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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “There are four different fates for the four couples of you, and I tell you it will work out even. Before the day is over some of you will yourselves give the birth blessing, but more than four is not mine to give. Go and conceive.”

  “But, good John Legacy,” Roger Meta began to speak.

  And then he finished it lamely. “He's beyond words.” John Legacy was dead, and it is fruitless to argue with a dead man.

  The four couples went out. They felt themselves quickened. They felt themselves fertile. They went off, couple by couple, to their own places. They gave the mutual blessing. They held union. And it is believed that they conceived. The birth blessing from one surnamed Legacy—it always works.

  It was afternoon of the day. The howl began (there is no other word for it); it was the witless, soulless, hopeless howl. A man was breaking up in body and brain and spirit: a solitary and impassioned man, too stern to bend, he had to break. A year and a day's frustrations and entrapments erupted into the horrifying transmuting howl.

  Were there any mercy in that town the very arteries of grief would burst at that awful wailing woe that shook the whole region.

  Who talks of grief? Who calls for mercy? No, no, it is joy everywhere in a town awakened to afternoon gladness. It is glee. It is gaiety unconfined. The whole town rushed to the river and sewers to watch the great transmutation. The Scorner was dying in loud rale and wail in his high seat, and the universality of the town rejoiced.

  Not quite all, perhaps. There is some question of the disposition of four couples who were united in an eight-person friendship. One couple (Roger Meta and Circle Shannon) was already at home in the sewer and had seen the transmutation many times. “But I'll see it no more,” Roger said mysteriously. “I'll be out of it now and away.”

  Harker Skybroom and Twicechild Newleaf did not join in the rejoicing. They were frozen in a white-faced fear and horror which neither could understand. They did not go to watch the transmutation. There would be transmutation enough in themselves.

  But Charley Goodfish and Carol Bluesnail went gladly to the viewing, as good citizens should. And Jaspers Rerun with Velma Green went at a run in feverish eagerness. People were singing as they went on foot and bicycle to watch the changing of the waters. Some of them even sang the new “Four Fates” song, which prophesied what would happen to four new heirs:

  One be the Constant Townsman deft,

  The Pilgrim one, and one the Scorner,

  And one a dazzled man who left

  His wife a Grendel-widow mourner.

  The sewers were fragrant as new-mown hay now, and all the waterways were teeming with life and food. Minnows were seeded by minnow-men, minnows came from nowhere and everywhere and feasted on the wonderful transmuted euglena algae. One could actually watch them grow to bigger and bigger fish. From the navigation channel, which had always run clear and pure parallel to the contrived Kyklopolis waters, fish leaped the barrier to feast on this new pasture and to grow to even bigger fish. Turtles came and frogs, crabs and river lobsters, slack-water shrimp, all fine water things; they came or they were brought, and they would grow and grow. For six months, all through the winter, the waters would be burgeoning with life. They then would choke and die again.

  On one point, speculation of outsiders had been correct. The trigger for the transmutation of the euglena algae was an audio one, a high complex sound that nobody had been able to duplicate. It was the death howl, the death wail of the Scorner, and nobody could duplicate it who had not suffered in strictness as the Scorner had suffered for one year.

  Perhaps the happiest of the happy people was Jaspers Rerun. He had always been delighted by the yearly purification and now he felt that he had a special part to play in it. He did. He plunged into the renewed waters. He was taken in one gulp by the monster Grendel. Grendel was happy now with his holiday prey, the people were happy that Grendel was happy, even the widow Velma Green was almost happy and very proud.

  The people were singing their national hymn that referred to those critical times of more than thirty years ago:

  The World a dark smoker, nor Nero to fiddle;

  We drew us a Circle and lived in the middle.

  Such solidarity as the people of Kyklopolis showed was rarely to be found.

  Meanwhile, back in the center of town, the body of the Scorner had been tumbled out of its high chair onto the turf, and hackers were hacking away at it. They drew it, and the rich entrails were divided among the men of the leading crops. They quartered it, and the quarters were given to the four quarters of the town; there is incomparable fertility in the body of a dead Scorner, and none of it must be wasted. (Grendel had already dined: he'd not get this Scorner.)

  Then men went ritually with lighted lanterns (though it was still clear day) to look for the new Scorner. They looked here and there. Then more and more men were looking in the same place and at the same man. They were looking at the white-faced terrified Harker Skybroom. They seized that gentle big man and dragged him out. They dragged him up to the Scorner's Seat and made him Scorner. Now he would be (for the good of the community) stern and inhuman and relentless for his one year, and then he would die with the terrible transmuting howl. It was the long line of dedicated Scorners who had made the close-built town of Kyklopolis able to feed and support itself though completely cut off from countryside and world.

  Roger Meta was pilgrim. All had looked at him as pilgrim, as all had looked at Harker as Scorner. And Roger, fleet-footed now, lost no time leaving the town. What message he carried is not known (the town would never hear of any of the pilgrims again), but he leapt over the barrier of circle stones (the lightning holding its bolt for this once-a-year passage) and was gone from there. His going left room for all of John Legacy's birth blessings. But what is this? There cannot be a second pilgrim in one year. That is illicit. Nevertheless, Circle Shannon was coming after Roger her man at a pretty good rate of speed.

  “Hey, sis, want a birth blessing? I'm leaving. So's he within me. Have two.”

  “Oh yes, oh yes,” two young women said, and Circle gave them birth blessings.

  Then it was over the circle-stone fence with her. And lightning death?

  Circle stood (outside the town now, in the World) with head tilted back and arms akimbo. The lightning hurled itself at her and she flinched not at all. It froze, it almost grinned, it parted, it struck and split three circle stones; but it left Circle Shannon unscathed.

  Who be the Circle's nearest kin?

  Where oh where does the wheel begin?

  “Wherever it begins, it ends right here,” Circle expounded. “My nearest kin is already quickening within me, and my other nearest kin is half a kilometer ahead. I run into countryside and world. I run after him.”

  Circle Shannon ran after her man Roger Meta in the deepening darkness.

  And Name My Name

  1

  It was said our talk was gone or rare

  And things with us were ill,

  But we're seven apes from anywhere

  A-walking up a hill.

  They came to those Kurdish highlands by ways that surely were not the best in the world. They came with a touch of furtiveness. It was almost as if they wished to come invisibly. It had been that way the other times also, with the other groups.

  There were seven creatures in most of the groups coming, and there were seven in this group: two from the Indies, two from Greater Africa, two from Small Africa (sometimes called Europe), one from Little Asia. There was no rule about this but there was always variety in the groups.

  “I never believed that the last one was truly valid,” said Joe Sunrise. He was the one from Little Asia: he was big and brindled. “Yes, I still regard the last one as an interloper. Oh, he did show greater power than ourselves. He set us back into a certain place, and since that time we don't talk very much or very well. We don't do any of the things as well as we did before. I suppose he is master of us, for a little while, and in a skimpy wa
y. I believe though that that ‘little while’ is finished today. I believe that he will be shown as no more than a sad aberration of ourselves, as a step backwards or at least sideways.

  “But it will be a true stage of the sequence today, as it was in our own primary day, is it was when we named the world and all its fauna, when we set it into its hierarchy.”

  “It comes to us from the old grapevine,” said Mary Rainwood, the blondish or reddish female from the Indies, “that the Day of the Whales was a big one. For showiness it topped even our own takeover. The account of it is carved in rocks in whale talk, in rocks that are over a mile deep under a distant ocean; it is an account that no more than seven whales can still read. But there are several giant squids who can read it also, and squids are notoriously loose-mouthed. Things like that are told around.

  “There are others that stand out in the old memories, though they may not have happened quite as remembered. And then there were the less memorable ones: the Day of the Hyenas, for instance; or that of the present ruler (so like and yet so unlike ourselves) whose term is ending now. I for one am glad to see this one end.”

  “There is an air of elegance about the New One,” said Kingman Savanna, the male delegate from Greater Africa. “He also is said, in a different sense from the one who now topples from the summit, to be both very like and very unlike ourselves. The New One hasn't been seen yet, but one of real elegance will be foreknown. Ah, but we were also elegant in our own short time! So, I am told, were the Elephants. There was also something special about the Day of the Dolphins. But about this passing interloper there has not been much special.”

  “What if this new event and coming blocks us out still more?” Linger Quick-One asked in worry. “What if it leaves us with still less speech and art. What can we do about our own diminishment?”

  “We can grin a little,” Joe Sunrise said with a certain defiance. “We can gnash our teeth. We can console ourselves with the thought that he will be diminished still more.”

  “He? Who?” Kingman asked.

  “The Interloper: he under whom we have lived for this latter twisted and foreshortened era. The Days of the Interlopers are always short-lived, and when their day is finished they tend to lose their distinction and to merge with the lords of the day before.”

  “They with us? Ugh!” Mary Rainwood voiced it.

  There were seven persons or creatures going in this band, and Joe Sunrise of Little Asia seemed to be the accepted leader. They walked slowly but steadily, seeming to be in some pain, as if they were not used to wearing shoes or robes. But they were well shod and well wrapped; they were wrapped entirely in white or gray robes such as the desert people wore, such as fewer of the highland people wore. They were hooded, they were girt, they bore packs and bundles. They were as if handless within their great gray gloves; they were almost faceless within their hoods and wrappings. But two things could not be hidden if one peered closely at them: the large, brown, alert, observing eyes (these eyes had been passively observing now for ten thousand generations); and their total hairiness wherever the least bit of face or form gave itself away.

  Well, they had a place to go and they were going there, but they had a great uneasiness about it all. These seven, by the way, out of all the members of their several species remaining on Earth, still retained speech and the abstracting thought that goes with it. And on what dark day had these gifts been lost by all the rest of their closest kindred?

  And such was the case with almost all of the so different groups moving towards the meeting place. Such was the case with the elands and the antelopes, with the hogs and the hippos, with the asses and the zebras, with the eagles and the cranes, with the alligators and the gavials, with the dolphins and with the sharks. They were small elites representing large multitudes, and they retained certain attributes of elites that the multitudes had lost.

  2

  Came Polar Bears on bergs past Crete,

  And Mammoths seen by Man,

  And Crocodiles on tortured feet,

  And Whales in Kurdistan.

  There had been all through the Near East, and then through the World, a general hilarity and an air of hoax about the reports of the ‘Invisible Animals.’ There were of course the Bears that walked and talked like men and were reported as coming out of the Russias. One of these bears, so the joke went, entered a barroom in Istanbul. The bear was nattily dressed, smoked a cigar, laid a hundred lira note on the bar and ordered a rum and cola.

  The bar-man didn't know what to do so he went back to the office and asked the boss.

  “Serve the bear,” the boss said, “only don't give him his ninety lira change. Give him ten lira only. We will make prodigies pay for being prodigies.”

  The bar-man went and did this, and the bear drank his drink in silence.

  “We don't get many bears in here,” the barman finally said when the silence had gotten on his nerves.

  “At ninety lira a throw I can understand why you don't,” the bear said.

  There were hundreds of these talking-animal jokes in those day. But they had a quality different from most jokes: they were all true exactly as told.

  Then there were the invisible African Elephants (how can an African Elephant possibly be invisible in clear daylight and open landscape?) coming up across the Sinai wastelands and going on for a great distance across the Syrian Desert. They were seven very large African Elephants and they spoke courteously to all who stood and gaped as they passed. They were the only African Elephants in the World with the gift of speech; the others had lost it long ago. No one would admit seeing these out-of-place Elephants, of course. That would be the same as one admitting that he was crazy. There were the great Crocodiles traveling in labor and pain over the long dry places. There were the Zebras and Giraffes snuffling along out of Greater Africa, and the blackmaned and the tawny-maned lions. There were the Ostriches and the Cape Buffalo and the huge Boa Snakes (the Day of the Snakes had been a very long time ago). There were not large groups of any of these, five or seven, or sometimes nine. All were rather superior individuals of their species: all had the gift of speech and reason. All had a certain rakishness and wry humor in their mien, and yet all went under that curious compulsion that is the younger brother of fear.

  No person would admit seeing any of these ‘Invisible Animals,’ but many persons told, with a peculiar nervousness, of other persons claiming to have seen them. There was somebody telling of somebody seeing a band of Irish Elk: no matter that the species was supposedly extinct for several hundred years; reportorial jokers would never be extinct. And it is true that these very few Elk said that they were the very last of their species.

  Many persons were said to have seen two floating islands going past Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean. One of these floating islands was loaded with various animals from South America; the other was filled and painfully crowded with sundry animals from the North American continent. At least half of these animals had been believed to be extinct. Some of them must have kept themselves well-hidden for centuries to be able to appear now even as ‘Invisible Animals.’

  But even odder things were coming across the plains of India and Iran. They were hopping and leaping animals. Actually their motion, when they were in full speed, was like that of the hindquarters of a galloping horse, a horse that had no forequarters. There were the big Kangaroos and the smaller Wallabies and such. But what were they doing? With them were many other creatures from Australia and New Zealand and Tasmania and the Impossible Islands.

  Ah well, then what about the Polar Bears riding on a small iceberg that floated past Crete and on towards Little Asia? There were Seals riding on this also, and Sea Lions were sporting in the lee of it. Oddest of all, there was a light but continuous snowstorm over this berg only and the circle of graying frothing water around it, and over no other place.

  But whales in the Kurdish Highlands? What? What? Yes, the rivers had been very high that year. They had cut out new chann
els here and there and left parts of their old channels in the form of a series of lakes. But whales in the Highlands! It's true that nobody told about it without winking. And yet it was told about.

  And how's about the angel out of Heaven who walked and stood in those high plains and who seemed to be in some sort of pleasant trouble? It's true that he said that he was not an Angel. He said that he was a Man only and was named Man. It is true that he looked like a Man and not an Angel (nobody knowing what an angel looked like). He looked like a Man, a Man of a very superior sort. But even this is a presumptive statement, since no one had admitted seeing him at all personally.

  Even so, whales in the Highlands, and a new special man named Man! And a thousand other prodigies. Could it all be the report of jokers?

  3

  To us, the bright, the magic set,

  The World is but a crumb.

  If we be not the People yet,

  When will the people come?

  But there were seven other very special humans met together in that same part of the world; met together, perhaps, by a sort of contrived accident. Nobody could deny that they were human; and yet one of the things they were discussing was the report that their humanity might be denied that very day or the following day.

  They had met in a private club room of the International Hotel in Mosul. They were making ready for a journey beyond Mosul. Which way beyond Mosul? Well, that was the thing they were discussing with some puzzlement on their own part. It would not be North or South or East or West or Up or Down from Mosul. It would just be beyond, a little bit beyond Mosul Town.