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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “He could have what?” the three Conglomerate gentlemen croaked in disbelief in their single voice. “Mrs. Windfall, your husband is making all the new things available free. There are millions of dollars in this if you can help us locate him, or simply tell us where he is, if you know. Then we can work out the double modification, and we will have everything on a paying basis.”

  “Millions in it for me, and tens of millions in it for you,” Griselda said thoughtfully. “And what is in it for my husband, Lemuel, who apparently doesn't want to be found? Please explain to me about the double modification.”

  “We will take one example out of dozens,” the three men spoke in their single voice. “Smithstone Clay has become edible, and we believe that Lemuel Windfall has made it so. In nine billion years Smithstone Clay has never been edible before; and now it is. There were previous hints of it, of course. There were clay eaters in assorted boondocks. But real Smithstone Clay has never been found in abundance before. Now it is. And who can say when or how it happened? Who kept a running census of so worthless a thing as Smithstone Clay? But now it is no longer scarce and no longer worthless. That is good.

  “But it comes free to everybody. That is bad.

  “It would be simple to put a modification into it at the other end, at your husband Lemuel's end, so that it wouldn't become edible until we put the countering modification into it at this end. This is the double modification. By this we can control the products or traffics or cargoes or potentials or circumstances. And then we will be able to sell it, for a fair price, to the whole world, instead of having it go free. And people always appreciate a thing more when they have to pay for it.”

  “Oh, sure,” Griselda said. “I will think about this, gentlemen. And I will ask Lemuel what to do about it, if I can find him with his ears standing open.”

  “And, Mrs. Windfall, there are dozens of other new and advantaged things besides Smithstone Clay,” the three men tried to explain to Griselda in their unity talk.

  “I know pretty much what the other new things would be,” she said. “I watch the ripples, and I can guess what innovative rocks are being dropped into the pond. Particularly can I guess them when I've heard Lemuel talk about them for fifty years. I will let you know, gentlemen.”

  Griselda had a little talk with herself after the gentlemen of Conglomerate had taken their leave. “My Lem has succumbed to the Devil's most transparent temptation,” she said. “I wish that he wouldn't do things like that. He should never wander off from me and do things on his own. He hadn't left his first childhood, and now he's fallen into his second. ‘Command that these stones be bread,’ the Devil must have told him. Why is it that nobody sees the heresy of the ‘Feed-the-world-by-easy-device’ proposal any longer? The Devil got Lem in a weak place there. He always had a soft spot in his heart for the Devil, and he always had a soft spot for the ‘Feed-the-world-by-easy-device’ ploy. I've told him that the Devil will be the ruin of him yet.”

  Griselda went to visit a sibyl in a cave out on the Sand Springs road. It was one of those caves that run back into the bluffs just before you come to Union Street Hill. Once there was a restaurant and nightclub named The Cave in that block. Now the block was known as Sibyls' Row. There were half a dozen sibyl studios and one brake-lining shop in that block, and one empty cave with a FOR RENT sign. “I would like your help in locating my husband,” Griselda told the sibyl. “Here is his address.”

  “If you have his address, why do you need my help in locating him?” the sibyl asked. “Does he live at the address?”

  “Yes, I suppose he does,” Griselda said, “but I don't. I'm not sure that the address is real. I hardly know how to say this, but there is something very spooky about the place. I believe I could go there—and I intend to—and that my husband would be there. And yet I might not be able to see him or talk to him. And I might not be able to come back. There are things accumulating there. Things were accumulating long before my husband went there to work and live. And other things have been similarly accumulating in other places or in other entrances to the same place, for long ages. I have this information but I don't know where I have it from.”

  “I will give the address to my python,” the sibyl said. “He will get to the effective level of it.” The sibyl went down into a lower room to give the assignment to the python. And after a while she came back.

  “Rats, rats!” she said in an odd voice.

  “Is that an expletive?” Griselda asked her.

  “Not this time. It's just that I'm almost out of rats. You know, there isn't a single rat catcher listed in the phone book this year. Rats and rabbits are what the python eats. You were talking about accumulations, Mrs. Windfall. Yes, there have been these most spooky accumulations for ages. For long ages before men appeared, these accumulations are to be found, so the peculiarity of the addresses must go back before mankind. I wonder just who was living at those dubious addresses then. Whatever the species, they had affinity for mining and for well-digging: mythology tells us that much about them. They manufactured things by processes that seem impossible. There was always one element missing. I believe that there was bilocation involved. I believe that there still is. Ah, the python has the address analyzed.”

  The python's voice came through a sort of ventilator shaft in man-serpent accents: “The address is at one of the primary interchanges, though physically it is on a small creek in Colorado. The full name of this creek is El Rio de las Animas Arrepentidas en Limbo, or the River of the Compensating Souls in the Borderland of Limes. But the early Spanish people did not name the creek so. With rare intuition, they recognized the site for what it was, and their name was the perfect translation of the primordial name, which is very old. The creek is also called Lost Souls Creek and Picketwire Creek. Sophia, ask the lady whether she happens to have a rat with her.”

  “Oh, no, I don't have,” Griselda said. “I never carry them.”

  “Nobody carries them anymore,” the man-serpent complained. “Well, the creek rises at, nay, it falls down from Trinchera Peak in Las Ánimas County, and it ends in the John Martin Reservoir on the Arkansas River in Bent County. The lower hundred and fifty miles of the creek, from Hoene to the town of Las Ánimas, does not touch on inhabited region at all.

  “The same creek, bearing the name of Las Ánimas, is also found hundreds of miles distant, in Sierra County, New Mexico. There is some mystery about this bilocation of the creek on Earth, but the fact of the bilocation hasn't been doubted. It is really a case of multilocation, as it is with every primary interchange place.

  “Ah, there's lots of words and names welling up out of my depths, and all of them refer to this location. Some of them call it a dislocation; some of them say that it is one of the limbos or halfway places; or a half-mansion, or a half-house.”

  “How about a half-hogan?” Griselda asked the educated snake in the room below.

  “I don't know,” the python said. “But what seems to be the trouble? Why don't you go ahead and visit the place, lady?”

  “Yes, I will, I'll do that.” Griselda said. “Thank you, python. Thank you, sibyl.”

  3.

  … mineral as well as metal, and that which is now only a name, and was then something more than a name — orichalcum — was dug out of the earth… The red light of orichalcum.

  —Plato

  As Griselda came near the place, she was surprised to find what name the local people called the stream. It was startling; it was a name unbelieved by many; it was ironic.

  “Jews, close your ears!” a prairie dog barked.

  “Greeks, harden your hearing!” a rattlesnake voiced.

  “Covenanters, avert your senses lest you be affronted by it!” a bullbat spoke in a series of little booms.

  “What I say is that Lem is lucky to have done even as well as this,” Griselda said.

  This was the evening of the following day after the conversation with the Conglomerate gentlemen and with the sibyl and the
python. It was a few hundred miles distant from the previous scene, and Griselda Windfall, having found her way somehow to an interior place, was dining with a funny little creature in a funny little restaurant. They were set down to a fine compendium of the new edible clays and stones. It was a queer, refractory sort of place, but Griselda had adjusted to it in everything except her eyes and her mind. Her dinner date had been getting smaller, and the café-restaurant had been getting stranger and more intimate. “I knew, of course, that Smithstone Clay had become edible,” she said, “but I had no idea that one could now eat Dogtooth Rock or Ganister or Mealing Stone. I sure did not have any idea that they were so excellent.”

  “Ah, yes, we are about to rehabilitate very many of the rocks and ores and metals. We will adapt them to Earth,” Griselda's dinner companion said. He was a bent sort of little gnome with bright and peering eyes. “We can find a dozen uses for every one of them. The folks here were needing some new ideas when I came along. Oh, coal and oil and gas are good enough, and they couldn't be had by regular people without the aid of folks who had fallen into my case. But people appreciate new benisons. Yes, and it is an act of charity and compensation to supply these new things, I believe. Stilbite, Amazonstone, Aztec Money — ah, they are wonderful stones, and we are finding wonderful uses for them.”

  “Toad's-Eye Tin, Asparagus Stone, Dry-bone Ore,” Griselda murmured fondly. “My husband, Lemuel, thought he could do great things with them if ever he could find an appropriate working place and conditions. Listen, Bright-eyes, what's good is that there can be money in these things. Somebody goofed at first and let Smithstone Clay become edible free of charge. Now that they have it in such exotic restaurants as this, though, there will be a profit in it somewhere.”

  “Do you not understand that all food was originally free food?” that little gnome said with his bent smile. “Do you not know that all shelter was originally free shelter, and that all property was originally free property?”

  “Didn't work, did it? And all those free things will not add up to a free trip to Paris for me. There has to be money generated somewhere. How did you become so bent, little Bright-eyes? You remind me very much of someone. How did I get here, anyhow, since the map had gone all haywire?”

  “Or picketwire,” the gnome said.

  “Yes, but I got here. And then both you and the place got funnier and funnier. However did you become so bent?”

  “The first and second lumbar vertebrae are reversed. This emphasizes the crook in the back. It bends the head forward and down, to the ideal working and cogitational position. Really, the way that humans have their heads tilted, I don't understand how they can do any thinking or working at all. This reversing of the vertebrae makes a change in the facial expression: one must always look up and peer at another person. There are even cases where persons aren't recognized by their familiars after the change. The reversing of these spinal segments also brings a change in the thought pattern, right down where it matters. Folks have spoken mistakenly of visceral thought, but that basic thing is really spinal thought. Spinal thought is very big here. So is medical practice. The changes are all made without surgery. They are made, in fact, without the… ah… patient being touched in any way. All topographical inversions are easy in a nontopographical ambience like this.”

  “And you've been topographically inverted, Bright-eyes?” Griselda asked. “You weren't always a gnome?”

  “Oh, God help us all, Grissie. Being a gnome is all in the mind and in the shape.”

  “What is that moaning and groaning?” she asked. “It seems to be in the background of everything in this dismal place. And why aren't there any colors here?”

  “Oh, one of the requirements for a good workshop is that it be without distracting colors at all. And some folks moan and groan a lot when they're at labor. They're carrying on now like a bunch of ham actors because we've set them to work triggering easy-to-find deposits of orichalcum on Earth. We tell them that it's easier to make than coal or oil, but they whimper about having to learn something new.”

  “Orichalcum? You're arranging for it to be found on Earth? Not for free, I hope?”

  “You want it to be somehow otherwise, Grissie?”

  “Certainly, Lem. Oh, I called you Lem — you remind me of him. I want the trick that they call the double modification set into it. I want it set in to my own gain. I'd like a few little fortunes to accrue to me, for a few little years.”

  “Oh, I suppose so, Grissie. I'll have them make out a Conveyance of Patent that you can take back to Earth with you. Yes, they are moaning and groaning quite a lot. They are the uncreative folks, so they must be set to simple tasks. And simple tasks do become groaningly tedious.”

  “What are the simple tasks, Bright-eyes?”

  “Oh, mostly the old faithfuls. Consider all the coal and oil deposits that have been fabricated for Earth. Kobalds and goblins and gnomes, so long as they are in this place of tribulation and tribute, are forced to serve the people with these products. Yes, the legends of them working in mines and wells under the roots of mountains are true ones. The making of these things is the hard part. Transferring them from non-topographical ambience like this to Earth is easy. It's a law that all objects tend to locate themselves in the nearest topography. The great accumulations or deposits or gluts on Earth have been passed off as natural or quasi-natural occurrences. They aren't, Grissie, they are manufactured things, and they were manufactured here.”

  “I'm promised fortunes on the orichalcum intrusions,” Griselda said. “Oh, what are some of the other things that you are making in new profusion and for new uses?”

  “Oh, Mealing Stone, French Chalk, Cottonball Borax.”

  “Oh, yes, yes. Lemuel was projecting work on all of those. How about Horseflesh Ore and Iron Rose?”

  “We'll be ready with them quite soon, Grissie. And Mispickel and Noselite.”

  “Two of Lemuel's favorites. Oh, how startling! I've been sitting here with you and not realizing that you were Lemuel. I thought you were some gnome. But at least we buried you for Lemuel, though somehow you didn't seem quite dead. If you had, I wouldn't have come here on this wild-goose ride. No wonder I got lost. The deed said Picketwire Creek, but the people in the area call it Purgatory Creek.”

  “No, I don't seem quite dead, Grissie. This dying makes quite a change in some persons, but it hardly touched me at all. It upset Jasher Halfhogan seriously, very early in his life; that's why he always seemed a little strange to you. But dozens of things have happened to me that seem more decisive than dying. Ah, here's the Conveyance of Patent. They do fine engraving here, do they not? And this agrees to the double modification and assigns you the benefits. You can take this to Conglomerate Enterprises, or to Wheeler-Heelers, or to Le Conglomerat in Paris, or to any of them; and you'll be paid handsomely.”

  “To Paris? Oh, if I could only get there, Lem! And with a fortune yet!”

  “Oh, you can walk out of here and into any of a thousand different primary interchanges on Earth. Think Paris, and you will come out in Paris.”

  “Oh, Lem, Lem! Is there anything that you need here?”

  “Why don't you send me my old red sweater? There's always been so much moaning and groaning about the heat here that they have overcompensated against it. It will be nice to have my old sweater here when I work late.”

  “I'll send it, Lem, I'll send it!” Griselda cried. She kissed him, or perhaps she missed him. She thought Paris. She rushed out of there. And she came out in Paris in the middle of…

  … the Rue de Purgatoire. And right around the corner was Le Conglomerat, where she traded the Conveyance of Patent for a few of those fortunes. And all around every corner was Paris.

  “Oh, the red light of orichalcum,” she sang, “and Paris!” For Griselda was a good-looker, now and forever. And with the kind of fortunes that she had, a good-looker like Griselda could have her heart's desire in that place.

  From The Thunder Colt's Mout
h

  This city had been, for some time now, different from any other place in the world. It was different for its hanging onto a certain stubborn and malodorous remnant. And the most stubborn and most malodorous part of that remnant was Zabotski. Zabotski had once been a chemist, a smelly man in a smelly trade. He had retired from being a regular chemist, as he had retired from a dozen trades, but he remained a smelly man. And there was something peculiar about even this: He wasn't smelly to the nose; he was smelly to the eye.

  He was probably rich. He owned a lot of property around town. He wasn't an unreasonable landlord. He carried more people than did those who bad-mouthed him. But he had an abrasive tongue; he could outshout even Duffey in a shouting match; and he was in no way elegant.

  On this particular early morning he was mumbling to himself, but when Zabotski mumbled he could be heard for half a block:

  “There's a peculiar little episode hanging over our town. It's like a misshapen cloud, and it's been raining unproper stuff on us for the last several hours of the night. It's hovering like a big buzzard, like a fancy dan buzzard with three peacock tailfeathers fastened on. I think this dirty-bird episode will be a puzzler, and I may add to the puzzle. I'm going to claim that I have a main hand in it, just out of orneriness.”

  Zabotski sometimes waited around and offered his arm and protection to Margaret Stone when she had finished her nightly giving-of-testimony in the Quarter. He liked to walk her back to the Pelican building with a flourish.

  Protection for Margaret Stone! Aw, come down from that perch! It was rather the town and the world that needed protection from Margaret.

  “He's about the last of them,” people would sometimes say about Zabotski, and they'd shake their heads. The last of what? Ah, to answer that we must go on a spree of destruction that changed the face of the town and the country and disturbed some of the underpinning of the world itself.