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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “That's the hardest kind,” Cris Benedetti said.

  “It's almost time for that damnable TV spectacular Science Supreme, The End Of The Crackpots,” Joe Waterwitch growled through clenched teeth. “I will hate the smugness of it, the exclusions, the cursed close-mindedness. And yet I'll be fascinated by that whole barrel of snakes, and I don't know why.”

  “Carrock, so will I, and I do know why,” said the young genius Austro. “Is it two receivers we will set up, Khalid, sir? That way we can have one that shows what everybody sees and the other one to show it the way they're really doing it. That one will be tricky, but very instructive. We will need to follow along as we go so we can modify our patterns. We have to know what it is that we're heterodyning.”

  “I can do it,” Roy Mega said. “I was slow to pick it up, and that isn't my way at all; but I know I can handle it now. Exquisite shielding for the check-set, and unscrambling the scramble! It will be the only set in the world to show our process in unmodified form, a real curiosity. And the modified one will show the full flowering, the tilt, the scramble. There's no limit to it — or to just how good we really are.”

  “Is there power enough for such amplification?” Cris Benedetti asked. He wasn't an electronics man.

  “Electrically, yes,” Roy Mega said. “Mentally—that's up to all of us. And do not be quite your usual kind self, Mr. Benedetti. We need a little urbane arrogance, and we need it from you. We need a little elegance from someone. Is there anyone here elegant besides me? Contribute, men, it is almost time.”

  “Carrock, we hope, we hope!” Austro howled. And he was modifying equipment faster than you could blink.

  “It shouldn't take much electricity,” Khalid guessed. “We took Damascus with only crude sparking coils and primitive Greek fire to amplify and reinforce our own mind-worm bit. Of course it took us six months before we blew down their minds. And our new assault may take us six months or six years or sixty, but we will finish the beginning of it tonight. As to the power, it couldn't have been more than a nudge the wrong way during your reactivation of us that turned me from the consummate genius and masterful person that I am into the worst actor of any year. This is the subtle touch that seems to change nothing and changes everything. One will hardly be able to point to a single element that is changed at all, yet the totality will be changed absolutely.”

  “What is going on here anyhow?” John Dragon demanded.

  “The damnable TV news special Science Supreme, The End Of The Crackpots is going on in thirty seconds,” Cris Benedetti said. “It's to the first audience of one billion persons ever. Be angry or be easy, Dragon, but be yourself. The world is going to see this show through our eyes and attitudes. We must give the world a really fine and new experience. Polarized data! The field has hardly been touched. One can do so many things with it.”

  “Mind-worms. We will be mind-worms,” Khalid said. “We are inside them all. We begin the conquest now, and they'll never know what hit them. We ride the current of that intuitive river named Pharpar. We make the whole world see it through our own elegant eyes. I like that ‘elegant eyes’ part.”

  “But we can't alter a TV program that is already going on,” Joe Waterwitch protested. “We would have to do—”

  “We are doing,” Roy Mega said.

  “Joe, you're the dowser and you don't know where it's at,” Benedetti chortled. “Certainly we can alter it if we bring our equipment and minds and eyes to bear.”

  It was quite a good TV spectacular. Science Supreme, The End Of The Crackpots was a program that people would remember. It would affect them for the rest of their lives. It wasn't quite what had been expected. The crackpots; they came through as the entrenched inner sanctum boys. It took a lot of courage for the scientific community to confess to such weaknesses in itself.

  And some of the things that you had always thought of as a little bit fringe, ah, they got an open-door welcome here. A few of them set you and the whole world thinking on new lines. There has to be something to them: there has to be a lot to several of them. Take that new para-archeology, that especially. By a combination of electronics and human minds, great hunks of the past are really recreated. Old ghosts walk, and they do not look ghostly at all.

  And often, in the electronics building there, a glance at the check-set to see from what rough rocks these men present were fashioning such elegant gems! The original had been rough and intolerant. It had been smothering and shriveling. But the check-set was not seen by the billion persons, only by the seven.

  Oh, but the great and gracious modification which now became the prime original! Yes, the noble thing itself was bruised a bit when the modification tore through the old encrustations, but noble things are always tough enough to survive: and now, for a while, it was no longer smothered and shriveled.

  But the final, elegant, polarized presentation was like an old promise fulfilled, like a hidden river rediscovered. It was an unfolding, a full-flowing. It was finally to see all dimensions of time and space with elegant eyes.

  Mr. Hamadryad

  For some time there had been the feeling of an immediate change in the earthy globe, of a great turning-over that might replace the scatterbrained, petty, irascible and inefficient, though somehow human tone of the world with something that was cool, fastidiously ordered, immeasurably cruel, suave, silky, feline and altogether devilish. But the closeness, the reality of that change didn't sweep over me till I first met Mr. Hamadryad. (I travel in coconuts, and it is ancillary to such travel that I have the fortune to meet such persons as Hamadryad.)

  I believe that Mr. Hamadryad was the oddest-looking person I had ever seen. Surprisingly I regarded him so, for I first became aware of him in The Third Cataract Club in Dongola, and some very odd-looking gentlemen come into The Third Cataract. If you cock an eyebrow at someone in that place, then he's really odd.

  There had been two sets of footfalls outside on the earthen corridor: one set were those of a somewhat splayfooted person in soft buckskin boots; the other were those of a barefoot person, but these latter footfalls were blurred by a sort of double step.

  Only one of the persons came into the club though, and he was the splayfoot-seeming follow in the soft skin or pelt boots.

  “A Stony Giant,” this person ordered from Ukali the barboy, “and the regular for lunch.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Hamadryad,” Ukali said, and he set about building the Stony Giant.

  Hamadryad's voice, when he ordered, had been a sort of muted howl or bark, but not at all unpleasant. The Stony Giant was a large, local drink. It was a huge goblet of palm wine sprinkled with the saline rock-dust of the region. It contained a stork egg, smashed in shell and set afloat in the liquid. And Ukali added a bit of Aladdin's Sesame when the drink was almost ready. The Stony Giant is a specialty of The Third Cataract Club and is found almost nowhere else in the world.

  Hamadryad had a long nose. It was so long that it set him apart from the world, whether he wished it or not. After his vision had traveled the length of his nose and had come to the world itself, it had already traveled half the distance that might be expected of anyone's vision.

  Hamadryad had brown eyes that seemed not to fix on a person but on a point several feet through and behind that person. Hamadryad gave me this gaze now. Then he smiled pleasantly enough at the point several feet through and beyond me. Hamadryad had a full head of hair, though of a peculiar crest and lay. He was a short person and somewhat stooped even in his shortness. But he was lively and quick of motion. His mouth — down there somewhere beneath that very long nose — had a twist of good-natured seriousness. In prospect he seemed a pleasant fellow: and, really, an odd appearance never hurt.

  Ukali finished building the Stony Giant, and he gave it to Hamadryad. The barefooted double steps were heard in the corridor outside again, going up and down, but no one entered. Hamadryad had paid for the drink with a pard d'or, a very old coin of Somaliland. Ukali gave him no change, but wrote a
figure on the air. Hamadryad had set up tab for a week or more at The Third Cataract with the gold piece. Then this odd man came and sat with me.

  “They have explained it all away in unconvincing words,” Hamadryad began with his pleasant howl or bark. “They make it seem like nothing at all. Five-hundred ton lintel stones, and they say that they were teetered up there either with log ramps or earthen ramps, and that the ramps were removed afterwards. Banana leaves! It's nonsense, I tell you.”

  “What is your profession?” I asked him.

  “Cosmologist,” he said.

  The barefoot walking was again heard outside, pounding up and down in that earthen-floored corridor, and I was very curious. What was that very heavy, very silky double step?

  “Is your friend not coming in?” I asked Hamadryad and nodded towards the corridor.

  “He is not my friend. He is my slave,” Hamadryad said. “He was in for a moment — you didn't notice him — but now he has gone out again. I prefer that he remain outside.” Yes, I thought that I had heard this slave come in and go out again, but I had been unable to see him. I knew now that the double step meant the slave was a four-footed creature and that the powerful, silky tread meant the creature was five times the weight and freight of Hamadryad.

  “Really, for even a minor megalithicon, such ramp-building would require the felling of a sizeable forest or else the moving of more dirt than all the earthworms of the world have moved in all time,” Hamadryad was saying. “Even if I didn't know how it was done, I wouldn't accept that it was done with either log or earthen ramps. In Peru three-hundred-ton dressed stones are set into cliff faces that are eight thousand feet high, and sheer. At Baalbek there are thousand-ton stones set in the highest course. What sort of ramps might have been built up to raise such stones as those?”

  “I don't know. I'm not a ramp man,” I said.

  “Really? You look very like one. I'm glad that you're not,” Hamadryad said. “But I tell you that intensive on-the-site investigation would reveal the impossibility of any sort of ramp in any case. Always there is either a continuity or discontinuity of deposit of soil: nobody can build large ramps and then remove them again without leaving clear traces. Nobody, for that matter, could set very heavy lintel or other stones there on earth preparatory to raising them and not leave trace of them. But on the megalithic sites there are no such traces ever. One would be justified in saying that there have never been such ramps. One would almost be justified in saying that there have never been any such large stones on the sites were they not there on their high supports for all to see till this very day.”

  I looked at Ukali the barboy. “Which of the nine kinds of nut is this?” I asked with my eye. Ukali made a jerky motion with his hand, the motion that a user of Arabic script will make when be tries to draw a Roman E in the air.

  An E? Hamadryad was an Easter Island nut? He was interested in that small island that drifts always, at slow or at faster speed, towards a foreordained spot. Why, I'd have guessed that eighth or ninth on the list, certainly not first. He didn't seem like such a one.

  Ukali brought Hamadryad his lunch, the stomach of a suckling lamb distended with its original milk.

  “You can check it with any fairly old stone structure,” Hamadryad was continuing with his pleasant low howl. “Examine Long Barrows, Dolmens, Menhirs, Cromlechs, Henges, Temples, Pyramids and Kifo Pyramids, Sphinxes and Criosphinxes, Sanctums — is it not odd that all megalithic structures are somehow worship buildings and that there are no secular structures among them? — and you will always find the same things: stones that were and are too heavy to be lifted by any human device. The largest modern-day walking crane will hardly lift three hundred tons, but very many of the old buildings have stones weighing from four to eight times that much. Really, there is no device, ancient or modern, that could have lifted them. They simply weren't lifted by machines or devices. All logging or ramping militates against itself very quickly. In no time at all it will become ninety-five percent inefficient. We have the drag, the friction, the longer resolution of angles. The lever-advantage quickly becomes disadvantaged; there is a plain stickiness of all materials that sets early limits. That is why no modern building, say of the last three thousand years, contains really large set stones. The only exceptions are a very few most special buildings built by us initiated ones for our own reasons.”

  Small flakes, pieces, grains of Aladdin's Sesame were moving about on the tabletop, and there was no breeze. I saw that Hamadryad was moving them by an act of will. He really seemed unconscious of his act, though it was taking a lot of his energy. He was practicing this thing while he ate and drank and talked, practicing it against the day when it would be required of him. This was a talent he wished to retain and develop.

  Hamadryad, while clearly one of the nine kinds of nuts, did not seem like an Easter Island nut. Had I mistaken Ukali's sign?

  “How are things on Easter Island?” I asked Hamadryad.

  “Still drifting, and with an accelerated drift,” he said. A shadow had come over him. For the moment he didn't look to be quite so pleasant a person as before he had. “The home is now about twenty-seven degrees south and a hundred and eight degrees west, but it drifts. I'm very much afraid it will reach the dread point in my own lifetime, even within the next two hundred and fifty years. Oh well, nobody remains top ape forever. There are cycles. There are aeons.”

  “What is the dread point?” I asked him.

  “What? What?” Hamadryad barked. Then there was a little business that I missed. Hamadryad had cocked an inquiring eye at or through the barboy Ukali. I felt rather than heard the soundless question: “Which of the nine kinds of nuts is this?” And I flubbed Ukali's quick answer. I caught him just having made a jerky motion with his hand that a user of Arabic script will make when he draws a certain Roman letter in the air. But which? Which of the nine kinds of nut had Ukali signaled to Hamadryad that I was?

  I felt very much put down, but that was only for a moment. Neither Ukali nor Hamadryad was boorish. And now Hamadryad answered me with compassion and in his low, howling voice.

  “Oh, twenty-nine degrees south and a hundred and eleven degrees west is about the center of it. I thought for a moment you were joking about holy things. But you really didn't know, did you?”

  “No, I didn't,” I said, and I felt very ignorant. Ignorant, but determined to get whatever kernel there was in this nut. “But what is so special about the point that is twenty-nine degrees south and a hundred and eleven degrees west?” I asked stubbornly.

  Hamadryad looked shocked. Did he still feel that I might be making fun of holy things? Then he answered me as if he were talking to a child:

  “That's the only point on the globe that God cannot see,” he said then.

  “Why not?” I demanded.

  “Ah, it is in the shadow of His own thumb,” Hamadryad said sadly. “He'll not be able to help us when things reach that point. No one will be able to help us.”

  I hadn't a lot of business here. No coconuts were grown in the region of The Third Cataract, but we did import a few from the Indian Ocean coasts. And one cannot neglect any odd portion of his territory. Why should I feel like an outsider?

  There was still the heavy, silken, double-step sound of bare feet in the dirt-floored corridor, the sound of a powerful animal walking on pads back and forth. I went out to look. There was nothing to be seen there, and the light was good. There was much to be heard there though — and quite a lot to be smelled. There was a little rush now of the feet coming more rapidly, coming at me. There was the stenchy animal signature. There was fear — mine. I bolted back into The Third Cataract Club. The fear didn't follow me there, but a sort of snicker followed. It was an evil, feline chortle. It was a big cat laughing at a lowly human. So I knew what animal was pacing invisible in the corridor.

  “Well, how do you get the big stones up there?” I asked Mr. Hamadryad in total exasperation.

  “Oh, we use panther
s,” he said simply.

  “Panthers? Not leopards?” I asked. For the invisible animal in the corridor was a leopard.

  “Panthers,” Mr. Hamadryad repeated. “After all, a leopard is only a panther gone to meat.” But how can panthers aid in raising five-hundred-ton lintel stones to great heights? I believe that Mr. Caracal came into The Third Cataract Club then.

  Mr. Caracal was a suave, silky man with steep cars. Hamadryad didn't like Caracal, that was plain.

  “Go back into it,” Hamadryad ordered. “You have no right to be out of it.”

  Caracal showed a fastidious contempt for Mr. Hamadryad. Certain unclear things happened.

  “This is rebellion!” Hamadryad shrilled. It may be that Hamadryad left the club then, or that both of them left. Anyhow, something intervened, and I didn't see Hamadryad again for five years.

  2.

  Is the Yin-Yang alternation the same as the Monkey-Cat alternation? Even among the Chinese this is not certain. Just how strong is the compulsion that the dominant member — in the period of its ascendancy — holds over its contrary? Is it strong enough to rupture the Earth? Yes, Paracelsus thought so. Is it strong enough to move mountains? Yes, Mencius was sure that it was. Is it powerful enough to move continents? No, no, that's very unlikely. Powerful enough to move islands, it may be, but not continents. Avicenna believed that even small islands can only be moved a qadam or so a year. A man who sometimes comes into the Geologists Club here says that islands can seldom be moved more than a foot a year, and that Easter Island is moving at only half that speed. He says that the tension is about the same between the Yin-Yang and the Monkey-Cat alternations — and that these are the two strongest contraries. One can move grains of sand with a little disk held in the palm of the hand, if it bears either the Yin-Yang or the Monkey-Cat union-contrast. But increasing the size of the disk will not increase the effect.