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

by R. A. Lafferty

  Colonel Crazelton walked through. “Is everything going all right?” he asked.

  “No, I don't believe that it is,” Donners said. “Epikt, now that I look back on it, it just seems that he was more than a lump of clay. And yet I don't have any memory of him at all. I have something else of him, but it isn't memory.”

  “The analysis shows that it is just a lump of clay, Donners,” Epikt said.

  “All right then. Clay it is. Why not make it dust so it'd be easier swept away or under? Clay is always a little sticky. But it's all simple and neat, is it, Epikt?”

  “No, not really, Donners,” Epikt said. His cigar holder, the Smoe-form, seemed to be puffing away independently of Epikt. “Similar lumps of clay have turned up in more than a hundred pictures from more than a hundred discovery worlds. And they sure do look like men. Tricky light and arrangement that! Very tricky, to be on more than a hundred worlds. Not only do they all look like men, sort of, but they all look like brothers.”

  “The brotherhood of clay, I suppose,” said Colonel Crazelton. “Well, why shouldn't there be?”

  “And all the lumps of clay have one thing in common, Epikt,” Donners mused.

  “What's that?” Epikt asked.

  “They all like to get their picture taken,” said Donners. “Hey, that's right. I never knew one of them that didn't like to get in on a picture.”

  “How was this one taken, Donners?” Epikt asked, and the Smoe cigar holder grimaced and mugged, believing itself to be of the invisible clay. “There's a hundred ways you could have done it, Donners, but how did you activate the picture-snapping in this one? All five of you were in the picture, and the lump of clay also.”

  “Oh, his wife took the picture,” Donners said in a flat voice.

  “Whose wife, Donners?” the Epikt-extension asked archly. Epikt had forgotten to put eyebrows on this extension of his; but now he created them, and he created them arched. “Do you realize what you have just said, Donners?” Colonel Crazelton demanded.

  “Would I have said it if I had?” Donners asked with a spread-out-hands gesture. “Ah, ah, what shall I say now? Is this all there is to losing one's mind, Epikt? What do you think, Colonel? Just have it blow up on you with a little ‘poof’ like that? Dammit, it was the piece-of-clay's wife: that's who took the picture! Wait, wait, it only hurts for a moment and then it will pass. It's gone now, guys. I don't remember how that picture was taken. I really don't. And I bet I'm not going to remember it either.”

  The Epikt-extension gazed at Donners thoughtlessly. This Epikt-form looked a little like an old Beardsley drawing: those mustaches, those big plate-sized eyes, that outré cigar holder, that huge girth, all a bit Turkish looking. And down in the corner of the imagined Beardsley picture that was Epikt there had to be a hardly noticed small smudge. It would be seen only on about the third sweep of the eye. Who could say what it was? Who could say more about it than that it was made of clay?

  “Donners, you were one of the party that returned to a particular world to pick up Procop,” the Epikt was saying, and the Smoe-form cigar holder was mugging and ughing (what's so strange? If Epikt could make a droll extension of himself he could also put enough of himself in a cigar holder to show animation and mockery),” and you found that he had disappeared completely. And the instrumentation, which could discover any animation whatsoever on that world, could not discover any trace of him. He was clear gone, was he, Donners?”

  “Absolutely, Epikt, he was clear gone.”

  “But two moments ago you asked ‘Who can say whether he stayed disappeared?’ Just what did you mean by that?”

  “I don't know, Epikt.” Donners was a little bit flustered with himself. “I hate people who put awkward words in my mouth, and I hate myself when I do it. And I wish the Inquisition would go back to using humans for its questioners. Ah, it seems as if I used to see Procop after that, every time I was back on Procop's World; but I never saw him to notice him much or to think about him. He was a bit like those lumps of clay. There's something about him that still comes to me, if I don't think about it too closely, but that something that comes sure isn't memory.”

  “Donners, I said that we would attend to business first, and then that you might be permitted to regale me with a few tall tales,” the Epikt-article said. “But aren't you mixing the two things up in a pretty sloppy manner now?”

  “Yes. Mixing them up inextricably, Epikt. There isn't any other way. I can't tell you anything else about this stuff. I don't know anything else. It's a nice day, Epikt and Crazelton. Let's go fishing, or—”

  “Or what, man-article?” Epikt asked him. “What else is it a nice day for?” But they were already gathering themselves up and walking out of the Inquisitional Sepulchres. “Come along, Crazelton. Donners says that it's a nice day.”

  “All right,” Colonel Crazelton said. “This is an oblique business and we won't solve it by direct examination in here. Yes, what else is it a nice day for, Donners?”

  “Oh, it's a nice day for a quick trip off-world,” Donners ventured. “Maybe to one of our early landings in the Cercyon belt. We might just notice something there that was missed before. We might even notice the answer to the Crazelton Problem.”

  “Taxi!”—there was a dampish, muddy voice—“Hey, maxi-taxi, go anywhere. Even go to Procop's World.”

  Epikt, Donners, and Crazelton piled into the maxi-taxi. “How come we take a maxi-taxi without any driver?” Crazelton asked. “That isn't very good practice, is it? Or is there a driver?”

  “Oh, sure, I'm the driver,” the hackie said. “Lots of people say that I don't make a very good appearance.” Oh, sure, there was a driver, but he wasn't the sort of a man who would be much noticed. That hackie wore a slouch hat with a beaded headband on the outside of it, and he wore his hair in two long, black braids. The rest of him was less conventional though.

  And he really gunned that maxi on the takeoff. He set it to roaring and screeching, and he left a trail of flame fifty kilometers long below him.

  “Things like that are bad for the streets,” Crazelton told the hackie. “Hey, quit blinking on and off like that. It makes you hard to see.”

  “I don't blink on and off,” the hackie said. “I'm just a low-resolution kind of guy.”

  “It's dangerous to drive like that,” Crazelton lectured. “A takeoff like that from a local traffic area can well crisp a pedestrian to a cinder. It would even burn up a cruising car with all the people in it. It's unmannerly to drive like that.”

  “Hey, I know it, but it sure is fun,” the hackie said. “Hey, will this maxi ever dig out!”

  “Did the driver say to Procop's World?” Donners asked. “Why not go to Donners' World? That's the one I know best, and that's where the picture was taken.”

  “No, we'll go to Procop's World,” the Epikt-form said. “We have an early picture from there too. Besides, Procop might have become undisappeared in the meanwhile, and we might run into him. Now then, Donners, before you diverted me I was accusing you of mixing up tall tales with the business at hand.”

  “Yes, and I said that it couldn't be helped, that they were tangled together too tightly to be separated. What we are really investigating is the shaggiest of tales. And you are a computer and don't even know how to state the problem in its right area.”

  “Ah, Donners, that lump of clay on Donners' World, what was it he said one time that tickled you?” Epikt asked, and the Epikt cigar holder cupped a hand to ear as if to hear it too.

  “Ah, clay-face said a thousand things at a thousand times. But this one that comes to mind—”

  “Yes?”

  “He said ‘Hey, you know what the toothless termite said when he came into the Shaggy Star Bar?’ ”

  2

  The Malayans said in the old times that when men got to the moon they would find a Chinaman already there running a store. The old Germans said that when the afterlife was reached there would be a Wendt on every good stream already runn
ing a mill. The Spanish said that it would be a Catalan already running a fulling mill. The Gascons said that whenever a strange world was reached one would find a Gypsy there with a blind horse and a jar of salve that would give vision to that horse only until it could be sold. Well, what will we find to be already there when we come arriving at new worlds? What is common to the Chinese and Wendts and Catalans and Gypsies? What is the least common denominator of humanity? What is the most fundamental clay of them all?

  —Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History

  The Idumeneans said that, as to humanity, God created the fundamental clay only; that this clay was not animated in the beginning, but that human life was implicit in it. They said that at various later dates fifteen archangels, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Israphael, Uriel, Jeremiel, Ninip, Uzziel, Ithuriel, Zephon, Abdiel, Zophiel, Urim, Urania, and Thummim, came by and formed the implicit clay into particular races, the races to which they would be the guardians. This seems to be a primitive and simplistic theory, almost a myth. Paranormal research has proved the accuracy of it, however; and this Idumenean thesis cannot now be doubted.

  Fifteen archangels formed fifteen races out of that clay. But are there not sixteen races of men in all? Whence comes the sixteenth? Did the implicit clay still contain another race after the fifteen had been activated from it? Would this make the sixteenth to be the oldest or the youngest of the races? Was this sixteenth people really the first and original, our Paternal Clay, our Heritage? What is the name of this race from which we may all descend?

  —SERMONS OF JOHN KING SPENCER

  “Well, what did the toothless termite say when he came into the Shaggy Star Bar?” the distraught Colonel Crazelton asked after the silence had hung there for a long minute.

  “He said ‘Is the bartender here?’ ” Donners finished it.

  3

  What then did Columbus discover? And why was he the first one able to see them? Had they changed? Or had he and his mariners taken an irreversible step for all of us? Or is it irreversible? Are they often seen even now? At first meeting, it took me five minutes to notice one of them. And I'm told that such experience is common — common, but seldom noted.

  —LETTERS OF DONALD BARON BANTING

  “Take your time, Colonel,” the maxi-taxi driver said. “It'll come to you.”

  4

  The Census Bureau says that, on the basis of numbered facts and listed names, there are a few more than two and a half million Indians in this country. But the Bureau also says that, on the authority of its most sophisticated instrumentation, there are an additional thirty million Indians living in this country, usually and unaccountably invisible; and that there may be a hundred million buffalo not usually figured in the count of livestock. And Barnaby Sheen of Oklahoma Seismograph Co. says that, on the basis of his own instrumentation (even more sophisticated and even more suspect) there may be ten times these numbers of “low resolution” (quasi-invisible) men and beasts.

  —CONTROLLED FLASH, THE PICTORIAL MAGAZINE

  OF THE STATISTICAL INDUSTRY (REPRINTED IN THE WEEKLY FREELOADER)

  The Census Bureau's instrumentation is getting too damn sophisticated. And Barnaby Sheen is Mr. Brain Damage himself.

  —LETTERS TO THE EDITOR,

  THE WEEKLY FREELOADER

  On Procop's World, Colonel Crazelton became very nervous.

  “Where has that maxi-taxi driver gone?” he cried. “He's either blinked out again, or he's gone. If he goes off and leaves us here on this world, it will be pretty inconvenient.”

  “I'm here, Colonel,” that hackie said. “I don't blink off. It's all your own eyes. And I told you that I was a pretty low-resolution fellow.”

  “Epikt, quit clowning!” Crazelton snapped as though searching a target of attack. “What's so smart about smoking a cigar that's ten centimeters from your mouth? Any stage trickster could do that.”

  “I'm smoking it with a Smoe cigar holder, Colonel,” Epikt said. “There isn't any ten-centimeter gap. How come you have so much trouble seeing Smoes? The hackie here looks like a Smoe, and you have trouble seeing him too. Do you also have trouble about not hearing things?”

  “No. I hear too many things that aren't there,” Colonel Crazelton complained. “I hear a stomping now, and a lowing, but it isn't the same as proper cattle lowing. It's possible that such sounds on Earth would be unnoticed amid the regular background noise, but here the background is slighter. And I hear, oh, no, that's all imaginary. Epikt, give me everything that you have on the property of invisibility of unbaked clay; and on bison; and on Smoe physiognomy; and on apperceptions that bypass memory and sense reception; and on anything else that you think might be germane. We should have stopped off and loaded up a few more of your brains before leaving Earth.”

  “No, Colonel Crazelton, I have plenty brains along,” said Epikt the dapper machine. “This isn't a very cerebral mission. Unbaked clay often hides from the eye by merging into the background. That's all that anybody knows about the property of invisibility of unbaked clay. But it should come through clear to the other senses; you should be able to hear it and smell it.”

  “Am I unbaked clay?” the maxi-taxi driver asked. Yeah, he had a big, hooked, Smoe nose on him, and very low resolution.

  “You're half-baked, Hackie,” Donners said. “Let's go have a drink. I think there's an old friend of mine motioning to me over there.” And Donners and the maxi-taxi driver ambled off.

  And Kilroy was seen crossing the landscape, a tall, rangy wraith with a far-off look in his eyes.

  “He is everywhere,” Crazelton said. “Is he generic, do you suppose? And where would Donners and the maxi-taxi driver go to get a drink here on an uninhabited world, Epikt? Hear it and smell it, you ask? Ah, that's what I'm doing: but I don't trust my ears and nose much more than I do my eyes. Epikt, my basic training was in zoology. And, well, I took my very basic training in a zoo. I know what that has to be: that stamping, that lowing (not a conventional cattle lowing), dammit, the booming, the belching, the rattling of hooves (they'd rattle even on velvet), the smell of them, and the plain multitudinousness of them! Epikt, there has to be a test. Are they here on this uninhabited world, or are they not?”

  “Sure, they're bound to be here,” that machine Epikt said. “How would the clay-faced Smoes live without them? You have to remember, though, that buffalo are low-resolution animals. They are clay-colored. And they are probably made out of unbaked clay. Yes, Colonel, the buffalo is also of the implicit clay. It is nearly everywhere in great numbers, and it is nearly always invisible.”

  “I don't mean buffalo. I mean particular bison,” the puzzled Crazelton said. “It was bison we had in the zoo. I'll never forget them.”

  “No, you don't mean particular bison,” Epikt corrected the colonel. “Bison is a weasel word. Colonel Crazelton, a buffalo just can't be particular. He's the generalized beast. He's the ancestral clay from which all the other beasts are formed.”

  “I don't even understand the ancestral clay from which all the people are formed,” Crazelton said. “Are the clay people the Jews?”

  “Jews? Those Reuben-come-latelies? What, with the toy noses on them? No, Colonel, they're not red-leg enough to be the original clay people. But there is a test for your buffalo, whether they're real or not. It's the hokey. That can't be faked. If it is real, then it must have come from real and present animals, however merged with their background they are. Remember the hokey, Colonel. Notice the hokey. Look out for the hokey! Oh, oh, too late. It does come through pretty pungent, doesn't it, Crazelton?”

  “It sure does, Epikt. Mighty pungent, mighty pervading. And it shouldn't be all that hard to see. Yeah, I'll be a bit smelly for a while, Epikt.”

  “I smell something too,” Epikt gasped. “Something completely other than all this. I knew those Smoe-faces could make fast cars out of something, but I sure did not know that they could make—whoof! Talk about a pile of junk! But just think of some of the things he could do
if you managed him right! Hey, I got to get a closer glom of that guy.” And Epikt had dashed off.

  “Inexplicable, inexplicable,” Colonel Crazelton said. “I have a feeling that things are beginning to come apart.”

  “Give me the boots,” the woman said to Crazelton. “You wouldn't even know how to start to get the buffalo hokey off of them. You have to use powder-weed and feather-weed and snakebite-weed.” She dumped Crazelton on his rump and pulled the boots off him. “And flimsy-rock and shoestone-rock and soap-me-down-rock.” “What is your name?” Colonel Crazelton asked the woman. There was powder-weed dust in his eyes and he couldn't see her clearly.

  “Joanna Sweetstomach,” she said. The woman took Crazelton's boots and went off with them. Crazelton wondered only mildly about there being a woman on the uninhabited world. There were other sensations impinging on his senses.

  There was another roaring, a booming, a belching, a whining, a rattling, a lowing of uncattle, a humming—the sweetest humming ever. And that humming strengthened and rose into a joyous scream.

  “They're all stock cars,” Kilroy said to Crazelton. “Special stock. Only the engines and bodies have been modified and jazzed up. Some of those machines ran in the demolition derby on Bernheim's World yesterday, and a couple of our hot-fire boys bought a couple of the wrecks and brought them here to fix up. They don't care a whole lot about derbies or formal races though. They just like to rev up the things and dig out with them and run them over the roughest ground there is.”

  “Cars, Kilroy? I thought they rode horses,” Crazelton said.

  “Oh, sure. They like to ride horses too. They put flintshoes on them to make them spark when they run. But fast cars are the first love of all of us. You got to remember that we had fast cars way back when horses were still rabbit-sized.”