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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “These mad folk come from the badlands,” Helen twanged like vibrating mountains. (One could actually hear her. She'd always had a voice that could cut through the howling ululation of the strings and chords.) “They come from those deserts of nonsound, from the silent salt plains, from the alabaster hills and the potato hills, from the gopher gulches and the bear brackens. The horrible silence has driven them mad, clear mad. They wear cloaks of bearskin; that is the truth. They refuse obeisance to the Fundamental Rock. They refuse all conjuncture. They'll not meet the beat, or mesh the flesh, or sing the thing, or grass or hash. They'll not touch the raper-caper, or the placid acid, or the ranchy dance. They'll not bollix Moloch with the rid-kids; they disdain the itch-twitch. There is no bottom to their madness. They're mad beasts in human form. They are coming in groups of a dozen or more and each group is bringing a cloud of silence with it. The secret of their madness is in that no-noise cloud.”

  “We kill them and dissect them,” Harry Stonefoot clattered so powerfully that the cords of his throat stood out purple. “They are humans in all but mind, and even there the brain capacity is of sufficient physical size. But they dress in bearskins while keeping themselves cropped and depilated. Why should they want to be taken for animals? What is it they are called?”

  “The bear-shirts,” shouted Doctor Rockter, “or bear-sarks as they were once called in Scotland, or berserks as they were known in Scandinavia, all with the same meaning of madmen who dress in animal skins. Have you brought me any of their brain tissue to analyze, Stonefoot?”

  (Everybody remembers Harry Stonefoot and his Stony Hearts who had done so much for Stony-Hearted Rock, who in fact had invented Stony-Hearted Rock a decade before.)

  “I've brought buckets of it,” Stonefoot shrilled. “But you'll find no difference in any of the dead tissue, I'll bet, except that their ears are unpierced and their spleens are unsplit. And they are so cropped and shorn as to seem quite different at first glance. They are not, however, basically a completely hairless species. Yes, plenty of brains left here, Rockter, though members of the Third Muggers have been eating great lots of them. That's effective when they do their ‘Brain Food Rock’ number, you know.”

  “We have set up amplifiers on the edge of the deserts in the hope of turning the berserks back, knowing their aversion for holy sound. And the holy sound does give them pain. They hesitate. But then they come along again with bleeding ears (ear scar tissue is probably possible to them then, though the earlier dead ones of them were completely without it). We play them very loud recordings of other berserkers in death agony. This does not seem to disturb them as much as random sound does; and yet the method is effective against infesting rodents. We will try still other things, for the mad infection must be stopped.”

  “They have a rationale,” Gaster Blaster boomed (everybody remembers Gaster and his Jelly-Belly group who did so much for Soft Rock in quite recent years). “I always say it's a sign of madness to have a rationale. And they have a saying, ‘love one another,’ which they apparently stole from the Buffalo Horns who did so much for Horny Rock. They say it but they do not practice it. They will not copulate with strangers. They will not copulate openly with each other. The Choppers, who have killed the most of them and examined the bodies, say that many of them are virgins. That reminds me a little of the numbers ‘Chastity Lastity’ and ‘The Chaste Waste’ that the Wastelanders (who did so much for Wasteland Rock) performed just the past year.

  “The berserks speak of light as though it were white or golden and as though it were singular. Apparently they cannot even see the shattered and dynamic psychedelic lights nor even the kaleidoscopic psychedelic sun. And the berserks, the marching virgins, are serious in their madness.”

  “I will go over the brain tissues and perhaps I can isolate the madness virus,” Doctor Rockter crowed (expertly, for he had been one of the Red Roosters who did so much for Red Rooster Rock two decades before). “This is not new, you know. There were manifestations of it more than two thousand years ago in the Roman district known as Coele-Syria. It has happened again and again since that early fish clan of mad persons. The catching madness may have felled and continued Rome itself; something certainly interfered with the terminal sanity there. And a king named Clovis formally joined a reappearance or variation of the mad sect in the year 496 and he brought 3,000 of his followers with him. This illustrates the magnitude of the danger, if persons in such numbers can catch the madness infection so instantly and so completely. Later there was Mad Francis who represented all the insane clans together: for he said that he was brother of the wolf and the hare and the fox and the deer and the bear. Also, I believe, of the sun and the moon.

  “And there were the madmen of Cluny and of Trent. They came ‘renewing,’ as they said, and they did renew the epidemic madness. This epidemic madness always comes just when the terminal sanity seems securely established.”

  “Do you want our culture, sane though it is, to be a terminal thing with our cycle and generation?” Beryl My-Thing shouted uncertainly.

  “Certainly. It is the direction of our sanity to terminate the life thing. I want that. Don't you?” Rockter crowed.

  “I'm not sure,” Beryl shouted with a curious misery.

  “Then you are not one of us, not really,” the Doctor crowed. “I suspect that you yourself are touched by this new-old madness. I declare you suspect.”

  This was shocking. It was unpleasant. Everyone remembered the great things that Beryl My-Thing had done with Crock-of Rock.

  “To continue,” Rockter crowed, “long ago there was a certain madman named Pádraig who almost single-handed brought the dementia to the Irish island. As a dominant thing, it was stamped out there only a few centuries ago. It still maintains itself in the hills and wastelands as it does in our own land. We know that it is endemic with ground squirrels and prairie dogs of our own western wastelands. The madness virus (I am sure that I will find this to be the case) is identical with, or closely related to, the Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. This, I assure you, is a real disease and not connected with that number of the same name that was done by the Rocky Mountain Rocks several years ago. We will solve the mystery and madness of the berserkers, though, or it will dissolve and transmute what we have built. They'll not let it be a glorious finality; they'll turn it into a turgid middle period.”

  “We will kill them where we find them,” Helga twanged like one of the Umbilical Chords, very loud, very stringy. “We will strip them of their bearskin robes, for I believe that some of their madness adheres to these things which they call ‘clothing.’ We will scatter them where they congregate, and we will steadfastly remain scatterbrained ourselves. Let us remember the old motto ‘A scatterbrain is a catter-brain,’ for we are the catter-brained cats. With this slogan, I believe that we renowned cats will be impervious to all infection.”

  “And if they still infect and grow in numbers and congregate?” Gaster thundered the question.

  “Then to the Colosseum with them! To our reconstructed temple of old rock!” Harry Stonefoot himself clattered like clattering stones. “It is built perfectly for maximum sound, and such sound must be paid for in blood. A pact, by somebody with somebody, was once made to that effect. I believe that the wonderful place will give maximum screaming tone when these madmen die in their agony. They refuse to twitch in life but they'll twitch in death.

  “To the tigers, to the lions, to the serpents, to the bears with them!”

  3

  It ends for shouting rockies and

  Hierocratic hairs.

  The quiet thunder comes to hand

  And mad, undancing bears.

  Peach Orchard Ballads

  It would be the finest concert of the week; one reason for this was that it would be the only concert of the week, for it would last the full week. It had been ordered by Glomerule, and Boris Medved, one of the really high members of that powerful society, was director of the concert.

  It was
in the Colosseum, whose only resemblance to an older structure of the same name was that it was also colossal. This was called the Reconstructed Temple of the Old Rock. It was not really a reconstruction of anything. It was a giant round rock building, domed and not open, and it had flashing psychedelic sun and moon in the middle of the dome. It wasn't even a very old building, less than one hundred years, but there were certain quite old rites going on in one focus of it.

  These rites were called the Bollixing of Moloch. It did not resemble the old Roman thing from which the Colosseum had its name. It more resembled the old Phoenician or the old Carthaginian thing.

  Certain suspected persons (there were about a thousand of them on the lists for this concert) were brought before Moloch whose head was a labyrinth of roar boxes and whose belly was a burning furnace. These suspected persons were required to do the right things to prove their decency and sanity. They must come in their natural nakedness and must make obeisance to the Fundamental Rock (this was the complex of roar boxes in Moloch's head: it gave the fundamental tone to all roar boxes everywhere). The suspected persons must then hold fleshy congress with certain professional experts. They must then partake of the holy grass and the holy hash. They must dip the placid acid, meet the beat, sing the thing, share the hair, dance the ranch, and twitch the itch. Finally they must take part in a rid-the-kids, for Moloch must be fed.

  A rid-the-kids (done every time sufficient groups of suspected persons were brought before Moloch) consisted of casting nine still-living fetuses, nine one-year-old children, and nine three-year-old children into the burning belly of Moloch. The suspected persons often would refuse to perform this simple symbolic rite, particularly if the children were their own. In this case they were adjudged mad and were given to the turned-on cats or the bears to be killed.

  This concert had now been going on for about two hundred thousand beats (about two days and nights by the old way of counting time). The suspected persons were mostly the mad berserkers who had been captured as they came in from the deserts. They wore animal skins for clothing, as persons of the unemancipated era were said to have worn clothing the century before. And they would not have rated in the Hierarchy of the Hairs at all; full and flowing hair seemed unimportant to them.

  And they simply would not perform any of the holy rites. The sound of the roar boxes apparently bothered them more than the fear of death. “We might as well get it over with,” several of them were seen by mouthreaders to remark, “anything to get away from the crooked noise and the crooked lights.” They were mad, mad, corporately and individually mad, contagiously mad.

  A few hundred of them had already been killed by the big turned-on cats, the tigers and the lions. There were a few hundred more of them to go. The air was blue-gray from the smoke and sock of grass, hash, and mash; and the arena was slippery with blood.

  The great rock numbers of this particular concert had emerged as “Blood and Sand” (“Blood in the pit where the crazies go/Soggy wet sand where the tripgrasses grow”), “Cat Rock” (“Tiger, Tiger, turned-on Cat/Berserk entrails keep you fat”), “King Rock” (“Moloch, Moloch, bloody King Red/Fire in the belly and rocks in the head”), and “Slippery Rock,” the words of which are too slippery to be captured here. Then, just as that splendid new number “Sock Rock” began, there was a premonition and a change that went through the whole structure and its fauna.

  It was quite a small group of suspects and refusers who were going through when it happened, eleven persons. Boris Medved, the High Director of the Concert, knew at once that something cataclysmic was happening. He felt the change more strongly than a lesser being might have felt it. He jumped bravely down into the arena with his roar boxes roaring.

  But they didn't roar as they should. One of the refusers, a young lady named Domitilla, spread out her hands; and Medved's roar boxes sputtered and died with little puffs of smoke. Then the giant amplifiers and roarers of the Colosseum went out. There was a soft wave of silence that went through the whole structure, and the people of the concert were suddenly ashen with fear.

  It was so quiet that one could hear the padding of the feet of the great turned-on cats and the bears on the soggy sand of the pit; one could even hear the moving of the giant snakes.

  “Noise, noise,” the people were croaking hoarsely. “We need our noise.” But their unamplified voices could hardly be heard and their unamplified instruments could not raise their wails into true rock.

  The big, turned-on cats seemed less turned on, with the din that had always maddened them now quieted by Domitilla's hands; but they moved easily, though nervously, in for the kills.

  The bears, however, intervened; for this particular band of refusers in the pit were berserkers, mad people of the bear clan. The bears surrounded the people and the big cats withdrew a little, the tigers spitting perfunctorily and the lions grumbling in their throats. And Medved, the Director of the Concert, came fearlessly and furiously into the middle of the group, seeming somehow cruder than the very bears in his hairy, splotchy nakedness.

  “Sing, mad people,” he ordered with a broken voice. “Dance, bears, dance…” But even songbirds will not sing on order, and bears will not dance at an antagonist's bidding; particularly mad bears will not, and these bears had now been infected by their human berserker affiliates.

  “This is madness,” Medved shouted almost voicelessly at the refusal. The demented, clothed people smiled at him. Bears are poker-faced and cannot smile, but they weighed this anomalous Medved with their eyes and shifted back and forth on their feet.

  Quite a few of the normal concert people were coming down into the pit to join the berserker folks, unmindful of the big, dangerous, turned-on cats, being made way for by the interiorly smiling bears. The madness was in almost explosive contagion now and coming dangerously near to taking over the whole crowd that was eager for something even more valid than noise.

  “I am the king of the bears,” Medved shouted hoarsely. “Dance, bears, dance!”

  “No, I am the king of the bears,” the largest of the bears conveyed the message some way. “You are a man on whom certain medical obscenities were once performed in the name of perversion. You have bear parts in you but you are not true bear. And now you and similar perversions must be ended.”

  More and more people from the concert (many wrapping themselves in banners and posters as if they wished to be clothed) were coming down to join the berserker folk in the pit. The now turned-off big cats and the sullen snakes withdrew to the sidelines and let the people congregate. And the soft-spoken, clothed, group mania took over.

  The mad, undancing bears moved in on Boris Medved, the Director of the Concert, and killed him redly.

  Animal Fair

  Mostly the animals understand their roles,

  but man, by comparison, seems troubled by

  a message that, it is often said, he cannot

  quite remember, or has gotten wrong.

  —Loren Eisely, The Unexpected Universe

  An anarchist of shaggy trees,

  A great red gleam that flies,

  A rearing buck, a rampant breeze,

  A girl with really eyes.

  —Eco-Log

  “That anarchist of yours is ruining my grass,” Mrs. Bagby said to Barnaby Sheen as I walked with him one morning. “It looks so shaggy all at once that I give up on it. I trim it and edge it, but it's no use. And my trees! Just look at my trees!”

  “I look at your trees,” Barnaby said. “They do seem to come on a little stronger than they used to, which I like. But what anarchist are you talking about?”

  “That anarchist that you keep in your house and that wanders everywhere. I don't know whether he's an ape or a man.”

  “Oh, he's a young boy,” Barnaby told her. “I believe that he will be a man when he's grown, though some of his species may grow up to be ape: the theological implications of this baffle me. But why do you call him an anarchist?”

  “Because he lo
oks at my grass and makes it sick.”

  “Never have I seen your grass looking more well, Mrs. Bagby,” Barnaby said.

  “Well, it's turned wild is what it's done,” the lady insisted. “There's so many things in the neighborhood now that look different after—”

  “—after he's looked at them? Yes, I know, Mrs. Bagby. Or rather, I don't know; I don't quite understand it myself. I ask Austro about it, and he just grins. He's getting to say a few more words now, but he isn't going to find words for such an ontological subject as this. It seems that I'm not going to find them either.”

  “Well, get rid of him, Mr. Sheen,” Mrs. Bagby said. “This neighborhood isn't a zoological garden.”

  “It should be, Mrs. Bagby,” Barnaby said seriously. “The whole world should be a zoological garden. Once, I believe, it was. It's a mistake to remember the first garden as small. It was worldwide. It was the world. Get rid of your own husband and children, Mrs. Bagby. Only then will I get rid of Austro and Loretta and Mary Mondo. They are my family. And Austro is not an anarchist. You are.”

  We went away from her, knowing that she was angry, being sorry for it. And her grass and trees did look more shaggy and living than used to be the case.

  (Austro, the houseboy and bartender of Barnaby Sheen, was of the genus australopithecus, which is either ape, or ape-man, or man, the middle one of these being impossible. The genus was supposed to be extinct long since, but Austro was proof that it wasn't.) (Loretta Sheen was a life-sized, sawdust-filled doll: Barnaby insisted that this object was the undead body of his real daughter Loretta. We had all known Barnaby well all our lives, yet we couldn't remember for sure whether he had ever had a real daughter or not.) (Mary Mondo was a ghost, the schizo-personality of a girl named Violet Lonsdale who was long since dead. But Mary Mondo was not dead.)