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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “The present explosion of knowledge is fact,” Barnaby Sheen was saying. “But there is also an occasional (though continuing) explosion of knowledge in another sense. One of the most false of legends is that the two great libraries of Alexandria, with their seven hundred thousand books or rolls, were deliberately destroyed, partly by Aurelian, more completely by Theodosius. That's all false, I tell you. Those two royal gentlemen would no more destroy valuable books and scrolls than you royal gentlemen here would burn up hundred-dollar bills. They knew what things had money value, and those old book-rolls had it.

  “The only correct thing about the story is the chronology. Actually the two libraries exploded: the one in the Serapeum in the time of Aurelian; the one in the Museum in the time of Theodosius.”

  Give him a while. Barnaby always liked to savor his own startling statements for a few moments after he had made them. Don't ask him (for a while) what he's talking about. He'll clarify it, or muddy it further, in a few minutes.

  “Austro really looks more like a big frog than like a big ape,” Harry O'Donovan commented as the unusual houseboy ambled (is it more froggish than apish to amble?) into the room. Austro winked at Harry to show that he understood his statement. Austro had recently learned to wink; he had also learned how to draw cartoons.

  “There is the leaky past, but it cannot leak out fast enough for safety,” Barnaby had taken up his tale again. He always came as directly as possible to a point, but the point was often a tricky one. “The staggering corpus of past events, and of non-central or nonconsensus events, is diminished swiftly. More and more things that once happened are now made not to have happened. This is absolute necessity, I suppose, even though the flesh between the lines (it is, I guess, the supposedly expunged flesh) should scream from the agony of the compression. “Velikovsky was derided for writing that six hundred years must be subtracted from Egyptian history and from all ancient history. He shouldn't have been derided, but he did have it backwards. Indeed, six times six hundred years must be added to history again and again to approach the truth of the matter. It'd be dangerous to do it, though. It's crammed as tight as it will go now, and there's tremors all along the fault lines. As a matter of fact, several decades have been left out of quite recent United States history. They should be put back in for they're interesting, and we ourselves lived through parts of them—if it were safe to do so.”

  “How about the count of the years and their present total?” Harry O'Donovan asked. “Are they right or are they not? Is this really the year that it says it is on that calendar on the wall? And, if it is, doesn't that make nonsense about leaving out recent decades?”

  “The count of the years is true, in that it is one aspect of the truth,” Barnaby said a little bit fumblingly. “But there are other aspects. They call into question the whole nature of simultaneity.”

  “What doesn't?” Harry O'Donovan said.

  “There are taboos in mathematics,” Barnaby tried to explain. “The idea of the involuted number series is taboo, and yet we live in a time that is counted by such a series. And when time is fleshed, when it puts on History for its clothes, it follows even more the involuted series in which there are very, very many numbers between one and ten.”

  “Just what do you have in mind, Barney?” Cris Benedetti asked him.

  “I have never discovered any historical event happening for the first time,” Barnaby said. “Either life imitates anecdote, or very much more has happened than the bursting records are allowed to show as happening. As far back as one can track it, there is history: and I do not mean prehistory. I doubt if there was ever such a time as prehistory. I doubt that there was ever an uncivilized man. I also doubt that there was ever any manlike creature who was not full man, however unconventional the suit of hide that he wore.

  “But when you try to compress a hundred thousand years of history into six thousand years, something has to give. When you try to compress a million years, it becomes dangerous. An involuted number series, particularly when applied to the spate of years, becomes a tightly coiled spring of primordial spring-steel. When it recoils, look out! There comes the revenge of things left out.

  “Were there eight kings of the name of Henry in England, or were there eighty? Never mind: someday it will be recorded that there was only one, and the attributes of all of them will be combined into his compressed and consensus story.

  “There is a deep texture of art and literature (no matter whether it is rock scratching or machine duplication) that goes back over horizon after horizon. There is a deeper texture to life itself that is tremendous in its material and mental and psychic treasures. There are dialects now that were once full vernaculars, towns now that were once great cities, provinces that were nations. The foundations and the lower stories of a culture or a building are commonly broader than its upper stories. A structure does not balance upside-down, standing on a point.

  “A torch was once lighted and given to a man, not to a beast. And it has been passed on from hand to hand while the hills melted and rose again. What matter that some of the hands were more hairy than others? It was always a man's hand.”

  “It may be that you are balancing upside-down on your pointed head, Barney,” Harry O'Donovan told him.

  “It may be, but I believe that is not the case. Atrox Fabulinus, the Roman Rabelais, reconstructs some of the omissions and compressions in the form of fables. It is a common belief that a fable is less weighty than history and less likely to break down the great scaffold; it was, you know, a fabled straw that broke the camel's back (a real event). We know from Atrox that there were three Roman Kingdoms, three Roman Republics, and three Roman Empires, each series extending for more than a thousand years. We know that some of the more outré and outrageous of the Emperors (and Kings and Tyrants and Demagogs and Rebels and Tribunes) are no longer to be found in proper history at all. Clio is a skittish muse and very fearful of breakdowns.

  “Yet Humerus Maximus and Nothus Nobilis and Anserem Captator and Capripex Ferox were in reality men of such bursting vigor and feats that history has not been able to contain them. But their suppression shouts at us and shocks us.

  “And it goes back many times farther; there are the stone pages that have been crowded (for a while) quite out of history. It was clear man from the beginning; even though at its earliest it was sometimes man dressed in an ape suit.”

  Austro had a bunch of patio blocks (thin concrete blocks) under his arm. He was very strong and he carried two dozen of them easily. He had been drawing cartoons on them; no, he had been drawing primordial pictures: they are almost, but not quite, the same. He drew with a bone stylus and used an ocher and water mixture for his paint. How had he known to do that? He showed his drawings to the sawdusty Loretta Sheen and to the unbalanced and ghostly Mary Mondo. They laughed gaily at the drawings, and then they laughed with a peculiar pathos.

  Mary Mondo brought some of the stones to us. We looked and laughed. Then we looked more and laughed less. They were sharp cartoons, striking caricatures. They were something more. Once there was a species to which humor was far more important than seriousness. Once there was a species so vivid and vibrant that it had to be forgotten by history. And Austro was a member of it. But, for a moment there, we almost knew what kindred Austro was to us.

  “François, the French Rabelais, pulled greater tricks than did Atrox,” Barnaby Sheen was saying. “As you have probably suspected, there are a full thousand years lost out of the Lower Middle Ages. History ran up to the year fourteen hundred and fifty-three once, and then reverted to the year four hundred and fifty-three. It was a much different year four hundred and fifty-three than it had been the first time, though. The Millennium really has been and gone, you know. It's forgotten now; it wasn't what had been expected, but it was what had been promised. “Nobody promised us that it would be a thousand years of peace and prosperity; nobody promised that it would be an era of learning and suavity; and certainly nobody promised that
it would be a time of ease and gentility.

  “It was the Millennium itself, and the Devil was bound for a thousand years. But he surely was not quiet about his binding. He clanked and howled; he shook the whole world, and he caused land tides and sea tides. He caused mountains to collapse and people to go fearful and even to die literally petrified. And then the people discovered a cloud-capping and roaring humor in their fearfulness. A giantism appeared, a real awareness, a ridiculousness which has always been the authentic rib-rock of the world.

  “François Rabelais caught a little of that giantism and jollity. But it is banned from history, that thousand years, though it was more real than most things in history. History is too fragile to contain it. History, and all its annals and decades and centuries, would be shattered forever if these ten centuries were included.”

  “What happened afterwards, Barney?” Harry O'Donovan asked, “when the Devil was unbound again and we resumed the historical count (wrong by a thousand years, of course, but who minds that?—or involuted by a thousand years) and things became as they are now? How are they now?”

  “Oh, the unbound Devil fragmentized (an old trick of his) and spread himself wherever he could. His is a feigned omnipresence, so there is a little of him in every person and every thing. He believes (he isn't really very bright) that he can't be bound again if he keeps himself scattered. But his shriveling effect is on us all: we are no longer giants.”

  “Oh, I've always believed that I was still a giant,” said Drakos who was considerably the largest of the men. And then he asked with the veriest bit of mockery, “Barnaby, would you like your daughter to be carrying on seriously with an ape-man?”

  “There has never been an ape-man, George,” Barnaby said softly. “There was, and there still is, this not-quite series of cousins for whom we miss the name. But it's a ghostliness, not an apishness, that sets them a little apart from us who are their kindred. And my daughter (whether she lived in flesh or not I am no longer sure) is now no more than a girl-sized doll full of sawdust and a few words or mottos. And yet she is more than that. If not a true ghostliness, she at least has a palter-ghostliness about her. So has Mary Mondo.

  “The children, Austro and Loretta and Mary (none of them is more than a child or at most an adolescent), are close kindred, closer to each other, perhaps, than to us. It is common, perhaps universal, that children are of a slightly different race (I mean it literally) than they will later become. But it is all right with them.”

  “When were the several decades left out of United States history, Barnaby?” Cris Benedetti asked him.

  “Early, and recent, and present, for I rather suspect that our own contingent present will not be firmly inscribed in the records.”

  “You mean that we may not be recorded as real?” Drakos asked.

  “Possibly not,” Barnaby said. “I'll give one example: there is the case of a father, son, and grandson from one family, John Adams, John Braintree Adams, and John Quincy Adams, all being Presidents of the United States. I notice, though, that only two of them are now believed in, or are now written in. The best of the three (wouldn't you believe it? it's always the best) has been left out. But the foreshortening was continuous, and part of it, I believe, took place during our own boyhoods. There was much more happening then three times more—than we are allowed to remember. Sometimes it seems that it was a million years and not just a couple of decades left out here.”

  “You don't mean this literally, do you?” Harry O'Donovan asked. “You talk in parables, do you not?”

  “Am I Christ that I should talk in parables? No, I talk literally, Harry. Things have happened, and then they have been made to seem not to have happened.”

  “By what possible process could it have been done? It would have required a simultaneous and multitudinous altering of records and minds.”

  “By a human process it was done; I cannot say more about that mysterious process. It isn't a natural thing, of course, for man isn't a natural animal. He is supernatural, or he is preternatural, or he is unnatural. I'm not sure which class this repeating amnesia, with its mechanical adjuncts, belongs to.”

  “What could trigger one of the explosions that you talk about, Barnaby?” Drakos asked.

  “I believe that a mind that does not accept the local mathematical taboos might trigger off a blast. And I believe that such a mind has been spending a lot of time in our old clubroom that now has the rumbles. It's a cave there, really. All clubrooms are caves. The caves on the Guna slopes, they are made by explosions, by blasting. Caves are never completely natural configurations, and there are no caves that have not been inhabited. Water and wind have not scooped out caves. People with their explosive and blasting intelligence and curiosity have scooped them out.”

  “I suspect that I should professionally recommend you to an alienist, Barney,” said Dr. George Drakos.

  “I suspect that you should professionally study this problem yourself, George,” Barnaby said somewhat stubbornly. “Even medical men have good ideas sometimes.”

  “Did there used to be a funny paper named Rocky McCrocky?” Harry O'Donovan asked the ceiling (he always sat leaning far back in his chair). “It was about, I believe, cave men.” “I don't remember it,” Cris said. “If there had been one, John Penandrew would know, but we seldom see John in these latter times. There was Alley Oop, of course, and later there was B. C. And many of the others, Happy Hooligan, Down on the Farm, Her Name was Maud, Boob McNutt, Toonerville Trolley, were troglodyte or caveman funny papers in disguise.”

  “I wonder if the, ah, troglodytes themselves had funny papers?” George Drakos asked.

  “Certainly,” said Cris. “Has not Austro just been making such funny papers and passing them around? And he is a troglodyte, or a troll, which is the same thing.

  “And our older rock uncles (they of the kindred forgotten, of the Flesh Between) have left such funny papers in thousands of places. Mostly they were scratched on slate-rock or on limestone or on old red sandstone; and they had, it seems to me, the intensity and context almost strong enough to move mountains.”

  “By the way,” Barnaby Sheen said dreamily, “there was once an explosion or implosion of certain archives or annals at Migdal which in fact did move a mountain. It was quite a strong blast. And we are inclined to forget just what an explosive pun is the word ‘magazine’ in its several senses. For it means a periodical publication, which is to say a journal or an annals. But it also means a depot in which explosives and ammunition are stored. Every library, I believe, is a magazine in both of these senses, and I use the word ‘library’ quite loosely.”

  “You've nibbled at it from every edge, Barnaby,” George Drakos said. “You might as well go ahead and tell us what you mean you when you say that the two great libraries at Alexandria exploded, and when you say that the archives or annals at Migdol (the Magdala of the more blessed location, I presume) exploded so violently as to move a mountain.”

  “Yes, I'll get with it,” Barnaby said. “Where is that Austro? He's never here when we want a refill.”

  “He's down in that funny room over the garages, the one that rumbles,” Mary Mondo expressed. “He lives there now.”

  “Can you tell him to come here, Mary?” Barnaby asked.

  “I just have,” Mary expressed. “He says there's no great hurry. He says he'll be along by and by.”

  “Thank you, Mary,” Barnaby said. “Ah, you slipped one over on me that time.”

  (Barnaby Sheen ordinarily did not recognize the presence or existence of the schizo-ghost Mary Mondo, but she was handy for communicating at a distance.)

  “Gentlemen,” said Barnaby then, “there are very many cases of archives and libraries exploding, cases that seem incredible. Some of them were libraries whose books were tablets of hewn stone, some of baked brick, some of glazed tile, some of flaky clay, some of papyrus rolls or other split-reed made into near-paper, some of parchment or thinned sheepskin, some of vellum or scr
aped calfskin or kidskin, some of velum or the palate membrane of the common dragon (‘vellum’ and ‘velum’ are sometimes confused by the ignorant; just remember that the latter is fire-resistant), some of paper of the modern sort.”

  “Some of the libraries consist of trunks filled with pulp-paper funny papers and comic books,” the sawdust-filled doll named Loretta conveyed. “They're the best kind.”

  “These collections,” said Barnaby (not having received the message his daughter had given), “being of such diverse material, would seem to have nothing in common to make them explode. But the annals and decades and centuries that were excised from them did very often force their way back into them with great power. Nothing is forgotten forever. The repositories very often did explode.”

  “How, Barney, how?” Harry O'Donovan challenged.

  “I believe that it always begins with an earth-rumble, with a cavern-rumble,” Barnaby said.

  “With a room-rumble,” contributed the sawdust-filled doll, but Barnaby did not attend her message.

  “Decades and centuries refusing to be suppressed!” said Barnaby.

  “Poor relations refusing to be suppressed,” said Harry O'Donovan with sudden insight.

  “A million years refusing to be frozen out,” expressed Mary Mondo. “Say, do you know the real process responsible for the ice ages? Oh, never mind. Your minds are too cluttered already with things you barely understand. You have thrice-repeated boyhoods refusing to be suppressed. There is a group ghosthood refusing to give itself up. They all build power.”

  “Fortunately my own library is quite small and quite technical,” Barnaby said. “I carry so much in my head, you see. Were it not so, I could almost feel the rumble of a coming explosion now.”

  “Oh, brother, cannot we all!” Dr. Drakos cried in sharp-eared comprehension.

  4

  “Kabloom, kabloom!”

  Said McCrocky's room.