“Brhzhlozh is only a machine,” Mary Virginia said sourly.
“Certainly,” said Roundhead. “He is an intuitive, music-writing machine. There was once some slight talk of keeping a few unmutated humans to compose our music for us, but the best opinion was to extirpate every human vestige and to make no exceptions. We are not humans by chromosomic count or blood type or brain wave patterns; we are not humans by passion or estrogen or adrenalin (for we have none of these things at all); we are not humans by mental process or by esthesia. We are forever rid of the human connection. We are the splendid persons, the people without passion.”
“We sit at opera, and opera was a human thing,” Stein said.
“Not the blood opera, no,” Roundhead contradicted. “It is all our own, both in its new form and in its ancient antecedents.”
The maddened bears were slashed out of their entangling nets by the young and splendid leapers. They escaped the onrushes of the released beasts; then human persons were thrown into the arena in the way of the bears. And these humans were broken up and killed in a series of noisy crunchings.
Then there was the Fire Drake Frolic in which a few more stubborn humans were slain. Fritz's “Fandango in Three Flames” was the accompanying music.
The interlude came then. There was interlude music by Mrzorca, and Shining Mountain Bubbly was served to the loge patrons.
“Opera used to be better,” Mary Virginia said. “Operas were more fun a few years ago, when we were still humans.”
“None of us was ever a human,” Cyrus Roundhead corrected. “Some of us may have thought we were human. Some of us may have been raised with humans, just as humans had a tradition of humans being sometimes raised with animals.”
Time flowed by on its smooth and easy surface. Time stood still in its depth. The new simultaneity had no depth. The gracious and rather stylized interlude was cleared away. The presentation of the climax piece of the night began, the Thunder Colt Game. It was orchestrated to the Thunder Torus music. The live, pantomimic game unfolded.
“When we persons of the thunder dimension attained consciousness, it was a sudden event that instantly overtook every person of us alive,” Roundhead of the splendid mouth was saying. “The world was already in the middle of its baroque being and civilization when we woke to consciousness. The humans have claimed a sort of consciousness, but they cannot mean the same thing by it. I believe that our own awakening to full consciousness was quite recent. Watch now! The awakening to life of our totem animal the Thunder Colt is the symbol of our own awakening to consciousness. Notice that it devours compulsively on awakening. So do we.”
There was a large Thunder Colt egg in the arena. The hoyden and other young people broke a window into the egg. They took a human person, alive and blaring, and thrust him through the windowhole into the egg. There was then a mindless gnashing and crunching as the still unconscious Thunder Colt inside the egg began to devour the human. With the nourishment, there came a fulgence from within the egg. It was not yet consciousness; it was only the inquiry.
Answering lightning struck the egg and shattered it open: the Thunder Colt stood up on uncertain and stilted legs. That was the awakening to consciousness.
Simultaneous thunder struck and infused the colt. That was the awakening to the thunder dimension.
Then the splendid Thunder Colt, some pieces of the eaten human still protruding from its mouth, leaped clear of its birthing debris and ran riot. The stark music of the Thunder Torus picked up tempo as the game evolved.
There were only two human persons remaining for the arena. These two were known to be noetic and splendid; they were humans only in their coming deaths and in their depths as persons.
The Thunder Colt knocked Deutero-Finnegan down with its first assault; it tore off his lower jaw, split his chest, and seemed to lay open layer after layer of persons in turbulent and confused depth.
“We have the thunder dimension,” the talkative Cyrus Roundhead was saying in the loge, “but I am jealous that there may be other dimensions that we lack. Do we really miss anything by living so entirely on the surface? What we need to find for ourselves is a dimension of depth. It would be fine if some kind and older race would will such a dimension to us, but we look in vain for a source of any such inheritance.”
The joyous, newly awakened, totem Thunder Colt killed the Finnegan effigy on the second pass, spilled him open in an incredibly mingled and rich juiciness. There was spilled out shouting scarlet blood, crimson blood, high-saturation blue-red blood from the young painter's body, from the body that really seemed to have had several tenants. There was sulphur-colored blood, saffron-colored blood, flame blood, ichor, and serum mezcolanza. The color was more orange than red or black now. That color, it was the life-garish orange color of all strange artists in their orange periods.
“Why, he had the right color in him after all.” Margaret Stone laughed. It was almost her last joke.
“As a species, we should try to create a signature color for ourselves” — Roundhead was talking — “as well as a depth and an intensity. Can we remain splendid forever if we do not add to our repertoire? We'd pick garbage out of the wake of any great people who had gone before us, but where shall we find traces of a great people? We search vainly for a legacy of glory.”
The Thunder Colt wheeled back and killed Margaret Stone at a single pass. It tore off half of her head with its totemic teeth; it tore out her throat. But it couldn't go deeply enough to get the laugh in her throat. That's all she had to leave.
The Thunder Torus music crashed to an end. Outside the opera house the new and unlegacied breeze was blowing under a gimcracked, jeweled sky.
Three Shadows Of The Wolf
There was a sheep-killing wolf about, and that redneck sheriff Otis Pidgeon would have to do something about it. It was a big wolf (everybody seemed to have seen it except the sheriff) and stories were clustering about it. The folks swore that it was a big gray wolf, not a red wolf, and that was impossible. One would have to go north a thousand miles to find a gray wolf. So the people were mistaken. But it wasn't like them to be mistaken about a country thing like a wolf. The people also said that the big wolf might have a pack, that he might have three shadowy followers. But, if so, the three were really shadow wolves; they didn't leave tracks.
It was a gray wolf with a white slash at the crown of his head. Ribaul said that the wolf would weigh two hundred and fifty pounds. Ribaul was a Frenchman, and so the sheriff automatically divided his figure by two. That would still be a very large wolf. It loomed up gray, and it disappeared like a ghost. It killed and carried off sheep.
Royal Parish was almost the only sheep-raising parish around there, and even in Royal the sheep were raised in only a small district around Yellow Knife. And that was where Sheriff Pidgeon was raised too.
Pidgeon was a tall and gaunt young man with bulging blue eyes. He was a man who went ash-white when he was angry or terrified or embarrassed; it might be said that he blushed white. He was the most suspicious man in Royal Parish. For this reason he had never married, never courted a woman, nor formed any close friendship, nor deposited money in a bank, nor loaned or borrowed, nor trusted weather or fate. He was the right sheriff for Royal Parish, but likely not for any other place. The people in Royal had very dirty quicksilver in them and only a suspicious man could keep up with them. But what Pidgeon was suspicious of now was the strange wolf.
Ragley said that the wolf stood as tall as a Shetland pony, but the lies of Ragley had always stood as tall as a jack pine in a brush thicket. Kenrad said that the wolf had ears like a panther, jaws with the snap of a gator, the muzzle of a moose, and a gait like a high-shouldered ox. Pidgeon was smart enough to know that no wolf looked like that. He was even sharp enough to understand that Kenrad had unwittingly described himself.
It was Ragley with the monstrously mobile features and the equally mobile heart who came through strongest on the wolf. Ragley was a widower with a thirtee
n-year-old daughter Clela. He was a liar by profession, and he farmed a little on the side. But Ribaul was the only one who described the wolf as if he even knew what a wolf looked like. Ribaul had been a roustabout and an animal tamer. He described the wolf as impossibly large, but he described it as a man would who knows just how a wolf is put together.
“I will tell you this, Pidgeon,” storekeeper Scroggins said. “You had better get that sheep-killing wolf before there is a man killed. This same thing happened a few miles south and it ended in a man being killed.”
“Anything can end in a man being killed,” Pidgeon said, “but it's usually another man and not a wolf that kills him.”
“If you know where to draw the line between them, Sheriff,” Scroggins said. “Did you hear me, Sheriff? I said ‘if you know where to draw the line between them.’ I'd get to the bottom of this if I were sheriff for fifteen minutes.”
Pidgeon was suspicious of all of them there in the store: Scroggins, Ragley, Kenrad, Tadler, Corbey, Boston, Danby. “All right, Scroggins,” Pidgeon told him. “You are sheriff for fifteen minutes. Let's see you handle it.”
“Just pin a badge on me and I'll get to the bottom of it.”
That got a sore spot. “You know the parish voted against an appropriation for a badge,” Pidgeon said. “Nobody remembers the last sheriff to have a badge.”
“Sheep disappeared from three more flocks last night, Pidgeon,” Danby said.
“Scroggins here will have it solved in fifteen minutes.”
“Not without a badge I won't. But there's some queer stories about that wolf.”
“Who's starting them, Scroggins?” Pidgeon asked.
“Why, Pidgeon, I would say that the wolf is starting them,” Tadler broke in. “I would say that there's a wolf hair behind every one of those wolf stories. They say that the wolf might not be exactly a wolf all the time. He disappears from a place and he travels mighty fast.”
“Yes, he's in three different places too fast for any wolf,” Pidgeon said.
“Maybe he rides a motorcycle, Sheriff,” Ragley jibed.
Pidgeon went angrily out of Scroggins' store and applied himself to looking for the wolf. Well, there was this about him: he left big and obvious wolf tracks at the site of every killing and theft. He always left at least one slashed sheep. But the tracks couldn't be followed from one raid to another. They just died away.
Pidgeon drove his pickup truck up a back road to the site of the Tadler raid, and he pulled off the road. Tadler's place was full of outcroppings. The sheriff had been told where the raid had been, and moreover a dog was waiting to take him to it.
“Ah, you're nipped a bit, Little Harry,” Pidgeon said to the dog, “but not as much as if you'd made a real fight out of it. There's a saying that a good sheepdog will stand to any wolf, but neither of us believes it. A dog smart enough to be a good sheepdog will know when he's outpowered. You have any opinions about that, Little Harry?”
Little Harry the sheepdog was abashed, though he and Pidgeon were friends. But he did lead the sheriff to a killed sheep, and to live sheep reposing around it. They ignore one of their dead fellows after he's cold.
“Killed in neat wolf style, isn't he, Little Harry? And not too much of him eaten. And there is no sign at all of the four missing sheep.
“Dammit, Little Harry, you should find some way of telling me what happened here.” There were plenty of tracks of a very large wolf, but they didn't lead anywhere.
“All right, Little Harry, which way did he go?” Pidgeon asked.
Little Harry showed him, leading him across the rock croppings that held no prints. Then there were prints in the mud, and the wolf went onto the road itself. “He doesn't leave tracks on the road,” Pidgeon said. “All right, which way did he go?”
Little Harry lay down in the road with the air of having done all that was asked of him. He could not be urged to go further. Pidgeon left the dog, got in his pickup, and drove to the site of the Boston raid.
It was six miles there. Boston had suffered thirteen sheep disappeared, and one killed and partly eaten by a wolf. This site also was near the road and did not require much walking in the rough country. It had been a considerate wolf in this. There were marks of several trucks here, Boston's, Tadler's, Danby's, Corbey's; they had come to investigate when the news had got around. There was one other heavy truck that may have been there first.
Pidgeon knew Boston's sheep, and he knew that the thirteen missing ones were the best ones. Pidgeon found and pocketed two small pieces of brass. He could have found more of them if he had looked long enough. Well, they were at least a small part of the explanation. Pidgeon went to the site of the Danby raid, glad again that the wolf was so considerate as to raid close to the road. It was about eight miles from Boston's place. They had all been here before him, all the trucks of the gathering angry men. Had the unidentified heavy truck been here also? Couldn't be sure.
One sheep was killed and partly eaten, and nine sheep reported disappeared. And here was a dead dog. He, at least, had stood to the wolf, but he hadn't had much luck with it. Dandy George had been a fine large animal; he'd been killed by something larger.
Pidgeon didn't find any brass here, and he didn't intend a long search for it. There were no wolf tracks except around the dead sheep (very plain, as though left there on purpose), and around the dead dog (barely discernible on the rocks there, as though the site was not of the wolf's choosing). Pidgeon found more tracks. The wolf had gone up onto the road.
“One of the fellows said maybe the wolf used a motorcycle,” Pidgeon mumbled. “He didn't, but maybe he used a truck. That wolf had a lot of man in him.”
There are very few wolves who will go down and slay one sheep, and then stand off and kill a number of them with a rifle. And then pick them off cleanly, carrying, not dragging.
Pidgeon went to get Ribaul, the French bum and his part-time helper.
Their connection had begun several months earlier when Pidgeon had locked Ribaul up in their little jail for cause. Ribaul had been living in a shack on rough land that belonged to a French farmer. Soon after the arrest, Pidgeon gave Ribaul part-time employment and the run of the place. Ribaul was a handy man, a big oaf with a head like a giant potato. He was strong as a mule, and like a mule he would refuse when he felt himself overworked; but Ribaul could track.
“Hopping Hailstones!” Sheriff Pidgeon swore. “You fat-faced fool!” The French bum Ribaul had nudged Pidgeon's arm and made him miss a shot. It was too late to shoot again. The wolf was gone, and so was a night's work.
“You splay-footed French fool, you'd better have a good reason for that.”
“No, no reason, Mr. Pidgeon, just a notion,” big Ribaul said in a little voice.
“I had a perfect shot. Why am I afflicted by a fool?”
It was just before dawn, about eighteen hours after Pidgeon had got Ribaul to help him track the wolf. They had stayed with it all that time. Ribaul could track, but there was a lot of hocus in his methods. They had driven the back roads along the west end of the parish. The wind had been strong from the east, and Ribaul swore that he could catch a whiff of a wolf when within a mile of him.
“That's the way they work the bloods, Mr. Pidgeon,” he said. “Track and backtrack till you pick up the scent. Then close in on it. Pass it by to the other side till you lose it again. Then box it in.”
“You aren't a bloodhound, Ribaul, though about the eyes and dewlap—”
“I can't pick up a scent as quick as a good dog, but I know better how to close in when I have it. I'm smarter than a lot of dogs.”
Well, maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. They had the wolf boxed in several hours before sundown. They could drive no closer to it, and their box was a double section of land, a wild thousand acres, very rough.
“Sometimes the wolf has followers,” Ribaul said, “three other wolves who trail him, but sometimes they are only shadows. And there is a man who sometimes has three followers. Th
ey will be men for a while, and then they will be only shadows.”
“Rot, Ribaul,” Pidgeon said. They walked and cross-walked, always to the windward of the wolf. Ribaul had a high loping walk and Pidgeon had trouble staying up with him.
“We're crossing the same country a lot, Ribaul. You're sure you're onto him?”
“The wolf moves too. He is a smart one. He began to move a couple of hours ago.”
They were going along a clear hogback ridge when Ribaul stopped.
“The wolf scent is completely gone, Mr. Pidgeon,” he said.
“How could that happen, Ribaul?”
“I'm afraid to ask myself how it could happen. Now I get a scent. Ah, I don't know how to say this. What I get now is a man scent instead of a wolf scent.”
“Well hickory-handled hell, Ribaul! Let's go after the man then!” They went after him. But a man is harder to follow than a wolf is. He hasn't the same pungency to him. Pidgeon and Ribaul separated at a rock cone with jack pines growing out of it; it was a place where crows roosted. Ribaul went around it to the north, and Pidgeon to the south. Pidgeon heard Ribaul whistling and he called to him to be quiet. Then he heard him no more.
Pidgeon was coming into the throat of a draw a quarter mile beyond there when he picked up a scent. It wasn't a man's scent. It was a wolf's. Strong!
“Ribaul, this way!” Pidgeon called. There was something in the brush, large and low, heavy gray and flash-white. “Ribaul, this way!” Pidgeon called again.
It wasn't possible for a shot yet. The thing moved just often enough and far enough td prevent that. And it couldn't be seen clearly. “Ribaul, you fool, down this way!”
Ribaul came from the north out of a tangle of rocks and brush.
“He's in the brush just beyond us, Ribaul,” Pidgeon said. “Even I can get the wolf scent here.”
“Yes, he's changed again. He's wolf now. I've been watching him a long time. He's a wolf now, but for a while he seemed to be something else.”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 205
