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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “I see,” said Barnaby Sheen, but he didn't see it at all clearly.

  “But where did the happening begin?” asked the little foxy man. “I always like to be in the middle of a happening. I check the origin to be very near this place, to be very near to you. I even get the cryptic message ‘It's the Sons of Sheeny’. I got that while I was riding Polynesian Airlines here. Who are the Sons of Sheeny, Sheeny?”

  “I don't know, but I suspect,” Barnaby said.

  “I check it to near you, but I sure do not check it to you,” the nervous and ardent man said. “Man, you're not on fire from it at all! You're not even alive to the new fever, and everything shows that you're in the middle of it. I'm Gippo Sharpface, by the way. And you, Sheeny, are Mr. Nobody himself.”

  “Did you locate this place by triangulating in on an influence?” Barnaby asked.

  “Almost that. I'd realized since about midnight last night that the process would have to be distorted triangulation, since the phenomenon wasn't truly worldwide. But it's about the same thing. I located the center of the influence, and I found that the center was empty. The center is yourself. Can you tell me what is wrong, Sheeny?”

  Gippo Sharpface was all this time speed-reading books and tossing them over his shoulder behind him like banana skins.

  “I guess nothing is wrong,” Barnaby said, “but I thought that the phenomenon was worldwide. It's of almost simultaneous appearance and development in Shanghai and Moscow and Istanbul and Stockholm and London and Cairo and New York and Toronto and Mexico City and Honolulu and Ponca City, Oklahoma. Just look at the charts that I have. Say, Gippo, how did the porno operator know where to phone Emanuel Visconti? He was completely unknown till yesterday, wasn't he?”

  “Sheeny Sheen, those places you name don't make the world. Where is Capetown? Where is Sydney? Where are Buenos Aires and Rio? Why were things so unclear in Singapore the porno capital of the world? No, there wasn't any rational way for the porno proprietor or myself or a million other people ever to have heard of Visconti. He had hardly heard of himself. There isn't any rational explanation for any of the hot instincts. But Emanuel Visconti was one of the hot instincts for a while: not nearly as much now as he was a few hours ago, of course.”

  “The tendencies are only in the northern half of the world, are they, Gippo?” Barnaby asked. “That's interesting. And the emanating center is around here? Your triangulation shows that this is the center of it all?”

  “Old Sheeny Nothing-Man, Not-With-It-Man, this can't be the center of anything. What's that concrete block building about fifty yards over there?”

  “That's my laboratory. And the only persons working there lately are two lucky-brained young men. Sometimes I say that they comprise the left lobe of my own brain.”

  “Are they sometimes called the ‘Sons of Sheeny’?” Gippo demanded excitedly.

  “Only by yourself,” Barnaby said, “but nobody else could be called that at all. They're the two heads that beat as one. They're the hairy thumb and the smooth thumb in every bowl of stew. I suspected that they were involved.”

  “Yes, that's the emanating center, Sheen,” Gippo said as he tossed another finished book over his shoulder. “That's the turned-on place. Could you have a cashier's check for a million dollars drawn up within twenty minutes or so? It will take at least that much for first ante if we're going to get in on this boom.”

  “Do you want to be turned off again, Gippo?” Barnaby asked. “Oh, I suppose I could have the money in one form or another within fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  “No, I don't want to be turned off again, Sheen, not while this season is running. I want a bucket. It's raining the queerest and hottest fish ever seen, and I have an overpowering lust for them. I want my passions fulfilled, and at the same time I want them to continue burning, and I want to make a good thing out of the hot rain while it's going on. Then I will have to find out where the next hot brain-rain or whatever will fall.” At a jittery fox trot, Gippo Sharpface went down to the laboratory building, tossing books over his shoulder as he finished them.

  Barnaby Sheen called several of us on the hot line that Roy Mega had rigged for him. We all agreed that a pleasantly hot sort of spring fever was going through everybody. We thought that it was an information-and-invention sort of fever and we didn't understand how it fit into the porno context, except for the sheer lust there might be in the new racking and sacking of knowledge. While we were on the hot line, Barnaby said that Austro had just come in with a personal check of Barnaby's to be signed, a check for a million dollars. And Barnaby said that he was signing it with chisel and graver. A Barnaby Sheen check would have been hard to forge, since Austro made them for him out of thin slate-stone. Nobody could imitate Austro's rock-engraving work. And nobody could imitate Barnaby's signature when he cut it into slate-stone with square-blade tapered graver.

  “That's more than I usually put into a thing on a hunch,” Barnaby said. “Now I have crossed the Rubicon on this, or at least I have crossed Joe Creek.”

  But Barnaby needn't have worried. Within another thirty-six hours, he had put so much money into the hot-information project as to make that first ante of no great importance, whether he lost it or got it back.

  Say, it was a bonfire of rampant mentality and discovery that took over the northern half of the world in the days that followed. Two weeks of that splendid and frightening spring fever brought more achievement than had the hundred-year-long fever that had once run through Athens, than had the hundred-year-long fever that had once run through Florence. Besides, those older fevers had run off in all directions; but the present new-old burning was focused on knowledge and on sharp and swinging science. The focus of it was the main thing. There were few side runnels of it that were not concerned with knowledge. It was an ordered flooding of that Hot Brain River. Every day brought new and generating lightning, like the flash that had opened up the new world, like the flash that had opened up the Copernican cosmos, like the flash that opened up the atom. And the glorious explosion of knowledge was accepted and effected at once. What did it matter that the cargo had first been freighted in by grubby hands and grubby minds? The beneficent explosion was real now. The thing had gone on for nearly three weeks, and the world would never be the same as it had been before. The technology hadn't had a chance to follow up on all the breakthroughs, but that chance would come as soon as things had cooled off enough so that they might be touched. That or “I think it will catch up in a little bit different sort of season a little bit later in the year,” Roy Mega said. What sort of talk was that? Did anybody really understand what was happening? No, not completely, for it was happening exponentially. Well, was anybody finding a way to take advantage of what was happening? Oh, there were a few hundred of the sharpfaces who were. They found new sorts of buckets and bushels and bags to take portions of that post-material harvest. Here was treasure that would burn the fingers off you, and yet it could be handled by the handlers.

  There were some who gathered the aromatic smoke and the tilt-spectrumed sunlight into coffers. (The stuff that had once been called knowledge had been raised by several powers, so it was not quite the same stuff it had been before.) There were some who raked and compressed the bright brainstorms into bales. There were the manipulating few who had the touch to garner intangibles and to label them “Special Commodity”. There were several score of persons who could price and predict the tendencies of this commodity-market conflagration of ideas.

  Gippo Sharpface did a little bit of the garnering and the prediction-calculating. Barnaby Sheen did a little of it, and he also seemed to own the results of others who were doing it. He said that, for quite a while there, he was making a million dollars an hour out of the fever. Some of the old-time porno operators were able to hang in there for a while, and some of the soft-stuff industrialists and foundation people did it. And new people who had been in the hot-brain business for only two or three weeks were now running ellipses around the world
.

  “Do you know for certain what day the season will end, Sheeny?” Gippo asked one day.

  “Why should it ever end?”

  “Oh, don't you understand the times and seasons, Sheen? How do you get along as well as you do? Austro says that it will end the day after the Hot-Brain full moon.”

  2

  Austro could probably have explained the theory of it a little bit. He couldn't do it very well in words, but he could do it in symbols cut in his rock tablets. He explained it pretty well even in words, but everybody was always too busy to listen. “We used to set the seasons of the world from two locations,” Austro said once. “One of these regions was the Guna Slopes, and the other was the Malawi Shores, the one about ten degrees north and the other about ten degrees south of the equator. And also, we were the ones who set up the equator, but that's a different account. There were certain tricks with shape stuff and smell stuff that we used to get the seasons started, but all of it was remember-and-reminder jog. It still is. People really feel when it's time for one season or another, but now-a-aeons they get busy and they don't feel it strongly enough.”

  “Quit the quacking and get busy, Austro,” Barnaby Sheen ordered. “Start divining what's going to be hot property tomorrow. You're good at that, but you're no good at quacking and clacking.”

  “There's a lot to be said for the etiological aspect of the epochon,” Austro said a minute later when Barnaby had gone elsewhere, “and their plastinx category apozemiosis, not to mention the helical reinforcement of the phengaric base, considering the former duration of the etios itself. Now, if we keep fifteen points firmly in mind—”

  “Why all the Sunday words, Austro?” I asked him.

  “Carrock, I'm trying to shake my ape-boy image,” he said. “People think that all I can say is ‘carrock’. Well, the hot-brain season is one of the seasons that the people have been too busy to remember. Of course we always remembered it back home, and we always had the hottest brains of anyone in the world. But we felt the other people dragging their feet, or dragging their lobes on it, and this slowed us down, since all people are one corporation. Ah, George, the hottest property tomorrow will be Simon McCoy of Olathe, Kansas, in this very nation. This young man has just this minute broken his pool cue in total frustration, and if he can get hold of a paper and pencil he will jot down a mass of the most astonishing mathematical tables ever. These will be revolutionary, in the manner of revolving or rotating vectors, but far beyond. They'll have a sort of tilt-spin to them. The number of the pool hall is 1-913-PH9-9199.”

  “Got it, Austro,” said Doctor George Drakos, who was a sort of correlator of talent. “Table-tilting and mathematics belong together in hot-brain season. Now quit the jabber and stay with the divining stuff.”

  (Barnaby Sheen had drafted all of us to work at his lab and in his sprawling house, running around with buckets to catch the hot-brain rain.)

  “Back home we couldn't send the hints strong enough to overcome the indifference of the world-scattered people,” Austro was saying. “We were not able to recall them to the duties and pleasures of the ordained seasons. The only electricity we had was the difference in potential between flint-stone and chert-stone. Here we can broadcast the hints with a real zing. And the people the zing hit first were the jaded-brained pornos who were always howling for faster and newer zings. But it's hit everybody now. If they all find that they like it, I bet they come easier to it next year.”

  “Get out of the way, Austro,” Cris Benedetti shouted. “Why don't you come up with something new for the family-plan centers?”

  Barnaby Sheen, in just two days time, had set up nine thousand Family-Plan Hot-Brain Parlors to handle the brainster boom. The boom had long since outgrown the porno stores and now it was a communal thing all the way. Brains called to brains and they made scorchy music together. In the country, the people gathered in dingles and dells for their communal-knowledge oestrus or rut; but in the towns the Hot-Brain Parlors of Barnaby Sheen filled a need.

  “Can't you move faster, Austro?” Harry O'Donovan was hollering. We all tried to get as much out of Austro as we could. He had talents, but they were lazy talents.

  “How can I move faster, Harry? I'm only a twelve-year-old kid,” Austro protested.

  “The hot-brain season is really a kid thing,” Austro continued when Harry O'Donovan was off hollering somewhere else, “but I don't think that anyone gets too old to enjoy it. It's real fun to be smart in the smart season. One time down in the Gunas we went in for shooting stars in the hot-brain season. We really shot them out. I mean it. That was only a few thousand years ago. Guys are still puzzled about all those old novas that seemed to happen at the same time. That was about as high going as anybody ever got, even in hot-brain season. Who's got hot enough brains to do it now?”

  “Get out of the way, Austro,” Gippo Sharpface barked. “You can chatter when hot hammock season gets here. That's what it's for.”

  Roy Mega could have explained the theory of it a little bit, if anyone had had the time to listen to him.

  “Conveying subliminal shapes electronically was easy enough,” Roy was saying, “and of course shape is a big part of the stimulus. But our biggest difficulty was conveying subliminal smells at electronic speeds to electronic distances. Smells are essential to it. We had to hype ourselves up and then wait for the hot-brain season to hit the two of us. That's the reason that the season in general was really almost nine hours late. We weren't smart enough to do it on time. It took us nine hours to get smart enough, and then to make and transmit the jog-keys to remind the peoples of the world that a new hot season was here. But after we were hit by the smarts we could work out anything.”

  “But just what is it, Roy?” I asked him. I had the idea now that everybody except myself knew what was going on.

  “Why, it is only the seasons of the world and of the world's people,” Roy Mega said. “It's the old oestrus and the rutting. People are supposed to have their hot and bright seasons, first for one thing, then for another. But when people started to live under roofs they lost part of their feelings for the seasons. Then they said that they would stay hot on everything all the year round, and they lost another part of it. They really lost the edge of it then. They barely managed to stay lukewarm on everything. And then they lost even that. Every day is a holiday when the hot seasons are observed, and things really get generated.”

  “Why is the brain-bust going on in only the northern hemisphere, Roy?” I asked.

  “Because the brain-bust is a natural season, and the natural seasons are reversed down there. They're having their own rut down south right now, but you'd hardly believe me if I told you what it was. It's one of the forgotten things that sure hadn't ought to be forgotten.”

  “How long will the hot-brain season last here?” I asked him.

  “Oh, till the hot-brain full moon. You'll feel it when the season leaves you. And you'll feel a little bit empty. Yeah, for about a minute. Then the next rut season will hit you and you'll be overtaken by something just as strong as hot brains, and entirely different.”

  “Get out of the way, Mega and Laff!” Barnaby Sheen was bellowing. “Why do I pay starvation wages around here? Just to hear you guys jabber?”

  “Is anybody taking care of it down south?” I asked Austro when next the straw bosses were busy elsewhere. “Sure, a cousin of mine is doing it down there,” he said. “This cousin was raised on the Malawi Shores, and then he was shanghaied to Rio as a kid. Now he's teamed up with a cross-eyed carioca youngster who's kind of like Roy Mega. They're pretty good at it down there, almost as good as Roy and I are.”

  “How many hot seasons are there in the year, Austro?” I asked him.

  “Get out of the way, Austro and Laff!” Cris Benedetti was howling. “There's work to do.”

  Well, it was fun. Every day, though we worked long hours, was really a holiday. It's fun to be smart. And the smarter you are, the more fun it is. Those who deny this a
re those who've never had any really smart days in their lives. It's top fun when the whole world is smart, or the top half of it anyhow. There's real excitement in learning everything, everything, and then exploding it into bigger and bigger versions of itself. It's like doubling your life's knowledge every day, and then doubling it again the next day. It's like— (—time is compressed here, and the brain days are all run together. There is too much of it for analysis, though analysis of everything else is part of the brain days. The pleasure is still too near to be put into words, and they say that the hot-brain jag will be even better next year.)

  “There's a new corporation trying to buy me out,” Barnaby Sheen said one evening. “The corporation is made up of the second, third, and fourth biggest people in the hot-brain cash-in complex. But I'm still number one. Why should I sell?” “Sell before the sun goes down, Sheeny,” Gippo Sharpface told him. “And then pull a few millions off that roll of yours for us your faithful and seasonable minions.”

  “But things are getting bigger and bigger,” Barnaby puffed.

  “And tonight is hot-brain full moon night,” Austro said. “Oh sure, it'll be back again next year. Well, sell now and you will have the means to handle it next year any way you want to. Sell it, carrock!”

  “At a certain hour we will send out a new shape and a new smell and a new sound,” said Roy Mega. “And these things will trigger the next hot season.”

  “Ah, yeah, I hear the new sound now,” Barnaby agreed. “It's the sound that the merry-go-round makes just before it breaks down.”

  Barnaby Sheen had to hurry, but he did manage to sell his hot-brain empire before the sun went down.

  3

  Barnaby Sheen was stamping out a multitude of burning cigar butts. Or else he was dancing some very funny dance in the early morning hours. I had never seen him dance before, but he wasn't bad. “Loppity, Goppity, Gippity, Gopes. I'm a little kid from the Guna Slopes!” Austro was singing with the ringing upper half of his voice, and he was filling the air with rock dust as he cut the same immortal words into a rock slab. At that moment, Austro was the hottest poet in the world.