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

by R. A. Lafferty

  We surely are not gullible enough to believe that the crinoid plants returned to the ponds and the slack water pools. Well, but certain conventional long-stemmed water plants had come to look and behave very like the crinoids.

  All creatures and plants had made their peace with the canopy, or they had perished. The canopy, in its two hundredth year, was a going thing; and the blue-sky days had ended forever.

  There was still vestigial organic nostalgia for the blue-sky days, however. Most land animals still possessed eyes that would have been able to see full colors if there were such colors to be seen; man himself still possessed such eyes. Most food browsers still possessed enough crown to their teeth to have grazed grass if such an inefficient thing as grass had remained. Many human minds would still have been able to master the mathematics of stellar movements and positions, if ease and the disappearance of the stellar content had not robbed them of the inclination and opportunity for such things.

  (There was, up to about two hundred years ago, a rather cranky pseudo-science named astronomy.)

  There were other vestiges that hung like words in the fog and rank dew of the world.

  ‘And the name of the star is called Wormwood.’

  ‘In the brightness of the saints, before the day-star.’

  ‘It was the star-eater who came, and then the sky-eater.’

  “And the stars are not clear in his sight,” said Job.

  “Poor Job,” said Sally.

  The second hundred years had gone by, and the diners had met at Mountain Top Club again. And an extra diner was with them. “Poor Sally,” said Harry Baldachin. “You are still a giddy child, and you have already had sons and daughters. But you should not have brought your husband to this dinner without making arrangements. You could have proposed it this time, and had him here the next time. After all, it would only be a hundred years.”

  We are not so soft-headed as to say that the Neanderthal Men had returned. But the diners at Mountain Top Club, with that thickening of their faces and bones and bodies that only age will bring, had come to look very like Neanderthals — even Sally a little.

  “But I wanted him here this time,” Sally said. “Who knows what may happen in a hundred years?”

  “How could anything happen in a hundred years?” Harry Baldachin asked.

  “Besides, your husband is in ill repute,” Clement Flood said with some irritation. “He's said to be an outlaw flyer. I believe that a pickup order for his arrest was put out some six years ago, so he may be picked up at any time. In the blue-sky days he would have been picked up within twenty-four hours, but we move more graciously and slowly under the canopy.”

  “It's true that there's a pickup order out for me,” said the husband. “It's true that I still fly above the canopy, which is now illegal. I doubt if I'll be able to do it much longer. I might be able to get my old craft up one more time, but I don't believe I would be able to get it down. I'll leave if you want me to.”

  “You will stay,” Charles Broadman said. “You are a member of the banquet now, and you and I and Sally have them outnumbered.”

  The husband of Sally was a slim man. He did not seem to be properly thickened to joint and bone. It was difficult to see how he could live a thousand years with so slight a body. Even now he showed a certain nervousness and anxiety, and that did not bode a long life.

  “Why should anyone want to go above the canopy?” Harry Baldachin asked crossly. “Or rather, why should anyone want to claim to do it, since it is now assumed that the canopy is endless and no one could go above it?”

  “But we do go above it,” Sally stated. “We go for the sun and the stars; for the thin wind there which is a type of the old wind; for the rain even—do you know that there is sometimes rain passing between one part of the canopy and another?—for the rainbow—do you know that we have actually seen a rainbow?”

  “I know that the rainbow is a sour myth,” Baldachin said.

  “No, no, it's real,” Sally swore. “Do you recall the lines of the old Vachel Lindsay: ‘When my hands and my hair and my feet you kissed / When you cried with your love's new pain / What was my name in the dragon mist / In the rings of rainbowed rain?’ Is that not wonderful?”

  Harry Baldachin pondered it a moment.

  “I give it up, Sally,” he said then. “I can't deduce it. Well, what's the answer to the old riddle? What is the cryptic name that we are supposed to guess?”

  “Forgive him,” Charles Broadman murmured to the husband and to Sally. “We have all of us been fog-bound for too long a time below the canopy.” “It is now believed that the canopy has always been there,” Baldachin said stiffly.

  “Almost always, Harry, but not always,” Charles Broadman answered him. “It was first put there very early, on the second day, as a matter of fact. You likely do not remember that the second day is the one that God did not call good. It was surely a transient and temporary backdrop that was put there to be pierced at the proper times by early death and by grace. One of the instants it was pierced was just before this present time. It had been breached here and there for short ages. Then came the clear instant, which has been called glaciation or flood or catastrophe, when it was shattered completely and the blue sky was seen supreme. It was quite a short instant, some say it was not more than ten thousand years, some say it was double that. It happened, and now it is gone. But are we expected to forget that bright instant?”

  “The law expects you to forget that instant, Broadman, since it never happened, and it is forbidden to say that it happened,” Baldachin stated stubbornly. “And you, man, the outlaw flyer, it is rumored that you have your craft hidden somewhere on this very mountain. Ah, I must leave you all for a moment.”

  They sat for some five hours over the walnuts and wine. It is the custom to sit for a long time after eating the heavy steaks of any of the neo-saurians. Baldachin returned and left several times, as did Flood. They seemed to have something going between them. They might even have been in a hurry about it if hurry were possible to them. But mostly the five persons spent the after-dinner hours in near congenial talk.

  “The short and happy life, that is the forgotten thing,” the husband of Sally was saying. “The blue-sky interval — do you know what that was? It was the bright death sword coming down in a beam of light. Do you know that in the blue-sky days hardly one man in ten lived to be even a hundred years old? But do you know that in the blue-sky days it wasn't sealed off? The sword stroke was a cutting of the bonds. It was a release and an invitation to higher travel. Are you not tired of living in this prison for even two hundred years or three hundred?”

  “You are mad,” Harry Baldachin said.

  Well of course the young man was mad. Broadman looked into the young man's eyes (this man was probably no older than Sally, he likely was no more than two hundred and twenty) and was startled by the secret he discovered there. The color could not be seen under the canopy, of course; the eyes were gray to the canopy world. But if he were above the canopy, Broadman knew, in the blue-sky region where the full colors could be seen, the young man's eyes would have been sky-blue.

  “For the short and happy life again, and for the infinite release,” Sally's husband was saying. “For those under the canopy there is no release. The short and happy life and scorching heat and paralyzing cold. Hunger and disease and fever and poverty, all the wonderful things! How have we lost them? These are not idle dreams. We have them by the promise — the Bow in the Clouds and the Promise that we be no more destroyed. But you destroy yourselves under the canopy.”

  “Mad, mad. Oh, but they are idle dreams, young man, and now they are over.” Harry Baldachin smiled an old saurian smile. And the room was full of ponderous guards.

  “Take the two young ones,” Clement Flood said to the thickened guards.

  But the laughter of Sally Strumpet shattered their ears and got under their thick skins.

  “Take us?” she hooted. “How would they ever take us?�
��

  “Girl, there are twenty of them, they will take you easily,” Baldachin said slowly. But the husband of Sally was also laughing.

  “Will twenty creeping turtles be able to catch two soaring birds on the high wing?” he laughed. “Would two hundred of them be able to? But your rumor is right, Baldachin, I do have my craft hidden somewhere on this very mountain. Ah, I believe I will be able to get the old thing up one more time.”

  “But we'll never be able to get it down again,” Sally whooped. “Coming, Charles?”

  “Yes,” Charles Broadman cried eagerly. And he meant it, he meant it.

  Those guards were powerful and ponderous, but they were just too slow. Twenty creeping turtles were no way able to catch those two soaring birds in their high flight. Crashing through windows with a swift tinkle of glass, then through the uncolored dark of the canopy world, to the rickety craft named Swift Wisdom that would go up one more time but would never be able to come down again, the last two flyers escaped through the pachydermous canopy.

  “Mad,” said Harry Baldachin.

  “Insane,” said Clement Flood.

  “No,” Charles Broadman said sadly. “No.” And he sank back into his chair once more. He had wanted to go with them and he couldn't. The spirit was willing but the flesh was thickened and ponderous.

  Two tears ran down his heavy cheeks but they ran very slowly, hardly an inch a minute. How should things move faster on the world under the canopy?

  Days of Grass, Days of Straw

  1

  Fog in the corner and fog in his head:

  Gray day broken and bleeding red.

  —Henry Drumhead, Ballads

  Christopher Foxx was walking down a city street. No, it was a city road. It was really a city trail or path. He was walking in a fog, but the fog wasn't in the air or the ambient: it was in his head. Things were mighty odd here. There was just a little bit of something wrong about things.

  Oceans of grass for one instance. Should a large and busy city (and this was clearly that) have blue-green grass belly-high in its main street? Things hardly remembered: echoes and shadows, or were they the strong sounds and things themselves? Christopher felt as though his eyeballs had been cleaned with a magic cleaner, as though he were blessed with new sensing in ears and nose, as though he went with a restored body and was breathing a new sort of air. It was very pleasant, but it was puzzling. How had the world been pumped full of new juice?

  Christopher couldn't recall what day it was; he certainly didn't know what hour it was. It was a gray day, but there was no dullness in that gray. It was shimmering pearl-gray, of a color bounced back by shimmering water and shimmering air. It was a crimson-edged day, like a gray squirrel shot and bleeding redly from the inside and around the edges. Yes, there was the pleasant touch of death on things, gushing death and gushing life.

  Christopher's own name didn't sound right to him. He didn't know what town he was in. Indeed he'd never before seen a town with all the storefronts flapping in the wind like that. Ah, they'd curl and bend, but they wouldn't break. A town made of painted buckskin, and yet it was more real than towns made of stone and concrete.

  He saw persons he almost knew. He started to speak and only sputtered. Well, he'd get a newspaper then; they sometimes gave information. He reached in his pocket for a coin, and discovered that he didn't have regular pockets. He found a little leather pouch stuck in his belt. What's this? What else was stuck in his belt? It was a breechclout with the ends fore and aft passing under his belt. Instead of pants he had a pair of leggings and a breechclout, three-piece pants. Oh, oh, what else?

  Oh, he wore a shirt that seemed to be leather of some sort. He wore soft shoes that were softer than slippers. He was hatless, and his hair came forward over his shoulders in two tight long braids. He had dressed casually before, but he didn't remember ever dressing like this. How were the rest of the people dressed? No two alike, really, no two alike.

  But he did bring a coin out of that leather pouch that was stuck in his belt. A strange coin. It wasn't metal: it was made of stone, and made roughly. On the face of it was the head and forequarters of a buffalo. On the reverse side was the rump of a buffalo. The words on the obverse of it read WORTH ONE BUFFALO, and on the reverse they read MAYBE A LITTLE BIT LESS.

  “And where do I put a coin in this contraption?” Christopher asked himself angrily and loudly. A hand extended itself, and Christopher put the coin in the hand. The hand belonged to an old wrinkled brown man, swathed in robes and folds of blackened leather, and sitting in the dust.

  The old man gave Christopher a newspaper, or gave him something anyhow. It was on leather that was almost board-stiff. It was illustrated, it was printed in a variety of hands; and here and there it had a little hair growing out of it as though its leather were imperfectly scraped.

  “Wait, your change,” the old brown man said. He gave Christopher seven small coins. These were neither metal nor stone: they were clay baked in the sun. The obverse of each was the head and fore of a badger, puffed and bristled and hissing in high defense. And the reverse was the reared rump of the same badger in embattled clawed stance.

  “Price go down a little but not a whole badger,” the old man said. “Take three puffs. It's close as I can get to even change.” Wondering at himself, Christopher took three strong rich smokey puffs from the old pipe of the old man. He felt that he had received full value then. It was about all that he felt satisfied with. But is it wrong to feel unsatisfied, which is unsated? Christopher thought about it.

  He went over and sat on a bale of rags outside the shop with the sign HOT ROAST DOG FOR SALE OR GIVE. The bale of rags seemed somehow lively; it was as if there was no division between the animate and the inanimate this day. He tried to make something out of the strange newspaper or the strange day, or the newly strange man who was apparently himself.

  Oh, the newspaper was interesting. It could be read one way or another: by picture, by stylized pictograph, by various writings and printings. Here were anecdotes; wooly, horny, bottomlessly funny anecdotes: and they were about people that Christopher knew, or almost knew. And all the people passing by (Christopher realized it with a chuckling gasp) were also people that he knew or almost knew. Well, what made them so different then? They looked like familiar people, they smelled like familiar people (which the familiar people erstwhile had not done), they had the familiar name that came almost to the edge of the tongue.

  “But what town is this? What day is this? What is the context?” Christopher wailed out loud. “Why is everything so strange?”

  “Kit-Fox, you call me?” Strange Buffalo boomed at him. Strange Buffalo was a big and boisterous man and he had always been a good friend of Christopher. He had? Then why did he look so different? And why was his real name, or his other name, now unremembered?

  “Will the buffalo go to war, do you think, Kit-Fox?” Strange Buffalo asked him. “Do you believe that the two great herds of them will go to war? They come near to each other now and they swear that neither will give way.”

  “No, there will be only the pushing and goring of a few thousand bulls, not much else,” Christopher said. “The buffalo simply haven't the basis for a real war.” He was surprised at his own knowledge of the subject.

  “But the buffalo have human advisers now,” Strange Buffalo said. “It began with the betting, of course, but now we can see that there is real cause of conflict on both sides. I dabble in this myself and have some good ideas. We are tying spear-shafts to the horns of some of the big bulls and teaching them to use them. And we're setting up big bows and teaching them to bend them with their great strength, but they haven't any accuracy at all.”

  “No, I don't believe they were meant to have a real war. It's a wonderful dust they raise, though, when they all come together. It makes you glad to be alive. And the thunder of their millions of hoofs!” (There was the distant sound of morning thunder.) “Or is that a thundering in the mountains?” Kit-Fox — ah,
Christopher was asking.

  “Well, there is quite a clatter in the mountains this morning, Kit,” Strange Buffalo was saying in happy admiration. “The deep days, the grass days like this one aren't come by easily. It's a wonder the mountains aren't knocked to pieces when the big prophets pray so noisily and wrestle so strong. But, as the good skin says, we must work out our salvation in fear and thundering.”

  “Is it not ‘In fear and trembling’?” Christopher asked as he lounged on the lively bale of rags.

  “No, Kit-Fox, no!” Strange Buffalo pealed at him. “That's the kind of thing they say during the straw days; not here, not now. In the Cahooche shadow-writing it says ‘In fear and chuckling,’ but the Cahooche words for thunder and chuckling are almost the same. On some of the Kiowa antelope-skin drawings, ‘In scare-shaking and in laughter-shaking.’ I like that. I wish I could pray and wrestle as wooly and horny as the big ones do. Then I'd get to be a prophet on the mountain also, and I'd bring in more days of grass. Yes, and days of mesquite also.”

  “The mountain is a funny one this morning, Strange Buffalo. It doesn't reach clear down to the ground,” Christopher said. “There's a great space between, and there are eagles flying underneath it.”

  “Ah, it'll fall back after a while, Kit-Fox, when they have won or lost the wrestling for the day; after they have generated sufficient juice for this day, for I see that they have already won it and it will be a day of grass. Let's go have a rack of roast dog and a gourd of choc beer,” Strange Buffalo proposed.

  “In a minute, Strange Buffalo. I am in the middle of a puzzle and I have this fog in my head. What day is this?”