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

by R. A. Lafferty

  2

  The means of enforcing a constant population in Kyklopolis is unknown. The people of the town simply accept it that there may not be a birth till there has been a corresponding death to make room for it. The moral power of the ruling Scorner seems to have much to do with this inhibition: a tradition beyond understanding reinforces it. The people believe so strongly that they will be sterile until they have received the belly blessing or birth blessing that they are indeed sterile.

  HARVESTER REPORT

  To wash the water and to scrub the air

  This be our part and everlasting share:

  But never quite to kill our filthy friend

  Or, purpose gone, we come to empty end.

  —SCORNER NUMBER 33

  Great jaws gaping in the murky water below, and black water pouring over the wales of Roger Meta's muck-boat.

  “I cannot reach you, Circle,” Roger called, “but I give you the blessing from here. My life goes now. Replace it.”

  “No,” she said stoutly. “I go with you if you go.” And she was into the water with a fish spear and after Grendel. A spear like that wouldn't even scratch the hide of Grendel.

  But it didn't happen then. It wasn't meant to happen. There was a giggling of devils (it was sometimes said that Grendel was composed of a whole nation of them inside his curious form). Grendel released the boat and slid down into deepest water. There were water spouts then with brimstone in them, hideous sounds that set one to retching, stench that roared, and guffaw that rotted the marrow. It was the monster Grendel laughing underwater.

  “Mine is another of the four fates then,” Roger spoke, shaking. “He doesn't take me today.”

  Then it was suddenly a very joyful day, after Circle and Roger had turned their boats over to the unloaders and processors where Sewer Seven comes into daylight and mingles with the other waters. The two young sewer workers climbed up the banks to the ragged outskirts of Kyklopolis. They blinked like dirty moles at the morning light, but that light is a healing thing even for sewer people. They saw each other by daylight for the first time. They were pleased about it, and a little shy.

  They were just within that wall of Circle Stones that bounds the Circle City and separates it from the Countryside and the rest of the World. These circle stones are stone wheels standing up, about a meter in diameter, with holes in the middle of them, just touching each other, ten thousand of them if one counts the similarly shaped and sized buoys that complete the circle out in the river just beyond the purifying sewers. It would seem that this little stone wall, free-standing and unmortared, could not keep anything out, but it could keep the world out.

  Could not one easily leap over it? No. To do so would be to be vaporized by lightning bolt. Try it and see! Only once a year might an assigned Pilgrim leap over it without self-destruction.

  Circle Shannon and Roger Meta left the dangerous bounding fence and started into deeper and more vital Kyklopolis itself. How beautiful, how idyllic was the cyclic city as it stirred itself into morning light. Little children bringing Night Charleys and Honey Buckets out of their houses and bringing them to the men who pushed the night soil barrows. Spriggers (they were the so-called “Green Children” who could make things grow) bringing out the little pots of green sprigs that had sprouted the day before and now raised their heads to the morning light. The spriggers brought their plants to the sprig masters, who would set them in the new muck being spread that morning. Constant renewal in even the very small things. No path used more than three days. Then it was abandoned (lest it should become dusty), mucked, and sprigged and sodded.

  “The Scorner has reigned a year and a day,” Circle Shannon said. Sheep were grazing the clover growing on the rooftops of the buildings, and chickens were clucking and pecking up there between and among the sheep. The bees also grazed the clover of its nectar, and the edible locusts grazed it of its black-leaf. All things fit together.

  “The Scorner will probably break up today or tomorrow,” Roger said, “though there is a case of a Scorner reigning as long as a year and four days. Some men do not break as quickly as others.”

  People going by on one-, two-, four- and eight-man bicycles, going always roughly and joyously for mostly they went on first-day or second-day paths through the blue-stem grass and the rice-grass, scattering the seeds like small clouds in the air, bringing the birds in cloud-sized flights, bringing the fowlers who took the birds. Only in the more dense center of the city were there rocked and covered bicycle roads, with the sodding and growing on the roofs of them. But it was good to stir the grass and constantly renew the paths in the other areas. The bicycles were the only wheeled vehicles in Kyklopolis the Wheel City. Certainly no motor vehicle could go there.

  They saw Scorner now, up in his own Scorner's Seat, the highest point in the city: and the balloons and the sky-brooms were all located in that region today. The curiosity about the Scorner was a natural thing. His breaking up marked the turning and renewal of the year.

  One hundred, two hundred, three hundred windmills turning. Windmills also were made in the Bicycle Factory, which was the only industry in Kyklopolis. More than half of the one thousand water fountains of the town were already spouting, and the others were being put into operation as the workers arrived. The smaller fountains were operated by workers who pedaled in a sort of stirrup and saddle arrangement very like cycles. They raised the putrid and polluted water into the sun and air, raised it again and again, turned it over and over. Muck-men worked in the fountains, just as Roger Meta worked in the sewers, and filled carts with the fertile but pungent precipitate. Air and sun and motion, and a bit of additive that the additive men dripped into the one thousand fountains every day, and wonders were done. Black water, brown water, green water, golden water, even silver and white and clear water sometimes. The fountains were a crowning beauty of the town.

  The Scorner's Seat was a sort of pagoda. It was set up on poles with ladders for visitors going up to it. It had a deep pitched roof with turned-up edges. It had to be resodded and resprigged often, and it was now grazed by only three mountain goats.

  Leading men of the various trades and divisions went up the ladders and reported to Scorner every day: and received their stern instructions from him. That is the way that Kyklopolis was governed.

  Scorner was stern in everything and was absolutely sound in his judgments, though it is said that he had been a gentle and rather slow-witted man until his office possessed him. Now the potato and turnip men, the cereal men, oats, barley, wheat, rice men came to him for their quotas and instructions. And the grass men — the grass men were in trouble. There was discussion that grass might have to go, being a plant that requires an intermediary animal to turn it into human food. The clovers (including the peanuts especially) had already cut deeply into the province of grass, enjoying certain advantages (the edible root-nodules) as well as greater productivity per square meter even for grazing, and they were nitrogen fixers as well as superior oxygen producers.

  “When the last grass is gone, Kyklopolis will have lost something,” a grass man moaned, but the Scorner sternly reduced the grass space in favor of cereal and clover. “Even clover will have to go sooner or later,” the Scorner said. It was possibly the last thing he would say, for he made a sign that he would confer no more that day: and the leading men all left him.

  Circle Shannon and Roger Meta had been eavesdropping or balloon-dropping on Scorner out of curiosity. It was this way: they had met one of the other heirs, Harker Skybroom, who was a balloon man. He was off duty but he had joined the loungers around the Scorner's Seat. Now a balloon was going up, and he invited himself and Circle and Roger to go along with the balloon operator, who was his friend. And when they had reached a certain height they had signaled the winch-operator to hold it there so that they might hear something of the Scorner's business. After all, the Scorner was public property and was almost always in view.

  Now they signaled the winch-operator agai
n, and they went up and again up, very high. The hydrogen-filled balloons (hydrogen by electrolysis was another thing produced at the Bicycle Factory, Kyklopolis' only industry) were captive on strong cable and were wound into the high air by hand winch. The winch on its heavy base was wheeled, so that the balloons might be sent up over a different part of the town every day, wherever the air was heaviest. The balloons served as rough air purifiers. The operators sprayed certain things into the smog, animate as well as inanimate things. The smog was transmuted in that vicinity. After all, smog is only polluted air, and pollution is only an extreme form of fertility.

  Vertical thermal drafts were created by the balloons. This meant further aeration of the air. Cloud-clover was created out of some of the smogs; this was the sky-manna too light to fall to earth; it was a cloud of small edible seed-like particles too light to fall. But it could be gathered by the sky-sweeps of the balloons. And it could be grazed by those smog-eating miniature “cattle,” certain midges and insects that were seeded by balloon. And these “sky-cattle” were taken by birds, which in turn were taken by fowlers. And also there was a mysterious Fortean dribble, sweet and fragrant from the transmuted fog. The actual food taken out of the smogs was of some consequence, the fertility rained down was considerable, and the sky-pollution was absorbed or scattered. It was clear air mostly over Kyklopolis, and wherever the air was befouled it could be cleared in a few hours with the balloons and their various skysweeps.

  One could, perhaps, see to a considerable distance from the high balloons. But what one saw from them was unregistered or quickly forgotten. It was only the Countryside and the World, things that could hardly be of interest to citizens of Kyklopolis.

  They came down again, the operator, Circle Shannon, Roger Meta and that remarkably gentle big man Harker Skybroom. Circle and Roger and Harker found that beeman Charley Goodfish. He was the man who talked to bees, who got all sorts of information from them, who brought some of this information to Scorner, who even brought special bees to Scorner when that stern man wished to question them more closely. Charley was the master of all honey products, and he and his co-workers maintained ten thousand hives or nations of bees. Many of these were set just inside the circle stones that were the walls of the city. Clearly many of the nations of the bees did traffic with the nectars of the Countryside and the World, but this is a thing we will be silent on.

  The growing party found Jaspers Rerun, who made euglena bread and other things from what might be considered waste material. Jaspers was fascinated with the euglena algae. He was fascinated with all the waters, though he was neither a sewer man nor a river man. He was even fascinated with the water-monster Grendel, much too fascinated with him. But Jaspers did not seem to have the staying qualities, not as Charley Goodfish, for instance, had them.

  They found Carol Bluesnail. They found Twicechild Newleaf. They found Velma Green. Their party was now to the full count of eight. Theirs had become, in the late of the night before, an eight-way friendship forever.

  “We will go now to John Legacy,” Twicechild said. “We are all pledged that no one of us will take unfair advantage in obtaining the birth blessing from him. And we are also pledged to see whether the matter of the blessing cannot be settled very quickly.”

  “Does any of us know where John Legacy may be found?” Roger asked.

  “No one of us knows,” said Harker Skybroom. “When a man has assumed the name of Legacy he leaves his proper home to die elsewhere. It is always to a secret place that he goes. It is always a secret how he summons his heir, for it is not with words or sign. If it were, then someone besides the heir might intercept and go also. And it is a most deep secret how he gives the birth blessing, how he is able to confer fertility to one who was not fertile before.”

  “Well then, we all walk in a secret,” Circle Shannon said in a jolly mystic way. “Come, come, walk, walk! I believe that we will hardly take one step out of the way. What can be kept secret from such fine folks as we are? Were we not the ones we would not walk the way. But we are the ones. Come, come all.”

  They walked through the poke patches and the onion patches. They walked wetly through the rice patches. Circle plucked a snail from the water-land edge here and set it in her hair by her ear. Three bees came and settled on Charley Goodfish and perhaps they talked to him. Two birds came down onto Twicechild Newleaf, who was a fowler by profession. All of these unhuman informants seemed to agree on the direction of the walk.

  The party came to a very small house with a lone kid grazing the grass of its roof. They all knew that John Legacy was inside, waiting happily to give the birth blessing, waiting less happily to die.

  3

  The solitary and impassioned ruler of Kyklopolis is afraid to break the cycle on which that settlement is based. The fact is that the small region has now become a religious fossil of the old Pollution-Purification rite. It becomes an enacted struggle in every detail of the life there: the elements are not real, they are surreal. The fact is that there is no regional pollution at all except that created on this special spot. After all, the Pottawattamie Purification Locks are only sixty kilometers upstream from Kyklopolis. The river runs clear from the locks and it runs clear to the very borders of Kyklopolis. And the air of the region has been clear for thirty years, excepting deliberate pollution in this one small area. The pollution in Kyklopolis is actually created and maintained by the massive toxic waste from (of all things) a bicycle factory which has a metallurgic operation so inefficient and of such poisonous throw-off (solid, liquid and vapor) as to stagger the imagination and to preclude any doubt that it is accidental. It isn't.

  The second item in the pollution there traces to the incredible mutational development of what we first believed was the simple euglena algae; whatever it is, it isn't simple. This rogue euglena, in one of its seasonable forms, chokes the waters completely, befouls the entire sewer and river system, crowds out almost all fish life with its robbing of the water of its oxygen. It even engenders belief in a local Devil or Water Monster, the counterpart of the town-ruling Scorner, but also the destroyer and absorber of the Scorner. This whole euglena blockage could, of course, be flushed out at any time, but the cyclic religious beliefs of the town would have to be flushed out also.

  Then, once a year, the Scorner dies violently, the maleficent euglena becomes a beneficent euglena providing water, oxygen and food for a great burgeoning of fish, and the blockage cleanses itself. We have here acted out the relics of grotesque pollution and grotesque purification, both out of that queer (now even nostalgic) period known as the Panic Past.

  We cannot say that the pollution in Kyklopolis is deliberately maintained, for there is no element of deliberation possible here. But it is stubbornly and insanely maintained.

  We still wonder, though, by what trick (we are almost certain that it is an audio trick) the yearly change in the uncommon euglena algae is brought about.

  SECOND HARVESTER REPORT

  Round and round, be we lord or lout?

  How'd we get in it? How to get out?

  Who be the Circle's nearest kin?

  Where oh where does the wheel begin?

  —SCORNER NUMBER 34

  The eight of them moved into the little house in one silent tight bunch. Had they been called indeed? Were they heirs in reality, and how had it come about?

  Inside, the bed had been overturned and broken. John Legacy was on the floor, but he was neither prone nor supine. He had gathered himself into a bundle like a belligerent buffoon. He'd not die willingly, but he'd not die fearfully either. And he'd said once that he wouldn't die in bed.

  “I might not die at all,” he bawled at them now out of the middle of a great grin. “I may transmute instead. Today is the day of the great transmuting. What shall I transmute into, a great frog?”

  “I'd respect you none the less if you did.” Circle Shannon spoke with absolute seriousness. “Would you be happy so?”

  “Nay, I'd still be on the
recurring wheel, and I want off it,” the old man said. “Ah, it is my four heirs with their pledged companions. You have chosen them well, my boys, or perhaps it is that you have been well chosen. You are my heirs, and yet no one of you has seen me before and no one of you has a drop of my blood. How did the knowing that you were my heirs come into your heads and into the heads of this town? I put that knowing into the heads, that's how it happened. You have not seen me, but I have often seen you. I've long been habited to watch young men at work, and I have seen that you four are less entrapped than others. What? Did a ninth visitor just enter this terminal house?”

  “No, good John Legacy, only we eight have entered,” Twicechild Newleaf told him gently.

  “Wrong, fine girl,” the old man said. “A ninth visitor has just entered and his name is death. Ah, but I'll die in my tongue last place of all. I have things to say yet. Do you know where this town went wrong all those years ago? Do you know where the whole world almost went wrong? Pollution, you see, is an overabundance of death: it cannot be cured by commanding an underabundance of life. We commit that error in Circle City.”

  “Good John Legacy, will you give one of us the birth blessing now?” Carol Bluesnail begged. “I'd not mention it, but you begin to turn blue and you'll die before you realize it.”

  “Oh, I give the birth blessing to all of you then,” John Legacy gasped out of his blue-faced pain. “You all be fertile now. Go and hold union and conceive. You are quickened.”

  “But there are four couples of us,” Harker Skybroom protested gently, “and your going will leave room for only one new birth.”