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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “I won't,” said Sally Strumpet. “I will live forever. It doesn't bother me very much at all, just makes my nose and eyes itch a little bit. What worries me, though, is that I don't test fertile yet. Do you suppose that the pollution has anything to do with my not being fertile?”

  “What are you chattering about, little girl?” Charles Broadman asked. “Well, it is something to think about. Gathering disasters usually increase fertility, as did the pollution disaster at first. It has always been as though some cosmic wisdom was saying ‘Fast and heavy fruit now for the fruitless days ahead.’ But now it seems as if the cosmic wisdom is saying ‘Forget it, this is too overmuch.’ But fertility now is not so much inhibited as delayed,” Broadman continued almost as if he knew what he was talking about.

  Sally Strumpet was a bright-eyed (presently red-eyed) seventeen-year-old actress, and that was her stage name only. Her real name was Joan Struthio, and she was met for club dinner with Harry Baldachin, Clement Flood, and Charles Broadman, all outstanding in the mentality set, because she had a publicity man who arranged such things. Sally herself belonged to the mentality set by natural right, but not many suspected this fact: only Charles Broadman of those present, only one in a hundred of those who were entranced by Sally's rather lively simpering, hardly any of the mucous-lunged people.

  “This may be the last of our weekly dinners that I am able to attend,” Harry Baldachin coughed. “I'd have taken to my bed long ago except that I can't breathe at all lying down any more. I'm a dying man now, as are all of us.”

  “I'm not, neither the one nor the other,” Sally said.

  “Neither is Harry,” Charles Broadman smiled snakishly, “not the first, surely, and popular doubt has been cast on the second. You're not dying, Harry. You'll live till you're sick of it.”

  “I'm sick of it now. By my voice you know that I'm dying.”

  “By your voice I know that there's a thickening of the pharynx,” Charles said. “By your swollen hands I know that there is already a thickening of the metacarpals and phalanges, not to mention the carpals themselves. Your eyes seem unnaturally deep-set now as though they had decided to withdraw into some interior cave. But I believe that it is the thickening of your brow ridges that makes them seem so, and the new bulbosity of your nose. You've been gaining weight, have you not?”

  “I have, yes, Broadman. Every pound of poison that I take in adds a pound to my weight. I'm dying, and we're all dying.”

  “Why Harry, you're coming along amazingly well. I thought I would be the first of us to show the new signs, and instead it is yourself. No, you will be a very, very long time dying.”

  “The whole face of the earth is dying,” Harry Baldachin maintained.

  “Not dying. Thickening and changing,” said Charles Broadman.

  “There's a mortal poison on everything,” Clement Flood moaned. “When last was a lake fish seen not floating belly upward? The cattle are poisoned and all the plants, all dying.”

  “Not dying. Growing larger and weirder,” said Broadman.

  “I am like a dish that is broken,” said the Psalmist, “my strength has failed through affliction, and my bones are consumed. I am forgotten like the unremembered dead.”

  “Your dish is made thicker and grosser, but it is not broken,” Broadman insisted. “Your bones are not consumed but altered. And you are forgotten only if you forget.”

  “Poor Psalmist,” said Sally. This was startling, for the Psalmist had always been a private joke of Charles Broadman, but now Sally was aware of him also. “Why, your strength hasn't failed at all,” she said. “You come on pretty strong to me. But my own nose is always itching, that's the only bad part of it. I feel as though I were growing a new nose. When can I come to another club supper with you gentlemen?”

  “There will be no more,” Harry Baldachin hacked through his thickened pharynx; “We'll all likely be dead by next week. This is the last of our meetings.”

  “Yes, we had better call our dinners off,” Clement Flood choked. “We surely can't hold them every week now.

  “Not every week,” said Charles Broadman, “but we will still hold them. This all happened before, you know.”

  “I want to come however often they are,” Sally insisted.

  “How often will we hold them, dreamer, and we all near dead?” Harry asked. “You say that this has happened before, Broadman? Well then, didn't we all die with it before?”

  “No. We lived an immeasurably long time with it before,” Charles Broadman stated. “What, can you not read the signs in the soot yet, Harry?”

  “Just how often would you suggest that we meet then, Charles?” Clement Flood asked with weary sarcasm.

  “Oh, how about once every hundred years, gentlemen and Sally. Would that be too often?”

  “Fool,” Harry Baldachin wheezed and peered out from under his thickening orbital ridges.

  “Idiot,” Clement Flood growled from his thickening throat.

  “Why, I think a hundred years from today would be perfect,” Sally cried. “That will be a Wednesday, will it not?”

  “That was fast,” Broadman admired. “Yes, it will be a Wednesday, Sally. Do be here, Sally, and we will talk some more of these matters. Interesting things will have happened in the meanwhile. And you two gentlemen will be here?”

  “No, don't refuse,” Sally cut in. “You are so unimaginative about all this. Mr. Baldachin, say that you will dine with us here one hundred years from today if you are alive and well.”

  “By the emphyseman God that afflicts us, and me dying and gone, yes, I will be here one hundred years from today if I am alive and well,” Harry Baldachin said angrily. “But I will not be alive this time next week.”

  “And you say it also, Mr. Flood,” Sally insisted.

  “Oh, stop putting fools' words in peoples' mouths, little girl. Let me die in my own phlegm.”

  “Say it, Mr. Flood,” Sally insisted again, “say that you will dine with us all here one hundred years from this evening if you are alive and well.”

  “Oh, all right,” Clement Flood mumbled as he bled from his rheumy eyes. “Under those improbable conditions I will be here.”

  But only Sally and Charles Broadman had the quick wisdom to understand that the thing was possible.

  Fog, smog, and grog, and the people perished. And the more stubborn ones took a longer time about perishing than the others. But a lethal mantle wrapped the whole globe now. It was poison utterly compounded, and no life could stand against it. There was no possibility of improvement, there was no hope of anything. It could only get worse. Something drastic had to happen. And of course it got worse. And of course something drastic happened. The carbon pollution on earth reached trigger mass. But it didn't work out quite as some had supposed that it might.

  2

  We shamble through our longish terms

  Of Levallosian mind

  Till we be ponderous Pachyderms

  Incased in ancient rind.

  — Lost Skies

  O'Hanlon

  Oh, for one thing, no rain, or almost no rain fell on the earth for that next hundred years. It was not missed. Moisture was the one thing that was in abounding plenty.

  “But a mist rose from the earth and watered all the surface of the ground.”

  Rainless rain forests grew and grew. Ten million cubic miles of seawater rose to the new forming canopy and hung there in a covering world-cloud no more than twenty miles up. Naturally the sun and moon and stars were seen no more on the earth for that hundred years; and the light that did come down through the canopy seemed unnatural. But plants turned into giant plants and spread over the whole earth, gobbling the carbon dioxide with an almost audible gnashing.

  So there was more land, now, and wetter land. There was a near equipoise of temperature everywhere under the canopy. The winds were all gathered up again into that old leather bag and they blew no more on the earth. Beneath the canopy it was warm and humid and stifling from pole
to pole and to the utmost reaches of the earth.

  It was a great change and everything felt it. Foot-long saurians slid out of their rocks that were warm and moist again: and gobbled and grew, and gobbled and grew, and gobbled and grew. Old buried fossil suns had been intruded into the earth air for a long time, and now the effect of their carbon and heat was made manifest. Six-foot-diameter turtles, having been ready to die, now postponed that event: and in another hundred years, in two hundred, they would be ten-foot-diameter turtles, thirteen-foot-diameter turtles.

  The canopy, the new lowering copper-colored sky, shut out the direct sun and the remembered blue sky, and it shut out other things that had formerly trickled down: hard radiation, excessive ultraviolet rays and all the actinic rays, and triatomic oxygen. These things had been the carriers of the short and happy life, or the quick and early death; and these things were no longer carried down.

  There was a thickening of bone and plate on all boned creatures everywhere, as growth continued for added years. There were new inhibitors and new stimulants; new bodies for old—no, no—older bodies for old. Certain teeth in certain beasts had always grown for all the beast life. Now the beast life was longer, and the saber-tooths appeared again. It was murky under the new canopy, though. It took a long time to get used to it — and a long time was provided. It was a world filled with fogs, and foggy phrases.

  ‘A very ancient and fish-like smell.’

  ‘Just to keep her from the foggy foggy dew.’

  ‘There were giants on the earth in those days.’

  ‘When Enos was ninety years old, he became the father of Cainan. Enos lived eight hundred and fifteen years after the birth of Cainan, and had other sons and daughters.’

  ‘Behold now Behemoth, which I have made with thee.’

  ‘And beauty and length of days.’

  ‘There Leviathan… stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims.’

  ‘I will restore to you the years that the locust has eaten.’

  “A land where the light is as darkness,” said Job.

  “Poor Job,” said Sally Strumpet.

  “This is my sorrow, that the right hand of the Most High is changed,” said the Psalmist.

  “Poor Psalmist,” said Sally Strumpet.

  The world that was under the canopy of the lowering sky was very like a world that was under water. Everything was incomparably aged and giantized and slow. Bears grew great. Lizards lengthened. Human people broadened and grew in their bones, and lengthened in their years.

  “I suppose that we are luckier than those who come before or after,” Harry Baldachin said. “We had our youths, we had much of our proper lives, and then we had this.” This was a hundred years to a day (a Wednesday, was it not?) since that last club dinner, and the four of them, Harry Baldachin, Clement Flood, Charles Broadman, and Sally Strumpet were met once more in the Mountain Top Club. Two of them, it will be remembered, hadn't expected to be there.

  “What I miss most in these last nine or ten decades is colors,” Clement Flood mused. “Really, we haven't colors, not colors as we had when I was young. Too much of the sun is intercepted now. Such aviators as still go up (the blue-sky hobbyists and such) say that there are still true colors above the canopy, that very ordinary objects may be taken up there and examined, and that they will be in full color as in ancient times. I believe that the loss of full color was understood by earlier psychologists and myth makers. In my youth, in my pre-canopy youth, I made some studies of very ancient photography. It was in black and white and gray only, just as most dreams were then in black and white and gray only. It is strange that these two things nearly anticipated the present world: we are so poor in color that we nearly fall back to the old predictions. No person under a hundred years old, unless he has flown above the canopy, has ever seen real color. But I will remember it.”

  “I remember wind and storm,” said Harry Baldachin, “and these cannot now be found in their real old form even by going above the canopy. I remember frost and snow, and these are very rare everywhere on earth now. I remember rain, that most inefficient thing ever — but it's pleasant in memory.”

  “I remember lightning,” said Charles Broadman, “and thunder. Ah, thunder.”

  “Well, it's more than made up for in amplitude,” Clement smiled. “There is so much more of the earth that is land now, and all the land is gray and growing—I had almost used the old phrase ‘green and growing,’ but the color green can be seen now only by those who ascend above the canopy. But the world is warm and moist from pole to pole now, and filled with giant plants and giant animals and giant food. The canopy above, and the greenhouse diffusion effect below, it makes all the world akin. And the oceans are so much more fertile now — one can almost walk on the backs of the fish. There is such a lot more carbon in the carbon cycle than there used to be, such a lot more life on the earth. And more and more carbon is being put into the cycle every year.

  “That's true,” said Harry Baldachin. “That's about the only industrialism that is still being carried out, the only industrialism that is still needed: burning coal and petroleum to add carbon to the cycle, burning it by the tens of thousands of cubic miles. Certain catastrophes of the past had buried great amounts of this carbon, had taken it out of the cycle, and the world was so much poorer for it. It was as if the fruit of whole suns had been buried uselessly in the earth. Now, in the hundred years since the forming or the reforming of the canopy, and to a lesser extent during the two hundred years before its forming, these buried suns have been dug up and put to use again.

  “The digging up of buried suns has caused all manner of mischief,” Charles Broadman said.

  “You are an old fogy, Charles,” Clement Flood told him. “A hundred years of amplitude have made no change at all in you.”

  The hundred years had really made substantial changes in all of them. They hadn't aged exactly, not in the old way of aging. They had gone on growing in a new, or a very old way. They had thickened in face and body. They had become more sturdy, more solid, more everlasting. Triatomic oxygen, that old killer, was dense in the world canopy, shutting out the other killers; but it was very rare at ground level, a perfect arrangement. There was no wind under the canopy, and things held their levels well. How long persons might live now could only be guessed. It might be up to a thousand years.

  “And how is the—ah—younger generation?” Harry Baldachin asked. “How are you, Sally? We have not seen you for a good round century.”

  “I am wonderful, and I thought you'd never ask. People take so much longer to get to the point now, you know. The most wonderful news is that I now test fertile. When I was seventeen I worried that I didn't test out. The new times had already affected me, I believe. But now my term has come around, and about time I'd say. I'm a hundred and seventeen and there are cases of girls no more than a hundred who are ready. I will marry this very week and will have sons and daughters. I will marry one of the last of the aviators who goes above the canopy. I myself have gone above the canopy and seen true colors and felt the thin wind.”

  “It's not a very wise thing to do,” said Harry. “They are going to put a stop to flights above the canopy, I understand. They serve no purpose; and they are unsettling.”

  “Oh, but I want to be unsettled,” Sally cried.

  “You should be old enough not to want any such thing, Sally,” Clement Flood advised. “We are given length of days now, and with them wisdom should come to us.”

  “Well, has wisdom come?” Charles Broadman asked reasonably. “No, not really. Only slowness has come to us.”

  “Yes, wisdom, we have it now,” Harry Baldachin insisted. “We enter the age of true wisdom. Long wisdom. Slow wisdom.”

  “You are wrong, and unwise,” Charles Broadman said out of his thickened and almost everlasting face. “There is not, there has never been any such name or thing as unqualified Wisdom. And there surely are not such things as Long Wisdom or Slow Wisdom.”

&nb
sp; “But there is a thing named Swift Wisdom,” Sally stated with great eagerness.

  “There was once, there is not now, we lost it,” Charles Broadman said sadly.

  “We almost come to disagreement,” Baldachin protested, “and that is not seemly for persons of the ample age. Ah well, we have lingered five hours over the walnuts and the wine, and perhaps it were the part of wisdom that we leave each other now. Shall we make these dinners a regular affair?”

  “I want to,” Sally said.

  “Yes, I'd rather like to continue the meetings at regular intervals,” Clement Flood agreed.

  “Fine, fine,” Charles Broadman murmured. “We will meet here again one hundred years from this evening.”

  3

  And some forget to leave or let

  And some forget to die:

  But may my right hand wither yet

  If I forget the sky.

  — Lost Skies

  O'Hanlon

  We are not so simple as to say that the Baluchitherium returned. The Baluchitherium was of an earlier age of the earth and flourished under an earlier canopy. Something that looked very like the Baluchitherium did appear, however. It was not even of the rhinoceros family. It was a horse grown giant and gangly. Horses of course, being artificial animals like dogs, are quite plastic and adaptable. A certain upper-lippiness quickly appeared when this new giant animal had turned into a giant leaf eater and sedge eater (“true” grass had about disappeared: how could it compete with the richer and fuller plants that flourished under the canopy?); a certain spreading of the hoofs, a dividedness more of appearance than of fact, was apparent after this animal had become a swamp romper. Well, it was a giant horse and a mighty succulent horse, but it looked like the Baluchitherium of old.

  We are not so naïve as to accept that the brontosaurus came back. No. But there was a small flatfooted lizard that quickly became a large flatfooted lizard and came to look more and more like the brontosaurus. It came to look like this without changing anything except its size and its general attitude towards the world. Put a canopy over any creature and it will look different without much intrinsic change.