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

by R. A. Lafferty

  Austro grinned and pointed at himself. Then he clasped his hands high over his head like a victorious prizefighter. But the funny thing about it was that none of my four friends seemed to see or hear the seed-man for the rest of the evening; and none of them noticed Austro's antics.

  “I've just had the most droll notion,” Harry O'Donovan said sleepily. “What if there were one or more early races of humans, as human as ourselves, who had been set aside or held in reserve? What if they'll be called in to take our place if we don't do a little better at our problem-solving? How does that strike you for a speculation?” And O'Donovan suddenly fell into unsound and twitchy sleep.

  What was this? Was the seed-man sometimes inaudible and invisible to these lords, the while he conveyed his message to their minds? That certainly seemed to be the case.

  “One of the things that has gone wrong is that you no longer recognize the spirit in things,” the seed-man said. “The spirit of the Shaper, of course, is in everything, whether living or unliving, in every person, animal, plant, tree, pond, rock, house, factory. But your minds are not able to comprehend this. Once you saw a nymph in everything, every tree, every stream, every stone. At another time you saw an angel in each thing. Now you the lords do not see the spirit in anything at all. You are not holy enough to see the Shaper, not holy enough to see the angel, not even holy enough to see the nymph. Ah, most of you are not holy enough to see the stone.”

  But neither of my two waking friends seemed to hear or see the seed-man at all.

  “I've just had an idea,” Cris Benedetti said with creeping sleepiness in his voice. “My daughter says that seeing a thing in a certain way will sometimes make it so. These are the metaphysics, the things beyond and behind the physics. I believe that we should see a nymph in every tree and stream once more, in every field, ah, in every factory. If only we could realize that every object contains the whole of the spirit! But, since we cannot, then why can we not see a personification of the spirit in every object? What we need is more nymphs. Even the sewers should have nymphs: then they would realize that there is no shame in being a sewer, not in being a good and transforming sewer. Ah—”

  Ah, he was asleep.

  “So you've put another one of them on the doze,” I told the seed-man. “But there aren't any nymphs, you know.”

  “Chiara is one,” he said. “Mary Mondo is one of a different sort. Loretta is one of still another sort: she is the nymph and the spirit of this cluttered house. And the sawdust that trickles out of her does not even tell her father that this holy house is being turned into sawdust by termites.

  “But why, lords, do you not mine the richest mines of all? Your rotten waters are real treasure-rivers of chemicals and minerals. Your junk heaps are the most concentrated metallic ores to be found on Earth. Your neglected and unkempt and polluted brains contain such masses of sheer intellect as would insure that you be lords of the world almost forever. Ah, use them, plant them, grow them, harvest them again and again.”

  George Drakos did not hear or see the seed-man, and he had the hearingest ears and the seeingest eyes of any of them.

  “The answer,” Drakos said in a drowse, “is in recycling and recycling again until we restore each thing to its proper life. We will recycle animal waste and plant waste, factory waste and mining waste. We will recycle (restore is the proper word) provinces and towns and personalities and persons. Let the chips fall where they may! We're only dead once. We'll bring things back to their beginnings. We will remember the meaning of the words ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’ ” Then Drakos was asleep.

  George Drakos had known by insight that the answer was given in the beginning: but he had started the book backwards, like an Arab or a Jew, on the last page, and he had not got to the beginning yet.

  “No, no more, Mary,” I told Mary Mondo. “That stuff makes me sleepy and it makes me forget.” “Oh shoot!” she conveyed. “I like to slip them to the fellows, and it's my job for a while, while Austro is busy on the Fair. Besides, you have to forget. This has to be buried down inside you, like one of the seed-man's seeds, before it will grow.”

  “What is your name?” I asked the seed-man. “I am Seminator the sower, one of the sons of Tellus,” he said. “Then you are not a professor?”

  “Yes, I am a professor. I profess.”

  There were noises downstairs as though creatures were coming in. There was the hair-smell and the fur-smell climbing up from the lower floors; there was the green breath of the foliage-eaters and the red breath of the meat-eaters; there was the feather and foot-smell of the birds. It was a complex of creeping, crawling, scuttering, hopping, fluttering, flying things down there. There was the rattling of antlers and the squeaking of nonretractable claws on wooden floors. There was turkey gobble and badger hiss. “Go down to them, Austro, and record their decision, inasmuch as they have made what can be called a decision,” the seed-man said. And Austro went.

  “Each of these local chapter meetings is a small thing,” the seed-man explained to me then. “A couple hundred of significant animals, a half dozen or so of lords. But multiply one of these local meetings by ten thousand times the world over and it isn't so small a thing. You are scribe for the sleeping lords here, but I doubt if you'll be able to follow this. Well, all that anyone can do is his best. Now then, sleeping lords—”

  The seed-man talked to them, to Barnaby Sheen and George Drakos, to Harry O'Donovan and Cris Benedetti. He talked to them at great length, and they sound asleep all the while. But, asleep as they were, they were plainly understanding him on a profound level, and I wasn't. It isn't given to everyone. They were the men who knew everything. I was only a scribe, like Austro.

  Austro came up to the room after an hour or so. Downstairs there was the shuffling and scraping and scratching and stomping of animals and birds going out. The seed-man looked questioningly at Austro, and Austro drew a drawing for him.

  “Ah, those of the Upper House are put on notice,” the seed-man interpreted. “The Animal Fairs here and all over the world have put you on very short-term notice. Your unwritten contract will not even be on a yearly basis now. It will be on a weekly, even a daily basis. The creatures have been doing all the work, they say: they have furnished the forming eyes, and you the deforming. You must see with more valid eyes, with more interlocking eyes. You can be replaced, you know.”

  “Just what should we do?” I asked the seed-man.

  “I have told the sleeping lords,” the seed-man said. “I have told them some certain things; and for the rest, they must tell themselves and this world. It isn't pleasant for me, you know, to have to come back every several centuries from my well-won rest. It isn't pleasant for my ten thousand brothers either. I leave now. I'm not allowed to take my ease here.”

  Then the seed-man was gone, and not by the door. Really, had he ever been there at all?

  “What is really the situation, Austro?” I asked. He drew a hand in his drawing tablet. Somehow he had the perspective all wrong, for the hand was a million times bigger than the drawing tablet it was drawn in. It was the Shaper's hand, and it looked as if it might come down on us at any moment. “Serious, is it?” I asked.

  He nodded that it was. Then he grinned. He pointed at his head and made a circular motion with his finger. He looked at the dozing men who knew everything and he shook his head. Then he winked.

  “They'll not remember that it happened,” he said in his seldom-used English. “They'll have to work it out without remembering.”

  “How serious, Austro?” I asked.

  He made big graphs on the wall with a luminescent red pencil. He could write a few English words when he wanted to, but the sentence on the wall was in that intuitive picture language of his. There were a couple of discs or scales in almost-balance. There were some lumps on one scale (and I knew that I was part of one of the lumps): there were what appeared to be tongues of fire on the other scale. And there was a line of writing.

  Even
as I looked, I saw the balance beam in the drawing was moving slightly on the wall.

  “Ye are weighed in the scales?” I asked fearfully, and he nodded that I had read it correctly. Then he wrote the second line and I was still more uneasy.

  “And are we found wanting?” I asked.

  “Carrock! Don't rush it,” he said. Then he rewrote this last line in English, making glowing red words below it all:

  “Sure is going to be close,” the words said. I thought I saw the balance rod in the drawing on the wall move just a bit more.

  Austro fixed himself a drink and sat back in an easy chair. Why, I wondered, could I come near to understanding Austro; and the four men couldn't, for all the deeper things they knew. They couldn't intuit his intuitive language, and they could never recognize his occasional English for what it was.

  Austro motioned to Mary Mondo, and she came and added to his drink. He drank. “Neither will we,” he said in that slurry voice of his. He meant that neither would we remember that the happenings had happened.

  “The animals in the draw, will they also forget it?” I asked.

  “Yeah. They forget it right now. It has to be worked out without remembering. The additive has been put into that little brook also.”

  I decided that it was because I look and act a little more like Austro than those others do that I could understand him better. So we drank together, the two of us, the youngish man of the species Homo australopithecus and the oldish man of the species humorously called Homo sapiens.

  “I'll also have a little of that now, Mary,” I said: and the kook spook poured a bit of the additive into my glass.

  “Cheers,” I said, and I drank.

  “Fchoinoeachlyuntrqu,” Austro toasted in turn, and drank deeply.

  Folks in the scribbling trade often drink unto the state and stuff of Lethe when they're together. There's a touch of necessity to it.

  The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos

  There was a crooked man

  And he made some crooked mice:

  And crooked fire and plasma ran

  By thunderous device.

  —Eco-Log

  Doctor George Drakos made some mice. Nothing unusual about that; Drakos had a fine laboratory and he concocted, brewed and made a great many things there. His mice didn't cause much of a stir, at first.

  “There is a shortage of mice, George?” Harry O'Donovan asked him with unveiled irony. “Ah, that one I don't like,” (this was about a mouse sticking its head out of Drakos' shirt pocket). “He reminds me, in an unclean way, of someone I know.”

  “He should, Harry,” Drakos mocked. “I made him to look a bit like you and to sound like you.”

  “Aye,” the mouse said in a high-pitched voice very like that of Harry O'Donovan.

  “Watch you do not go over the line, George!” Harry cried in rising anger. “Are you a mountain, George, that you should birth mice?”

  “They weren't any ordinary mountains that labored to bring forth these mice,” Drakos said seriously. “Believe me, they were the Acroceraunian Mountains themselves.”

  “The Thunder Mountains, George? I always wondered where they were located; where did you find them?”

  “In my own head,” Drakos quipped.

  “Come along, Laff,” O'Donovan said, “let us leave this disgraceful fellow. Imagine a man turning to the manufacture of mice at his age. I always thought that God had made too many of them, but you rather out-God God in some things, George.”

  So we left the Doctor there, with his pockets full of lively mice. But I really couldn't see why Harry O'Donovan was so disturbed by a mouse that looked and sounded a bit like himself.

  Oliver Benedetti paid no attention to the mice at all. Oliver was a dog belonging to the Benedetti family, to Cris and his daughter Chiara. Drakos would put several of the mice right under Oliver's nose, and the dog didn't seem to see them or smell them. “Have you made the small things without a smell, George?” Cris Benedetti asked. “No, you haven't: I can smell them myself, an ozone sort of smell. Then why does Oliver pay no attention to them?”

  “Oliver simply doesn't like the ozone sort of smell,” Drakos said, “so he turns away from them. Though they're pretty well made, Oliver doesn't recognize them as mice. He doesn't even recognize them as alive.”

  “Well, are they alive, George?” Cris asked.

  “Oh yes. Of course they are. Why would I make dead mice?”

  “Mr. Drakos,” Chiara Benedetti said, “the feet of one of your mice don't reach all the way to the ground.”

  “I must have made them too short then, Chiara,” the good doctor smiled.

  “Come along, Laff,” Cris said to me. “We do have some odd friends, but one who goes around with his pockets full of home-made mice is a little too much.”

  “Especially when their feet don't always reach the ground,” young Chiara sniffed.

  But Doctor Drakos, for a biological doctor, was no mean inventor. He had pulled many a good trick, with living things and with unliving; indeed, he sometimes said that he was erasing the mark between them. He had hypnotized ferrous metals and implanted post-hypnotic anti-rust suggestions in them; and they would not rust, those in which he had implanted that resolve. He had put a cheap sheet-iron cover over his patio, and it did not dare to rust with the fear he had put into it. It's an anthropomorphic explanation of how he inhibited metals from rusting; nevertheless, they did not rust. It's an anthropomorphic explanation of the way he made mice also.

  Austro had, from the first, paid a great deal of attention to the mice. He had raised unholy hell about them. He had, in his cartoon drawings, made the charge that Doctor George Drakos had raised unholy hell in creating them. Austro was the houseboy of Barnaby Sheen, a special sort of houseboy—special, meaning of a species, the species being Australopithecus. There were some folks who thought it outrageous that Barnaby should keep a boy of apish and putatively extinct species. “Who else would give him a job?” Barnaby asked. “Would any of these bleeding mouths hire him for anything at all? Name me one of them who'd do it.”

  Austro drew some very stark and spooky cartoons about the newly created mice and their possible consequences. There was hellfire and heaven-fire in those eschatological drawings, crooked lightning, and angry obliteration. But Austro hadn't had a really normal boyhood, and he was often upset by things not normally upsetting.

  “Carrock, come along, Laff,” he said now. “Let's leave the evil doctor to his own devices. There's things about those mice just not right.”

  Barnaby Sheen wasn't much impressed by the mice that Drakos had made. “How do snakes like them?” he asked. “How do foxes and coyotes; how do hawks and owls?”

  “I don't know,” Doctor Drakos said, as if he had never considered the matter before.

  “You don't know, George?” Barnaby asked in cresting incredulity. “But that's what mice are for, to serve as a standard food for a variety of predators. That, and to scavenge a bit, and to relieve humans of uncomfortable surpluses of wheat and other foodstuffs. Will they do any of those tasks?”

  “I don't know, Barney, I haven't tried them on it.”

  “How did you make them, George? How does one create life? Did you have any trouble coding the DNA molecules?”

  “No. They don't have intricate DNA molecules. Those are only needed for reproducing, and my mice will not reproduce. I will make them new every time. No, this is not a disadvantage. It is a distinct advantage. I have variety in my mice that natural-born mice cannot have. I can make my mice widely different, but mice can make themselves only a little bit different. No, they don't eat food; so I do not give them any elaborate equipment or a tract. Oh, they eat wind and electricity, and that's the truth of it.”

  “What can they do, George?”

  “My mice can talk and count; what other mice can do that? My worry is not that they're not good enough but that they're too good. They do things that I didn't create them to do or teach them to do. Who else h
as been brain-lighting my mice?”

  “I believe you will find it has been yourself, from a hidden aspect, George. Had you trouble with the nerves, or building the brains?”

  “As to that, Barney, I used short-cuts and short-cuts and still more short-cuts; and then it all started to fall together. There were so many techniques that I intended to use, and then the mice had already come to life before I got to use them. There are things about them that I don't consciously understand at all. But I have created animal life; no other physician or biologist has ever done that.”

  “But what for, George? How are the mice you made any better than those that God made?”

  “I don't maintain that they're any better, Barnaby. But they are a little different.”

  “Come along, Laff,” Barnaby said. “Let's leave the learned oaf to swash in his own bilge. A man who'd make anything without clear purpose is as confused as a democrat or Darwinian.”

  Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo weren't enraptured by the idea of the new mice either, and they were two of the most tolerant persons anywhere. They had to be tolerant: they had so much else working against them. “There are house mice here who gnaw my members and let sawdust out,” Loretta conveyed. “I don't love them for that, and yet I love them. But these new mice that I sense, I don't love them at all. Austro gives some pretty direful predictions about them, and he's an expert on dire. And Chiara Benedetti says that their feet don't always reach the ground.”

  “Neither do mine, neither do yours,” Mary Mondo expressed. “We forgive it in ourselves, but not in mice. There is something about these mice that is too spooky for me.”

  In the evening I was walking with Austro when we saw George Drakos coming up the road. The weather had already become a little bit agitated, and now Austro became decidedly so. There were bristling green clouds, tumbling and growing; they were moving too fast and they were glowering too darkly. Yes, and they were spitting a bit of fire. Austro also was sparking a trifle, or so it seemed. His hair bristled and crackled. He wished to turn aside. “Austro, nobody turns aside to avoid meeting a friend,” I told him. And besides, Drakos had already come up to us with that long saunter that seemed so slow and easy while it brought him always to a place quicker than one might believe. One was always tempted to say to Drakos, “You cheated; you skipped part of the way in the middle. You didn't really walk all that way that fast.”