren't ordinary candle molders or ordinary bees? No, no, they were the extraordinary of both; they had reality clinging to them in globs of light. Events gathered into constellations.

  One using words wrongly or in their usual way might say that everything had taken on a dreamlike quality. No, but it had all lost its old nightmarish quality. It had all taken on, not a dreamlike quality, but the quality of reality.

  There was, of course, the acre of fire, the field of fire. This acre was large enough to contain all that needed to be contained: it is always there, wherever reality is. There are tides that come and go; but even the lowest ebbing may not mean the end of the world. And then there are the times and tides of clarity, the jubilees, the sabbaticals. There is reassurance given. The world turns in its sleep, and parts of the world have moments of wakefulness.

  Ten million bees had not brought all the wax for that acre of fire, and yet it was a very carefully structured fire in every tongue and flame of it. It was the benevolent illumination and fire of reality. It was all very clear, for being in the middle of a mystery. White night turned into white dawn; and the people all moved easily into the fire, their pomposities forgiven, their eyes open.

  The Mysterious Master and Maker of the Worlds came again and walked upon this world in that Moment. He often does so. The Moment is recurring but undivided.

  No, we do not say that it was Final Morning. We are not out of it so easily as that. But the moment is all one. Pleasantly into the fire that is the reality then! It will sustain through all the lean times of flimsiness before and after.

  Scorner's Seat

  1

  Kyklopolis is one of those communities that o
riginated in the Panic Past; yet there is very little of panic in its make-up. It is one of those settlements of “Wheelies” and “Boaters,” who are employed (we do not know whether intentionally so employed) at the cleansing of certain river junctions; and cleansing them nearly as well as (and much cheaper than) can be done with Purification Locks. There is a feeling that such communities should be permitted to continue in their somewhat obsolete function. Kyklopolis is, even more than most such settlements, a closed religious enclave. It has withdrawn from the world and it steadfastly refuses to learn anything from the rest of the world. It does send out one pilgrim yearly to teach the rest of the world. This leaves one small question: does the rest of the world have anything to learn from Kyklopolis?

  Oddly there is one small thing that some of us in the rest of the world would like to learn from Kyklopolis. How do the sewer workers of that settlement get the local form of euglena algae or cloaca algae (the scum-wort) to mutate? How do they induce the anaerobic reversal in it, changing it from an oxygen robber to an oxygen producer? How do they make it act like a plant instead of an animal? We have only most inefficient methods of reversing these rare euglenas. The Kyklopolitans have, apparently, an easy and efficient way of bringing this reversal about as an annual change. The yearly pilgrims out of Kyklopolis do not seem to understand the method of the reversal, do not seem in fact to comprehend our questions about it. We believe that their trigger to the change is a compounded wave (probably within the auditory range). But just what is it? And why are we unable to duplicate it?

  HARVESTER REPORT

  I hold this Seat till with transmuting howl