The seven special humans were Anatole Keshish, a Turkish-Greek-Armenian intellectual of easy urbanity; Helen Rubric, the great lady and puzzle forever; Toy Tonk, an Eurasian girl who constructed philosophies that were like flower arrangements; Hatari Nahub, that charismatic Negro man who transcended continents and cultures; Lisa Baron of the light-haired and light-eyed peoples, and she was light-minded and light-tongued beyond the others; Charley Mikakeh, who was six kinds of American Indian, with a few touches of French, Irish, dark Dutch, and Jewishness in him; Jorge Segundo, who was all the Latins in the world in one man but in whom the old Roman predominated (there was once a wise man who said that we tended to forget that the old Romans were Italians, to believe that they were Englishmen, but they weren't).
These seven had brilliance dripping off them like liquid jewels, an image which we cannot express rightly in words, not even their own fragmentary words.
How these seven had been selected for a mission that they understood hardly at all is a puzzle. But they had gathered here from all the world without a word of instruction or suggestion from anyone. It was only a sort of psychobiological urge that had told them to come exactly here exactly now.
“We are met here and we hardly know why,” said Jorge Segundo. “We know each other not at all personally and only slightly by reputation. We are called here, but who is the caller? We come like lemmings.”
“The lemmings came today,” said Toy Tonk, “but only seven of them, and they not at all in a panic. Nor are we, though perhaps we should be. This is perhaps the ‘Childhood's End’ as foretold by the Clarke in the century past. Will this now be ‘The Second Age of Man’? And will ourselves seem children in comparison to the man (so far he is reported as singular in all ways) who comes?”
“This is perhaps the new morning, the Epiphany of one more of the ‘Nine Billion Names of God’ as phrased by the same Clarke, and we will either be ourselves magnified, or we will be reduced to something less than children,” Lisa Baron said lightly. “But we do not know that anything is happening.”
“I stood and talked to a camel this afternoon,” said Charley Mikakeh, “and you say that nothing is happening? ‘What do you make of all the new and strange animals passing through?’ the camel asked me. ‘It's a puzzler, is it not? And what do you make of myself talking? I and the very few others of my species have not done that for a very long time, not since the mushrooms still had prepuces as a normal thing, and yourself began to walk upright. It's an off thing, Ape, is it not?’ ‘I am Man and not Ape,’ I told the Camel, somewhat stiffly, I'm afraid. But the very fact that there was this conversation with a Camel indicates that something is happening.”
“Perhaps only inside your own head, Charley,” Anatole jibed. “I have had conversation with a variety of animal species myself today. All say that it is unusual with them; not it in common for their species to be able to talk. Yet I find it less strange than that we seven, previously unknown to each other, should be gathered here and talking together.”
“Oh, we are the seven magic people,” Hatari said rationally, though he now had a not quite rational look in his eyes. “Every age of the world (and I believe that our own has been the penultimate age) has its seven magic people who come together by psychic magnet at a hinge time. We are the spokesmen for the rest. But if we are the spokesmen, what will we say, and to whom?”
“If we be people indeed (and we never doubted it till this day) then we will speak it to our own variant (this mysterious Shining Man), and it will be given to us in that moment what we should say,” Helen Rubric was murmuring with her eyes half closed. “But I am very edgy about all this, and I believe that we are really coming to the edge. There is something wrong with the setting and the set.”
“What do you say, Helen?” Jorge asked. “What is wrong with the set?”
“The set is off; it is gone wrong. Both the picture and the sound seem doubled, Jorge.”
“Cannot it be fixed? But what am I talking about? I do feel for a moment that we are no more than animated cartoons on a screen. But this isn't a TV set; it is something larger.”
“This set is the whole-world set, Jorge,” Helen Rubric muttered. “And it has gone too far wrong to be fixed by ourselves. It may be fixed by this New Fixer who comes. But I feel that we ourselves are diminished and demoted, that we are put into a shadowy box now and confined to a narrow corner.
“I gazed upon my own double today and talked with her. She said that her name was Mary Rainwood. She seemed to take a saddened and sisterly view of me. She is an animal of the species Orangutan; and if we are sisters under the skin then hers is under the thicker and hairier skin; I might say that hers is the harder skin to get under. I know her species, but of what species am I an animal?
“It was odd that she was able to speak. She says that it only happens in the last seven days of an age. It seems equally odd that I am able to speak, and I really wonder whether I have been doing it for more than seven days. I believe that our own era has been a very short one and a deponent one.”
It was something like a ski lodge there in that private club room of the International Hotel of Mosul. Very cozy there by the open fire at night after a strenuous day on the snow slopes. What open fire? What snow slopes? That was all illusion.
It was more like a cave they were in. Open fire or not there was a flickering and a shadowing on the cave walls. And the talk among them became more and more shadowy on that last night of the Age.
It was morning then. It hadn't been such a long evening and night, only a few hours. It hadn't been such a long Age, no more than thirty or forty thousand years. They went out in that morning to a place a little bit beyond Mosul. Seven magic persons on either the last or the first morning of their magic.
4
Yours: — nervous sort of apish lives,
Derivative the while:
And, somehow, derro-concrete hives
Have not a lot of style.
The shining man hadn't arrived from anywhere. All ways of coming had been watched by some or other of the creatures. And yet he was there now on the crown of the animated hill. He was very much as all the creatures had supposed that he would be, before they had seen him at all: not really shining, not of imposing stature, with an inexperienced and almost foolish look on his face, not complex, not at all magic; competent, though, and filled with an uneasy sort of grace.
He was not nervous. Nervousness, of course, was not possible for such an excellent one as he was. But he was in some pain, for he was already in light travail.
The animated hill was merely a wide low hill (higher, though, than the high hills around it) covered with creatures. They were in tiers and files and arrays, they were in congregations and assemblies and constellations. Creatures almost beyond counting, enough seemingly to cover the Earth, and they did very nearly cover the wide hill.
The man appointed and named them, speaking to them with an easy dominance, and then sending them away again, species after species, speechless again for another era, yet having their assigned places and tasks for a new age of the world.
Earthworms, beetles, damselflies, honeybees, locusts, cicadas came and went. They had slightly new assignments now in a world which would be at least slightly different. Shrikes and eagles and doves and storks came through the crowded air. They spoke; sometimes they argued; they were convinced, or they accepted their assignments without being convinced. But they winged away again, speechless now once more, but far from soundless.
Time became diffused and multiplex, for the man imposed and directed thousands of species while the sun had hardly moved. Space also was extra dimensionable, for the wide low hill could not have served as staging space for so many species in the normal order of things.
“We will be the last ones,” Lisa Baron said to her magical companions. “As we are the highest species, the lords of the world, so we will have the final instruction and appreciation. Ourselves, the first age of mankind, will receive confirma
tion and approval from this aberrant creature who (however unlikely he seems) ushers in the second age of mankind. I beg you all, confer with him straight-faced and in all seriousness. Consider that his office is more important than himself. We are the giants and he is the dwarf, but he is higher than ourselves for he is appointed to stand on our shoulders.”
“We will not be the last ones,” said Jorge Segundo. “Can you not see that all these confrontations and instructions are simultaneous? And yet we wait. It is as if he notices all the others and not ourselves; he is probably jealous of our basic stature. But do you not see that even the trees and grasses come and go, speaking with him in their moment, and then going away speechless again to their own places. It is the unnaturing of the ecology that happens now, the preternaturalizing of the ecological balance. The natural world was always out of balance. There could not be a balanced ecology before or without man. Well, but why did we not bring the balance in our own time? Are we not men?”
The whales went away, greatly pleased and greatly relieved about something. And yet, all that the man had done was bless them and say “Your name is whale.”
There were long conversations with some of the species, and the man was forced to become eloquent with these. But the long confrontations did not use up great quantities of time. All these things were telescoped and simultaneous.
“Your name is lion,” “Your name is buffalo,” “Your name is donkey,” the man was saying. The man was tired now and in more than light travail. But he continued to name and assign the creatures. There was much discussion and instruction in each case but they did not consume much time. “Your name is swine,” for instance, was a total statement that contained all that discussion and instruction. The palaver was like a scaffold that is disassembled and taken down when the building is completed. “Your name is carp-fish” was such a completed structure with very much of stress and synthesis having gone into it.
“Your name is ape,” the man said, smiling in his pain. “No, no, no, we are men,” shouted Joe Sunrise, that big and brindled ape from Little Asia. “We are not ape. It is the miserable half-creature there who called us ape. Can he be right about anything?”
“Not of himself, and surely not about himself,” the man said. “But he hadn't this knowledge of himself. He is only an air and a noise. Remember that you yourself had the day when you named the names: You named lion and buffalo and mammoth and others. This half-thing also had his shorter day. It may have sounded as though he said, and perhaps he did say ‘Your name is ape.’ I do say it. ‘Your name is ape.’ Now go and fill your niche.”
There was much more to it, as there was to every confrontation, yet it consumed little time. There was lamentation from Mary Rainwood and Kingman Savanna and Linger Quick-One and others of their group. There were hairy visages and huge brown eyes staining with tears. But the apes were convinced and almost at peace when they finally accepted it and went away, speechless again but not noiseless, shedding their robes and wrappings and going hairy. They were confirmed as apes now, and they would be more fulfilled apes than they had been before.
It seemed that there was only one group left. Really, it had seemed to every group that it was the last one left; and yet every group had heard the naming of every other group, for it was all simultaneous.
“Well, come, come, my good man,” Anatole Kashish said to the man, and he clapped his hands for attention. “Now that you have disposed of the animals (and you did do it neatly, even though you were a little too wordy about it sometimes), it is time that we had our talk. We will clue you in on the world situation. Then we will be willing to listen to your special mission and message. I believe that we have been waiting for the message a long while, though frankly we expected it to be brought by a more imposing messenger.”
“You haven't any name,” the man said with an almost bluntness. “Your particular species vanishes now as a separate thing. It has never been a real species. It hasn't either body or spirit; only air and noise. Several of the creatures were correct in calling you the interlopers, the half-creatures. Be submerged now! Be nothing!”
“No, no, no, we are men,” Jorge Segundo cried out very much like the brindled ape Joe Sunrise had cried out the same words. “We are the lords of creation. Ours is the world civilization. We are the First Age of Mankind.”
“You were the Second Age of Apedom,” the man said, “and an abridged and defective age it has been. I intuit that there have been other such unsatisfactory half-ages or no-ages. Ah, and I am responsible for getting rid of the clutter you have left.”
The magic had suddenly gone out of the seven persons or erstwhile persons. Pieces of it that had fallen off them seemed to shine like jellyfish on the ground.
“We have fission, we have space travel,” Hatari Nahub protested. “We have great cities and structures of every sort.”
“I intuit all this,” the man said. “You are a hiving species, but your hives and structures do not have the style of those of the bower-birds or the honeybees or the African termites. I have wondered a little, though, how you build up these ferro-concrete hives that you call cities. Do you accrete them by deposits of your regurgitations or your excrement after you have eaten limestone and iron ore? It's a grotesque way, but the blind and instinctive actions of such hive creatures as yourselves always seem grotesque to thinking creatures such is myself. Such mindlessness, such waste in all that you do! The ferro-concrete and wood and stone and chrome hives — colonies that you construct for the billions of inmates, they are more strange, more mindless, of less use than would be so many great anthills. Go now, you mindless leaving folk. You tire me.”
“But we have civilization; we have the electromagnetic complex and the nuclear complex,” Charley Mikakeh challenged.
“And the firefly has a light in his tail,” the man said. “Go. Your short day is done.”
“But we have all the arts,” Toy Tonk claimed, and she was very near the art of tears.
“Can you sing like the mockingbird or posture like the peacock?” the man asked. “What arts do you have? Go now.”
(This was not really a long argument. The crows had argued much longer, and just for the jabbering fun of it. Besides, this was happening at the same time that all the other decisions were being given.)
“We will not go. You have not named us yet,” Helen Rubric spoke.
“It will be better if I do not speak your name,” the man said. “You will shrivel enough without. Go back to your hive cities and decay in their decay. Your speech now becomes gibberish and you begin your swift decline.”
“Why, I know who you are now,” Lisa Baron exclaimed. “You are the Genesis Myth. In fact you are the Partheno-Genesis Myth. Is it not strange that no language has a masculine form of parthen, and yet it appears to be the oldest. Now I know why the myth is in pain. From your side will it be? I am a doctor, among other things. May I assist?”
“No,” the man said. “You may not. And know you something else, female of the unnamed species: every myth comes true when enough time has run. There was a great myth about the earthworm once. There was even a sort of myth about yourselves. And you, creature, have a little more than the rest of your kindred. It seems a shame that you have already come and gone before the scene itself begins.”
“We have not gone, we will not go,” Anatole Kashish insisted. “Everyone is of some use. What can we offer?” Then his tongue had lost its cunning forever.
“You can offer only your submission and retroregression,” the man said.
“Ah, but tell us finally, what is our real name?” Hatari Nahub asked. Those were the last true words he ever spoke.
“Your name is ape,” the man said. “Really your name is ‘secondary ape.’ ”
There were fair and dark visages, and blue and gray and brown eyes shining with tears. The seven followed the other seven away, speechless forever, shedding their robes and wrappings, knowing that the blight was already upon their already obsolete world
-hives, knowing that their minds and talents were dimmed, and then not really knowing anything ever again.
Incased In Ancient Rind
The eye is robbed of impetus
By Fogs that stand and shout:
And swiftness all goes out from us
And all the stars go out.
— Lost Skies
O'Hanlon
“Wear a mask or die,” the alarmists had been saying louder and louder; and now they were saying “Wear a mask and die anyhow.” And why do we so often hold the alarmists in contempt? It isn't always a false alarm they sound, and this one wasn't. The pollution of air and water and land had nearly brought the world to a death halt, and crisis was at hand as the stifling poison neared critical mass.
“Aw, dog dirt, not another air pollution piece,” you say. Oh, come off of it. You know us better than that. This is not such an account as you might suppose. It will not be stereotype, though it may be stereopticon.
“The lights are burning very brightly,” said Harry Baldachin, “this club room is sealed off as tightly as science can seal it, the air conditioning labors faithfully, the filters are the latest perfection, this is the clearest day in a week (likely a clearer day than any that will ever follow), yet we have great difficulty in seeing each other's face across the table. And we are in Mountain Top Club out in the high windy country beyond the cities. It is quite bad in the towns, they say. Suffocation victims are still lying unburied in heaps.” “There's a curious thing about that though,” Clement Flood said. “The people are making much progress on the unburied heaps. People aren't dying as fast as they were even a month ago. Why aren't they?”
“Don't be so truculent about it, Clement,” Harry said. “The people will die soon enough. All the weaker ones have already died, I believe, and the strong ones linger awhile; but I don't see how any of us can have lungs left. There'll be another wave of deaths, and then another and another. And all of us will go with it.”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 145
