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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “All right, we'll do it,” Joe Waterwitch said then.

  The find-and-focus itself took nearly five hours, but the times were not connected and the delay in search did not matter. Then those of the expedition were able to see what was going on at the evening's session in the council room. And what was going on was a developing ruckus.

  There were seven great men sitting in the high seats in the council room: pompous men, somewhat amused now and a little bit fearful. They were amused by an audacious and slight man who was leaping about in the rafters over their heads. He mocked them. He harangued them. And they smiled.

  But they were really alarmed by the monkey-like climbing of this man, actually fearful of his stark animality and his go-devil grinning and of the jinni-like secrets that were tumbling out of him in unbottled speech that sounded as if it would never be exhausted. They were disturbed by the gamin-like thievery of that rafter rooster who'd as soon steal the world as a sack of walnuts.

  “I will command. I will rule. I will slaughter,” the monkey-like man in the rafters was heckling, “and when I have slaughtered enough, then I will become a man of even greater understanding than yourselves.” This heckling climber over their heads was Khalid.

  “I wonder when the Byzantine look made its first appearance?” John Dragon asked his fellow observers. “Surely not in Byzantium,” Cris Benedetti said, “but here in Damascus, in this place, on this night. Look at those seven in their high seats! It has just dawned in their minds that they have lost everything (that is the underlay of the Byzantine look), and that if they continue as they have been nobody but themselves will guess that they have really lost it (that is the brocade surface of the Byzantine look). I don't know how they have lost it, and they don't either. But such towering irony comes only after having lost everything, and having disregarded that loss.”

  There were seven men there with that look on them. In the highest seat was the commandant of the city. At his right was the bishop. At his left was the treasurer. The commandant himself was pomposity justified. He was wealth and line and power and intelligence. He was the deep texture of past pleasures and the aromatic glow of pleasure still to come. He laughed at his own defeat and forbade it to speak. The bishop on his right had exceptional ability, a highly refined and rarified sensibility, a canniness that had obtained an unusually good bargain from God Himself, a stormy sort of sublimation (channeled and diverted thunder), compassion, wit, well-being: and there was a foxy slyness that went with it all. This bishop had fished in stranger waters than his father Peter ever knew: in the Third Ocean of whose very existence both God and the devil are ignorant.

  And the treasurer on the left had the endless geniality that comes from never exhausted stores. He had the money bags that pour out specie forever, to smooth the paths and to make friends. The bags remain full no matter how much is taken from them. He had the sack of inexhaustible pleasure, and the barrelful of those sweet serpents named Intrigue whose joy outlasts that of every other game. And into the eyes of this extraordinary treasurer had come a new glow now: happy treason, the last pleasure of the almost jaded.

  Two other men sat on the right, two other men sat on the left; they were high and intricate men, of the sort who maintained the heavenly Byzantine Empire on earth.

  “I sit in the highest seat in the council room,” jibed Khalid, who had made a seat up in the rafters. This man Khalid was an un-giant jinni who had escaped from some bottle. “And I will hold command of this city.”

  One of the great men on the left of the commandant laughed: Khalid had nearly fallen from his high seat when he gestured too violently.

  “It seems a very precarious command,” the great man said.

  “I want it to be precarious,” Khalid howled. “I am already inside you, though you cannot suspect it yet. I will command. I will order. I will slaughter. I will breach your walls. I lay siege to you now.”

  “How long is the siege that you lay for us?” asked one of the great men on the right, and he grinned in his beard.

  “A half-year siege,” Khalid called down, and he danced on the smoke-blackened rafter. Guards were climbing after Khalid, but they could not scamper about with his quickness or his wittiness; they couldn't catch him. Khalid bounded to other rafters and cross-members.

  “Your eyes are put into your heads wrong and you look out wrong,” Khalid taunted. “Your eyes look for me where I am no longer to be found. You'd double your defenses to keep me out, would you, city fathers? But I am not outside. I am the mind-worm working inside and I besiege you from inside. I came in under the walls and under your minds by the other river, the one that is not to be found in your country or in the maps of it. You great men cannot understand this.”

  “I understand it,” said the great treasurer, and his eyes were a-dance with happy treason.

  “I almost understand it,” said the great bishop, and his fingers were avid to be dealing with strange fish.

  “And I almost understand it,” said Cris Benedetti, one of the men working on the para-archeological probe.

  II

  There is an absolute mystery covering all early Islamic expansion and military conquest. There is no possible way these things could have happened. Circumstances sometimes put forward to explain these happenings are in fact later circumstances created by these same happenings. The clear truth is that the desert Arabs were absolutely inferior to all their neighbors in wealth, numbers, technology, health, ability, intellect, location, ambition, sophistication, weaponry, organization, transportation, and experience in warfare. Their victories could not have been won in reality. It had to be a subjective religious rapture to make it seem to the Arabs that they were conquering. But how was the exterior world and its peoples conned into authenticating these subjective experiences of the miserable Arabs? Moreover, Islam was not then a rapture religion: it did not become so until nearly two centuries later. Nor was Islam then a militant religion. It became so only after the completion of those astonishing, early, world-shaking conquests.

  At Damascus, the attacking Arabs had only one-hundredth the numbers of the defenders. They had nothing but short, curved knives and inferior bows with which to assault the walls. They had no battering rams or siege engines at all — they did not even have entrenching tools. How did they breach the walls after a six-month siege? How did they take the strong town that had one hundred defenders against every one attacker?

  Here was an incredibly small and disorganized band of half-starved, half-demented desert men looking out of pus-caked eyes (Paul was not the first nor the millionth man to go blind on the dazzling road to Damascus), small men, sick men, nearly blind men, men with no ambition and no hope, beggars wrapped in euphoric dreams more ragged than their clothing, men sleeping away most of the hours to forget that they had nothing to eat. How did these men, at the very first step, conquer Damascus? How did they, at the incredibly swift second step, conquer the world?

  Could one travel in a time wagon pulled by time oxen to Damascus in the year 635 and look at the events with informed, modern eyes, it is possible that a missing piece to this puzzle might be found. But I doubt even this. There is no way that those events could have happened.

  —Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History

  “Gentlemen, we have missed it completely! We are stumblebums. That is what the respected scientists have been saying about us all along, and this seems to be the fact of the matter. There cannot be anything wrong with our methods. There cannot be much wrong with ourselves. There has to be something wrong with history. History was not there when we went back to examine her.”

  —John Dragon

  “So much of this has depended on me, and I do not feel that I have failed in any way. I have been the instrument and the receiver, and I believe that I have received correctly what was there. The fact that what was there is impossible is beside the point — overwhelmingly beside the point, I'm afraid. I've been the dowser and the medium, but I certainly am not a happy
medium over this. Where have we failed? Or rather, what is it that has failed us?”

  —Joseph Waterwitch

  “This brings into question the whole subject of reality. Reality has been an assumption, a postulate, an evident basis and beginning. It now seems to have been a false assumption. Reality has disappeared on us when, in this test case, we had the temerity to examine it too closely. What we now need to find and use is an alternate to reality.”

  —Abel Landgood

  “Gentlemen, I believe that our difficulty is that we have been using highly polarized information.”

  —Cris Benedetti

  From the Landwitch Papers

  (the minutes of the first paraarcheological probe)

  The Rivers of Damascus as mentioned in Scripture are two: the Abana River and the Pharpar River. But where are they now? The Abana River is now named the Baroda. This is the only River of Damascus to be found in the physical world. There is no other river in that part of the country. There is no dry bed where any other river could ever have run. The Pharpar River is not to be found anywhere in that scorched land at all. There is no trace or remnant or body print of it to be discovered anywhere on Earth.

  Well then, have you looked under the Earth? Have you looked inside the Earth? Have you looked inside the creatures of the Earth? When a river is lost, we must leave no land or mind unturned until we have found it, for a lost river may be anywhere. I believe that the Pharpar River has always been of the internal sort. It is the secret river that not only greens the soul but also runs under walls and gains entrance to all fortified and walled places of the world and of the mind.

  Regard your own estate and case. Is your own town not built on two rivers which are separated by a firmament between? One of them is the impossible river by which all things may enter anywhere. We'd be robbed of our celestial birthright without it.

  —Ignace Wolff, The River Inside

  The heterodyning of a brain wave produces a difference frequency or beat in conjunction with the normal brain wave — and this difference frequency can be both a sending and an echoing beat. It may also become a receptor beat and, in some cases, a reverberatory beat of very long duration. Of how long a duration? Oh, two thousand years or so before it becomes too greatly diminished to pick up.

  But, scientifically, a beat may reverberate for only microseconds after the inaction of its source: this scientific objection may not be assailed in its own field or context. But may the scientific objection be heterodyned out of its own field? May it be super-heterodyned to a place where it accepts what it had seemed to deny?

  The ever-changing modified or heterodyned wave pattern is a searching or tuning pattern. It seeks whatever is in resonance with its voice. It changes its voice till it finds that resonance. But hardly one person in a thousand can consciously heterodyne his own brain wave patterns to obtain the variations and the beats. The rare ones who can are sometimes called dowsers. True dowsers can get echoes from almost all physical substances — and also from many electrical coronas that are not really physical. Very good dowsers can get resonance and echoes from an even more rare sort of corona, which is called patina. The patina, that aged and weathered surface, is generally thought to be a physical effect and substance; but it hasn't a physical origin.

  Adept dowsers may also get resonances from ancient reverberations (some of them associated with patinas or other coronas, some apparently associated with nothing but themselves) that may have become endemic to a location, to have lodged there securely and enduringly. And dowsers are peculiarly able to get echoes from underground streams, which may be heterodynings of surface streams which are not necessarily in the immediate location.

  A good dowser can hear the signaling of rocks and sands and loams. He can hear water talk. He can hear air talk. He can hear a valley or a fortress speak. Joseph Waterwitch was a good dowser. He came by his talent honestly. He was a Shawnee Indian, and the Shawnees can out-dowse any other Indians in the world. Waterwitch had been given to Joe's folks as a family name because of their expertness in witching anything from water to fresh meat trails.

  But dowsers are scientifically unacceptable. Joseph Waterwitch had been kicked out of the usually free and easy Geologists Club when he refused to deny that he had dowsing talents. He had been kicked out quite literally — out of the private bar, out through the dining room and the meeting room, out through the library and exhibit rooms. Then he was kicked violently down that short flight of five steps to the street, to the injury of both his pride and his coccyx.

  But are all scientists absolutely closed to such things? May not some entry be made into some minds? At times it has been thought that an entrance could be made by certain underchannels, by streams that flow unsuspected below the medulla walls or that permeate the pons variolii to break through. Even at the Geologists Club, there had been one man drenched by the under-river, a man who might open the gates at the proper time — when he heard the off-key whistle of sweet treason. This man knew a lot about odd frequencies, and he could split stubborn rocks with his own double-tuned whistling.

  A patina is a reverberating surface that is composed entirely of its own history and that possibly does not exist in the present time. But this definition beggars John Dragon's statement that there is no room for the present in present time, that the present must always be slightly in the future and cannot be perceived except by this very slight shift into future time. Present time is an anomaly: it is less than a quantum wide, and its very narrowness posits its nonexistence. It is too narrow a crack to exist; and yet, there may be a two-way traffic through that narrow crack. Unacceptable things do come through the narrow crack that is mistakenly called the present—things such as ghosts, cranks, and treasures. A patina may be very deep and still retain all the characteristics of a surface phenomenon. It is made up of old vibrations and waves, and of nothing else; yet it has mass and physical substance, and waves supposedly do not. And a patina, though seldom containing metal, shows magnetic properties.

  It is not only stones and rocks that acquire a patina. The patina is often spoken of as an aging and a weathering, but young and growing things sometimes show striking patinas. An adolescent plum just coming to full color may have a patina; a smoky surface ghost of that full color. It is a patina, whatever other name it bears. A human being may have a patina which contains all that being's experience. And a newborn child may have a surface patina that reflects the complete history of its ancestors as well as its own makeup and shorter history. In countries where the niceties prevail, this valuable patina is often washed off the newborn child. Such removal makes for trauma and dislocation. The child is permanently deprived. He will grow other patina, but it will never be the same. He will forever lack roots and history and surety. He will seldom become a truly reverberating person.

  But is there any proof at all that patina may record and remember, and later transmit or recreate, persons and objects and events? Surely there is proof. Ghosts are the proof — the tens of thousands of reports of ghost persons and ghost events. Ghosts are the transmitting and recreating of old things and old doings.

  You do not accept ghosts? You have not been touched even once by the ghost river named Pharpar? It is not good to remain untouched by it. It is the river of resurrection. If you will not accept ghosts, neither will you accept one risen from the dead.

  The dowser turned inside out is the eidolon man. Joseph Waterwitch was a supreme dowser. His associate Abel Landgood was a dowser-inside-out, an image man or an eidolon man. As a projector of valid eidolons, images, and recreations, he was as expert as a formally untrained person can be. The great breakthrough arrived with the acquaintance and association of Waterwitch and Landgood. Together they drew up the Landwitch Covenant. They had the whole procedure completed between them before they went to have it instrumented.

  Abel Landgood had had a most normal childhood, even excessively normal. He had walked and talked with ghosts from the day he was able to walk and
talk. All children do this, but not all are as good at fixing ghosts as was Abel. He was an imaginative and creative boy. He was weirdly happy in his relations with the world, and that is always important. And he did not like empty spaces at all. Whenever he found a stubbornly empty space, he filled it with his imagination. There had been an empty space between the alley fence and the alley behind his house. Abel filled it with three apple trees and some blackberry bushes, and he would eat apples and blackberries until he got sick.

  There was also a little vacant half-lot across the alley. A house had once stood there. It had burned down. Abel put another house there, a funny-looking house. He put a very fat woman and a very thin man to live in the house, and he fixed their names to be Mrs. and Mr. Ostergoster. He put a boy to live in the house and fixed his name to be Mikey Ostergoster. Mikey fixed a cat. Abel fixed a dog that chased the cat away. Mikey fixed a crazy man to chase the dog with a stick. Abel fixed a soldier to chase off the crazy man. Mrs. and Mr. Ostergoster came out and quarreled with the soldier. Everybody began to fight then. Abel's father came out and unhinged all those folks and the funny-looking house also. And those things were gone in a blinking.

  “You shouldn't have brought back the Ostergosters,” Abel's father told him when they were alone and the echoes of the disturbance were retreating into the secondary patina. “There are people in the neighborhood who still remember them, and remember how they burned in the little house there, ah, in the little house that is not there. And you shouldn't have brought back the Confederate soldier to chase off the crazy man. With our reputation, you can't afford to seem too old-line Southern. And you shouldn't have brought back that particular dog. I remember that dog before they had to kill it. It was one mean dog—it's a wonder you weren't bitten. Cool it a little bit, Abel, or people will think you're an odd kid.”