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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “The old rules say that I am always supposed to win,” Valery declared, “and that is the way it is really played.” She overturned the card table, and it was like clattering thunder. It was a very heavy table, not really a card table at all. None of the rest of them except the gigantic Director Gregory would have been able to overturn that weighty thing. The Johnny Greeneyes extension of Epikt gathered up the valuable pack of Pape Jaune cards. Pape Jaune, the Yellow Joker or the Yellow Dwarf, but who was Pape Jaune really?

  “It's too nice a day to be inside this stinking Institute,” Valery announced. “Oh, I'm sorry, Epikt! That's almost the same as saying that it's too nice a day to be inside that big stinking brain of yours, and really I like your big stinking brain. But let's be outside for a while.” And they burst out like a cloud of April flies. (Some of the rare April flies are people-sized; do not forget that.)

  “I wonder if the record-setting lady in the lying-in shop has had her scrat yet?” Valery asked the world.

  “I'll go see,” said the Ancient Scribe extension of Epikt.

  “Oh, springtime, springtime!” Valery cried, catching hold of both Aloysius Shiplap and her own unoutstanding husband Charles Cogsworth. “Oh, to be young and foolish in the springtime! I wish that it might last all the year.”

  “Of course it will,” Aloysius said. “I thought you knew that.”

  And Gregory and Glasser walked on that unkempt ridge that rises above the Institute, and talked about various business while the flaming ducks still pelted down.

  “What they are,” said Gregory, “is pieces of the sky. They break off and fall and catch fire. Ultimately the sky is made up entirely of ducks, though scripture mistranslates them as quails. It is because of this composition that we often hear the term ‘duck sky.’ ”

  “I sure never heard such a term,” Glasser said.

  “But scripture does not mistranslate,” the Johnny Greeneyes extension of Epikt said. “Quails they are, the quails of the flesh-pots. Huge, it's true, but quails. We have the holy words for evidence: ‘We loathe our manna, and we long for quails.’ ”

  “That's Dryden. He's not scripture,” Gregory admonished.

  “He is to me,” the Epikt extension said, “and I speak ex cerebro, from the brain itself.” (But Epikt had, from the human viewpoint, odd literary tastes.)

  “Everybody accepts the blasted burning birds,” Glasser said querulously. “Nobody questions them at all today. But I never saw such a thing as this shower of flaming ducks in all my life. What can possibly cause such a phenomenon?”

  “Ah, the fellows flew too close to the sun,” Director Gregory explained it.

  2

  This is the year on the end of the rope.

  This is the year when Joan was Pope.

  “ ‘Clement V was pope from 1305 to 1314,’ ” Gregory read from a tape spewing out from a section of Epikt's brain, from the correlating section.” ‘And he was pope in Avignon, not in Rome. There was no pope in Rome in those years.’ ”

  “And John XXII did not become pope till the year 1316,” came another tape from another section of Epikt's brain, from the explicatory section.

  “He'd have been three years old then,” Valery mumbled. “So he matured quite early, but not as early as some members of his family did.”

  “Project the whole disputed year of 1313, Epikt,” Director Gregory ordered.

  “Impossible,” the machine groaned from its depths. “You don't know what you're asking.”

  “Project it in the context of only one city then, the town of Amor which had been and would be Roma,” Director Gregory said.

  “Oh, all right,” the machine Epikt agreed glumly. “It will be sketchy, though, and not from any fault of mine. There is something inherently sketchy about the persons and events themselves. Whether they were real or not, the things that happened didn't have much depth to them.”

  This is Epikt's account of the disputed year in the context of the city of Amor. The year itself was subjectively much longer than one year. The subjective sun rose and set several thousands of times during that compensating year. Indeed, though it was all one unmomentous moment, it was half a dozen decades on its own, less real level. Yet it can be measured, from one All Fool's Day to the next, and it takes the place of only one objective year.

  Of the ruler in Amor during the disputed year, there was less than met the eye. She was small; she was insignificant. She warred against significance and meaning.

  Joan Hedge-Green was born on All Fool's Day (sometimes called New Year Day) of the year 1313. She was but one of an exceptionally large birthing. She was not baptized, although an attempt was made. The water boiled or vaporized away on her approach, and the salt turned to putrid flame: thereafter she was not touched by either salt or water in all her short life. Her brothers at the same birthing had all been baptized John, and she took for herself the equivalent name Joan. She had nothing whatever to do with her sisters of the birthing.

  Though she was grammatically feminine, she was a perfect hermaphrodite, a jape, a scrat. She was sometimes called the Pape Jape or the dwarfish jape on account of her small stature. She had deformities, but their nature is not known. She walked and talked on the day of her birth, but in no other way was she remarkable.

  She left her hometown on the afternoon of her birth. She left by diabolical conveyance or vehicle, the black-wing express over the randy roads of the low sky. By one account she went to Roma in Italy. By another, she went to the town of Amor, “between the Germanies and Spain.” By a third account, the two towns were the same. She went there, and she set up an antirule or an antireign.

  But she did set up court there. She issued coin of the metal known as fool's gold. The sovereign coin was the sannio, and the system was tredecimal (to the base thirteen).

  Joan's forecourt was known as the Fleshpots of Egypt. (The Egyptian was but one of the motifs of the court; there was also the Babylonian and the Phoenician and others.) She fed her folk on fowl flesh; this was the roasted flesh of giant quail (all of them capons) that fell flaming from the low sky. She fed them on false-fish from that part of her court called the Rivers of Babylon. She fed them on a cheese so rank that it stood by itself, and came on command. She fed them on holy cow; and on unborn calves and colts, on unborn lambs and kids, on unborn cubs and children, all of which were roasted in that part of her court called the Ovens of Moloch.

  She gave her folk break-bone bread, and maid bread, and giant bread, and love loaf. She gave them wasp honey and hornet honey. She gave them blood pudding and offal (“Love each other and eat offal” was one of her high mottos) and bad wine. A visitor in Amor Town that year (there was no such town in any other year) reported that most of the courtiers did know the difference between good wine and bad wine, and that they preferred the bad. Joan gave her people sulfur for condiment, salt being forbidden to them. She gave them heifer milk.

  And Joan provided her people with hemp and with happy-poppy, with gobbling mushrooms and with ragged dream-weeds, with all the unreality seeds and substances and oils, with the aromatic and reason-wrenching plant known as smoke-poke the anti-incense; and the anti-incense raised its smoke not to heaven but to the low sky. These things were dispensed in that part of Joan's court known as the Ships of Tarshish.

  The visitor to Amor, the one just mentioned, had asked several of the courtiers, “Do any of you know of any giant nearby who has disappeared or been slaughtered?”

  “Yes, there was one,” the courtiers told him. “Our Papess Joan had him blown up with the new blowup powder from China. There may have been others, but now there will be no more giants. Pieces of them will smash down from the low sky whenever the weather is right. These are what we call giant bread.”

  So the courtiers had plenty to eat and drink and smoke and inject. They had more than enough, for they finished nothing at all. They were grinning, nervous, ecstatic, jerky courtiers, robust of ear, but somewhat deficient in all other parts.

&nbs
p; The city of Amor was built lightly, loosely, insubstantially, unpatterned and unstructured. It had solved the cursed necessity of having buildings and such materialities, for its buildings were very short on material. They were false-front and false-middle erections. The buildings were built of cardboard.

  (“But they didn't have cardboard then,” the avid annalist said. Had they not? Disputed years are not in sequence. They have what they have. But no, the annalist was correct. They didn't have cardboard in Amor.)

  The buildings, the whole town, was built of bark and willow withies. They were tricky, and they were almost grand. It was an architecture almost without weight. White and gray clay was smeared on the bark, and behold! there was the appearance of regal marble. All were gilt with fool's gold in whorled design, and at the same time all were in motley. Yes, the buildings, the buildings were in clown-suit getup of all light colors, with their own rakish royalty about them, and their precociousness. There was no maturity about them: they did not desire maturity. And at the same time there was nothing of the childlike: they sure did not desire children. There was the taut interruption, the jerk back from the momentous. (“That no thing come to term!” was another of the high Amor mottos.)

  And many of the buildings were no more than burlap cloth new out of China (so many things were new out of China, the feeble tea, the sleepy poppy, the tuneless music, the lack of giants) and tent poles. But these buildings showed their own solidity without weight (the sleepy poppy was partly responsible for their showing of solidity), and their own dazzle. In the presence of this dazzle, burlap is almost sunshine-color, it is almost gold, almost yellow, almost rich brown; and it is made out of the holy hemp and the unholy jape-jute.

  These near-weightless buildings were peculiar in their horned domes, in their toadstool towers, in their lacelike pillars. Burlap shapes much more easily than stone, though its strength is less.

  The buildings would have blown down in a good wind, but for the long, disputed year there was no wind at all, no hint of a storm, not even a breeze.

  It's true that in one region there was a semblance of a breeze now and then, and little bells (like sheep bells or goat bells) seemed to tinkle in this breeze. But it was all masquerade. Close examination would have shown that each bell was shaken by a small worm to cause the tinkling. They were wooly worms, caterpillars really. And a very close examination would have revealed that each of these caterpillars had its head notched in an inhibiting incision: the thing would never come to term; it would never be more than a caterpillar.

  And also there was something wrong with the tinkling of the small bells. Fine examination would have shown that each of them was cracked, as was their sound. In this region also there were trees with leaves too green, and meadow flowers with blooms too yellow and too red. There was sodded grass that was not true grass. There was a rank goatishness over everything, but it was not the whiff of honest goat. This false breeze and false greenery were in the region of the court that was called the Groves of Arcady.

  St. Peter's looked distorted and deformed. But St. Peter's was not built yet? It may not have been, as you know it; but it was built of bark and burlap and lashed poles. It was a burlesque of what it later became. There is no law that a burlesque of a thing may not appear before the thing itself.

  The afore-cited traveler to Amor in the disputed year has written that the tongue of the people was langue d'oc and that the ears of the people were asses' ears. Others have said that the ears more resembled goats' ears. The people could waggle their strange ears, and many had painted them motley colors, one yellow and one red. But there was nothing artificial about the strangely mutated ears. They were well rooted, and they were robust, the only robust things about those folk. And they had to be. The noise there was loud. Even the great mutated ears often bled bright red blood from the overpowering sound. And the sense of balance which lives in the inner ear was often destroyed. This accounts for much of the eccentricity of the chorea or St. Vitus dancers. They were the wobblies. The shattered and shattering noises also deformed other wavicles: those of light (for they made all colors into a crooked dazzle, and they manufactured colors where there could not be colors); the olfactory wavicles, so that the cloying bloodiness of giant bread, the skyscorching feather smell of flaming ducks or quail, the burning pine knots of the steamboats, the rotten-roses floweriness of the court were all blended into a tall symphony of smell; the radio wavicles that mutated till they brought programs from the distant past (“This is station ALEX, Alexandria, Egypt, bringing you the Year One Wonders”) and from the distant future (“Station KVOO, Bristow, Oklahoma, bringing a program sponsored by Johnny Horany the Hamburger King”). But it was the sound wavicles that predominated, that had made the ears become the highlights of the heads.

  There was amplification for the electrical guitars and other instruments. This amplification had been made possible by the insoluble genius of Sparky McCarky. That wandering man, the Unholy Fool of the Hebrides, had brought, in jugs, from his native Benbecula Island, a quantity of the spectacular lightning that nests in the crags there. He had brought this jugged lightning to Amor Town; he had installed plug-ins where it might be tapped, and so his lightning had been turned into amplified sound.

  The music and the lyrics weren't much. One couldn't hear them for the sound. There was a sort of projection in midair of the musical scores and the words of the lyrics. Some say that they were projected as on a visual screen; others say that it was a multimedia screen. Some of those poets weren't bad. Dante was there for part of the year. Others of the great ones were there for a while, but finally the bad poets drove out the good ones.

  In one central part of Amor Town, the sound reached such a strength that it sustained itself thereafter. When hands were removed from the instruments, the instruments still dinned on. When singers left, their voices remained. There was no stopping them. And when, beyond this noisy centrality, in the other fun spots — (The Gory Ox, The Calamity Howl, The Whoop Coop, The Gayety Gate (where Gayety Unrestrained sang with her sinewy voice) — the sound died away during the rare sleeping hours, that sound could be “lighted” again at the great, self-sustaining noise center, and it could be carried on a vibrating string to any of those bistros, there to rekindle the dead sound.

  The technology of Amor Town in the disputed year was anachronistic and atrocious. There were the steamboats which could not have been if that were a proper sequence year. But the steamboats were there and, especially in the mornings, were always blocking dry and rubbled streets. It is believed that they steamed out on the morning dew and were stranded when the dew dispersed. The steamboats, old sternwheelers or sidewheelers, had names like Hierophant's Show Boat, April Queen, Joanie's Show Boat (the show girls on that one were named Joanie, Janie, Jeanie, Junie, Johnny, and Ginny), The Big Casino, Fruity-Tootie's Show Boat, and Five Card Charley's River Rag-Tag. It seemed that these steamboats properly belonged to some other place and time (improperly, all places and times belonged to Amor Town in the disputed year).

  And then there were the automobiles (if you will permit our coining an illegitimate word from one Greek and one Latin root). These were machines: they ran on wheels and were powered by smoke. They were also called the Clown Cars, and they ran around on the green grass of Love Plaza. They ran erratically, in circles and in loops. They exploded so as to shake the whole town. They buckled in the middle and left droppings, sometimes a pile of clowns who untangled themselves and ran in pursuit of their vehicles, sometimes a pile of camel excrement steaming and fragrant, sometimes a roaring lion who soon burst into flames, showing himself to be only a paper lion. Sometimes the clown cars reared up on their hind wheels and honked terrifying horns. But, besides the steamboats and the clown cars, there wasn't much real technology in Amor Town.

  (Here a tambour makes drumming sounds.)

  I love with every orifice,

  I love each dampish channel red,

  I love all flesh alive and dead, I


  love the bottomless abyss.

  —Joan Hedge-Green (Papess at Amor)

  (Here the drumhead of the tambour splits.)

  (Here a ram's horn sounds.)

  Nor guessed the situation bit,

  Nor found the Lord so dull a lover,

  Nor used the love-as-catchword kit

  A multitude of sins to cover.

  —Archipelago

  (Here's the ram's horn cracks.)

  (Here a percussion triangle rings “ting, ting.”)

  The eternal triangle

  —Anon., 1907

  (Here the broken triangle sounds “tunk, tunk.”)

  (Here a postboy's horn blows three notes.)

  Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end.

  —Chesterton

  (Here the postboy's horn blows three more notes, but far away.)

  Love was the theme of Amor Town, and the triangle was the symbol and shape of that contingent society; the triangle, and its solid form, the tetrahedron. The sound of it was triangular, the groupings were triangular, and its prismatic light was triangular. Joan Hedge-Green herself formed an immediate love triangle with her two lovers, the Clown-Devil and the Maid of Wands. (“Glory, love, and love some more for Babylonian Jane,” as Rudyard said, but not quite.) Every person in Amor Town was a ravening lover. (“So I move mountains and I love them not, then I am nothing,” as Paul said, but not exactly.) Each lover had its own Ares and its own Aphrodite, and each was by turns Ares and Aphrodite to others. This was the triangle repeated over and over again in the love plane, the interlocking loving that is not accountable ever. (“Blessed be that love that shatters all its offspring on the stones,” as the Psalmist said, but not precisely.) But the plane does not go up far enough, and it sure does not go down far enough.