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

by R. A. Lafferty

  But Abel Landgood wasn't an odd kid at all. He was absolutely normal. It's the kids who lack or lose the basic talents who are odd.

  The Landgoods had to move twice during the childhood and adolescence of Abel. The family seemed to attract ghosts, and the neighbors objected. (Ghosts are normal, but people often react abnormally to ghosts.) It was not all Abel's doings about the ghosts. Like Joseph Waterwitch, Abel Landgood did not acquire all his talent in his own generation. Both his father and his mother had talent.

  And, like his parents, Abel retained his talents after he had become an adult. An average child will lose such abilities, but a normal child will retain them.

  Joseph Waterwitch (the man with the locating or homing beats, who could bring any interesting location or time or patina into focus and enjoy it) met Abel Landgood (the man with the strong imagination, the image-projecting or eidolon-making talent by which interesting old things could be enjoyed by everybody). They realized that between them they could recreate anything that had ever been — or anything that had ever existed strongly enough to leave its impress on time in patina-form, for patina is the living precipitate of time. On the basis of their meeting and acquaintance they drew up the Landwitch Covenant. Needing guidance, the two men joined forces with John Dragon, the dean of soft sciences at Southwestern Polytech and with Cris Benedetti who was professor of miscellaneous subjects. Dragon got an appropriation, mostly travel money, to test the Covenant in a puzzling historical situation; one far enough distant to be beyond intervening personal passions and prejudices. Cris Benedetti took the two talented gentlemen down to Barnaby Sheen's electronics shop where two young electronics geniuses, a smooth-faced young man named Roy Mega and a hairy-faced young man named Austro, built imposing and sophisticated instruments that would reinforce the talents of the two men and would also give a scientific appearance to the enterprise.

  “I believe that the patina-deposit complex is so complete,” Joe Waterwitch had said on the eve of their first monumental testing, “that it would not greatly matter if all life should disappear from Earth. Secondary life would immediately spring from these deposits. The many millions of micro-books written on skins (on the skins of the rocks, on the skins of everything) would bring forth recreated life — whatever life was most ready and most avid to be resurrected. I believe that I have already experienced glimpses and manifestations of the reactivating mechanism. It would be a curious life and a curious world then. Everything in it would be the ghost of something that had gone before, but the combinations would be new, the motifs and forums would be completely fresh. It would not be a sequential world or a rational one. Anomaly would be characteristic. It would be like—”

  “It would be like the world we live in now,” Cris Benedetti said. “You have described our own world perfectly and I suspect that your thesis is correct. We live in a recreated secondary. The evidence shows that absolutely. All life did suddenly disappear from Earth — I'm not sure when this happened. Secondary life, made up entirely of anomalous ghosts, did spring up from old residues written small on various skins. We are the anomalous ghosts and that world is our world.”

  “I believe that there are a few slight objections to your theory,” John Dragon said with that deadly seriousness that is found only in citizens of secondary worlds. “There are so many things about us that have to be happening for the first time. There are things too flimsy ever to be reproduced. However, we may be living in an abortive secondary.”

  III

  The constituted body known as the Landwitch Covenant, that para-archeological investigating team, failed its first major test. Its little movie, The Fall of Damascus, filmed on a working site, may well have been the worst movie ever made. However its failures came about, it was a sick parody, ridiculously false history, and it simply could not have been a resurrection of the past. It received bitter assessment from the scientific community, for the para-archeological probe had been represented as somehow scientific. The whole group had been completely discredited; and one Khalid had been voted the ironic award of “Worst Actor of the Year, of Any Year”.

  “They gave us no credit at all,” Abel Landgood complained. “This is the first movie ever made to consist entirely of complete ghosts and of complete ghost sites. Who else was ever able to evoke an integrated past so entirely? And of course it is scientific! What else could it be? Admittedly there was something the matter with the past we evoked, but we'll solve that too.”

  “ ‘The Worst Actor of the Year, of any Year’!” Khalid fumed. “I'll show them—”

  “Can you get another appropriation, Dragon?” Joseph Waterwitch asked.

  “No. I'm out completely,” John Dragon said sorrowfully. “I am ragged, bagged, tagged, and fired from Southwestern Polytech. ‘You're making a mistake,’ I told them. ‘You're destroying the balance of things. You need a dean of soft sciences.’ ‘Not that soft,’ they said. Did you ever watch a ceremonial academic putdown? They cut the brass buttons off my dean's coat, broke my plate and turned my picture to the wall.”

  “Worst actor of the year!” Khalid still smouldered. “I'll make them eat that! I don't know why I came through so badly, though. That just wasn't the real me.”

  “It isn't fair,” Waterwitch groused. “We're put clear down, but everyone who touched us comes up smelling like lilacs. That kid Austro who works for Sheen, he has a write-up and an article in the latest Geology This Month. The article is Instrumental Reception of Igneous Rock Mantle Data by Means of Pulsating Heterodyning Grids, and it is subtitled Search and Focus, or Do Rocks Remember? And talk about a gadget! That kid must be a freak. It says that the ‘manuscript’ for his article was chiseled on thin stone tablets.”

  “Who does he think that he is—Moses?” Abel Landgood exploded. “He's a friend of yours, isn't he, Benedetti? What kind of friends do you have anyhow?”

  “Right now, all of us need all the friends we can get,” Cris Benedetti said.

  “Worst actor of the year!” Khalid still moaned. “I'll rub their noses in that before I'm through. But why wasn't it the real me?”

  “Maybe Austro can devise a filter for excessively polarized data,” Cris Benedetti said hopefully.

  “What hurts is that Austro was working for us and got his ideas from us,” Waterwitch insisted. “And Geology This Month described him as ‘highly professional and impeccably scientific; if he were not so, his theories would be grotesque’. If that fuzz-faced clown is scientific, what are we?”

  “Some have it, some don't,” Cris said.

  “But he used us.”

  “Then we'll use him,” Khalid said reasonably. “There's no doubting it; that kid has drunk from the older river. That means that he can enter and infiltrate and topple, and that's what he is doing. There have to be such manipulators working behind the scenes whenever you go into the business of tumbling walls down, and there have to be these awkward stalking-horses out in front. Though I never before thought of myself as a stalking-horse.”

  “Well, just what are you, Khalid?” Landgood asked him. “And what are you doing here?”

  “Yes, we've all been wondering about that,” Cris Benedetti said. “You're a residue among residues, you Arab sand-flea,” Joe Waterwitch said. “I focused on you, and Abel Landgood catalyzed you into apparent being. You're a ghost, a recreation from the past. You aren't real.”

  “What man is sure of his own reality?” Khalid asked. “Are any of you? We desert people have gone into this much more deeply than you Franks have. Thinking isn't your line. But you clods precipitated a Khalid as seen through Damascene-Byzantine eyes. No wonder I was selected worst actor of the year! Why didn't you catalyze the real me, the shrewd, brilliant, spacious, nonpareil political and military genius, the leader of the canniest and trickiest and most sophisticated bunch of men ever assembled?”

  “Ah, because our data was polarized,” Cris Benedetti said. “We tuned in on residues and patinas as seen by Damascene eyes because those were the ey
es that predominated in Damascus. That's the way you looked to those city people, so that's the way you looked to our instruments and film. I believe that it could have been corrected if we had had a little more experience in these things. But it's all water over the dam now.”

  “No, no, water under the dam,” shrewd, spacious, nonpareil Khalid said evenly. “Oh, that water is our salvation! Let's go see those kids. Somehow they're at home in the other river.”

  “How come you speak English, Khalid?” asked John Dragon, the ex-dean.

  “More polarized data,” Khalid explained. “I don't really. But you know me by your own polarized English-speaking minds. So, to you, it seems as if I speak as you do.”

  “Are you still in good graces at Polytech, Benedetti?” Landgood asked as the men (and a contingent man, Khalid, a barefoot ghost in odd robes) walked the half-mile down Six-Shooter Road to Sheen's electronic works. “Oh, they've given me a sabbatical,” Cris said. “They said that I needed a rest. It's fine, I suppose, but it's without pay.”

  “Won't it be a little hard on you to go a year without pay, Benedetti?”

  “It's seven years. They convinced me that a sabbatical is for seven years. They also said that the sabbatical was renewable. They've always been nice people to work for, and they're scientifically orthodox. Some of them will appear on tonight's TV news spectacular, Science Supreme, The End Of The Crackpots.”

  “Which are the crackpots?” Khalid asked.

  “Such as ourselves,” John Dragon said. “Para-archeologists and such.”

  “No, no, they're wrong,” Khalid protested. “Because a thing is done badly, as your thing surely was, is no reason to throw it away. Keep with it.”

  “That other genius kid, Roy Mega, is just as ambivalent as Austro is,” Abel Landgood sighed. “In the latest Para-Electronics Today he is quoted a bit. I'll read it: ‘The Scientific Community may be a little too prone to suspect vivid depictments of time-residue data. Why should such representation not be vivid; as long as it is valid? The translation of residue data falls as easily into anthropomorphic forms as into modified sine wave or any other graphic form. It is no real indictment that a translation of residual men and sites should look like men and sites. However, we cannot condone the excesses of certain adventurers in their recent extravaganza. As the boys say, Do not task us with Damascus. That was a sad and discrediting thing. We wash our hands of such excesses’.”

  “With which water does he wash his hands?” Khalid asked. “From which side of the she-wolf does this cub suck? Ambivalence may often be its own best tactic, but not always. We will see.”

  “There's more,” Landgood said. “He writes, ‘We must begin to accept the fleshing of time-residue ghosts, just as we have arrived at accepting the solid fleshing of TV images. Yet we do well to be suspicious if they are of too funny a flesh. Malodorous and deformed ghosts disprove themselves’.”

  “I'm one of those he means,” Khalid grumbled. “Worst actor of the year! Malodorous and deformed ghost! I'll come back on them. I'll rub their noses in it.”

  “He goes on,” said Landgood, “ ‘We, along with all responsible scientists, must reject these current debasements of—’ ”

  Landgood, reading, collided with Roy Mega, who was strolling in front of Sheen's electronics building.

  “It's good to hear oneself quoted with such total preoccupation,” Roy Mega said. “Gentlemen, ah, I see that you have one of the funny fleshies with you.”

  “A care, young colt,” Khalid said with barefoot dignity. “I have dined on infidels' tongues before, and I'll have yours out by the roots. There's a special flavor to the waggle-well, young-fool tongue.”

  “A care, old nag,” Roy Mega said with gathering hubris. “You aren't real and you aren't here. You are no more than the experimental after-image of a bad motion picture ghost. As an after-image, you are my experiment, and I can terminate you easily. Your apparent continuation after the show and its recordings were finished owes itself to a trick I intruded into the equipment. Your appearance depends on one holding-coil, one small electro-magnet, that I set in the circuits. And it is a time-release holding-coil, so your continuation is quite precarious. In fact, it should—”

  “The coil should have released itself some hours or days ago, should it not, young colt?” Khalid smiled. “It should have released itself when my days of grace were finished. These were days during which I tracked down these men who had had something to do with my awakening. I wanted to find out why I came through so badly, why it wasn't the real me. But now there is more than one holding coil in the equipment you built—and more than one in equipment that you know not of. Oh, I've insured and reinsured the circuitry on which I depend. I am even on the verge of making myself independent of all circuitry, of making myself of less funny flesh, of becoming again more than an electric man. Why should my continuance depend on fleshless circuitry? There is One on whom all depends.”

  “Carrock,” said Austro, the young, hair-faced electronics genius, as he came out of the electronics building.

  “An even stranger colt, you!” said Khalid, turning pleasantly to Austro. “You, if not the other, have drunk from the hidden and intuitive river. You at least can circumvent and enter the walled city. Possibly of funny flesh yourself, but yours is a greening genius from that hidden water.”

  “Mud on my mouth! I have drunk from it!” Austro declared. “And so also has Roy here. He is as conniving and cantankerous a person as yourself, good Khalid. Carrock, why don't we all come inside?”

  They all went inside.

  “This Roy boy, this dolt colt here, he is not as conniving as myself,” Khalid preached when they had settled indoors. “He does not make sure. He does not check back. Had I placed a time coil in an equipment, I would know it when the time had run out and the coil had forgotten to release. Could so careless a young man have taken Damascus? Could he have taken Ctesiphon or Baghdad?” “Like Grant took Richmond,” Roy Mega crowed. “Like Sungai took Dashbashpul!”

  “Carrock, kids. To peace and to work,” Austro poured aromatic oil on the hidden and intuitive waters. “By the sour'd ears of science, we have more to do than set a-blowing the sand of old battles. Carrock.”

  “Are you ever a fancy-talking hair-face!” Khalid jeered. “But I believe that I have heard that you are only a device manufactured by the jinni named Sheen.”

  “Oh, Austro's real enough, Khalid,” Cris Benedetti assured the out-of-time Arab when they were all at ease in the lounge of the electronics building. “And Austro is right. We have to set a-blowing the sand of new battles. Now. But how will we do it? The great walls of science are guarded by so many that not even a mouse can get in. They even have a battalion of a thousand and one furious mouse-hunters. And the bright pennant Science Supreme, The End Of The Crackpots will fly over those high battlements tonight. Khalid, we do need an old desert warrior here.”

  “I am the greatest ever,” Khalid answered. “But several times all of you have spoken of science without total respect, and this I do not understand. We are talking about the same thing, high science, Ilm itself? I thought that science was all to the good. The Byzantines believed that they had come to the end of it: we knew that we had just come to the beginning of it; but we came to that beginning with joy. We ciphered more intricate mathematics in the sand than they in their scrolls. We studied more complex star-ways from our sandy hills than they from their towers. We brewed more chemistries from the bark of one incense tree than they from all their archive dust. At desert smitheries and forges we built instruments and machines beyond anything imagined. And we made a rhetoric and eloquence to carry on and announce these things. After Him whom all adore, we most adored science, the holy Ilm. And now you hold science in bad repute? Has the Byzantine contempt and satisfaction come back? Has the wheel turned full circle? It's almost as if we hadn't whipped them completely.”

  “Yes, the contempt and satisfaction with past knowledge have come back,” John Dragon
said sadly. “And they have encrusted the thing itself. The noble old ship is sluggish and bottom-heavy with barnacles. The Free Brother of Man, your holy Ilm, has imprisoned himself behind walls and is longer free.”

  “We know how to enter and to throw down walls,” Khalid said. “You, the two young geniuses, get yourselves busy instrumenting it. There will be an event, will there? Then we will capture and ride that event. We begin the assault tonight. We will assail the encrustation from inside.”

  “This isn't Damascus, this isn't Baghdad,” Abel Landgood said.

  “Yes it is,” Khalid insisted. “The encrustations, the wallings, the enclosures—they are Damascus, they are Ctesiphon, they are Baghdad. Young geniuses, are you at work on it?”

  “Ah, I'm not quite sure what—” Roy Mega hesitated. “We've been using doubletalk, and we've been washing our hands a lot. I don't know what else—”

  “Carrock, I know, I'm sure,” Austro said. “Here, Roy, come work. We make them use doubletalk in their own mouths.”

  “If I only knew what we're supposed to be doing—” Roy Mega complained.

  “If you have to ask, you've missed it,” Khalid told him. “Surely a smart young man like you wouldn't miss it. We need your fine hubris. We need your sharp distinctions. The noble thing itself will be bruised a bit when we tear through its encrustations, but noble things are always tough. Come, come, Frankish men, we need the fine edge of your minds for our polarity. What we really need is irony, a little unconscious irony.”