“Whatever there is of you, we can touch it and bend it and twist it,” they said.
Well, they did touch and bend and twist every discoverable aspect of Judge Roger Baluster. They rotted every element of him, and they set his reputation into reeking corruption.
Once there had been the time when Roger Baluster had had the look of an eagle. Now he had the look of a buzzard or vulture. His pride and judgment had been destroyed utterly. His compassion and his humor had been horribly twisted. His appearance, whenever a glimpse could be got of it, was completely repulsive. As were so many now, Roger was cloaked and masked and swathed most of the time. But a really foul appearance can come through every swathing and speak to every sense.
They had disrupted Baluster's household also. They had taken his wife away, and he couldn't find out what they had done with her. They had destroyed two of his children, and they had turned the other two against him.
But he still had money, very much money, cannily hidden. That was what kept him alive. Money can buy a grudging sort of acknowledgement as long as there is any of it left.
Silvester Sureman had gotten crossways with the firm that handled the maintenance of his personality. Before that, things had gone well with him. He had on the day of the misunderstanding moved into a new suburban home, a sign of affluence. Silvester himself had a misunderstanding-removing business which he called ‘Roadsmoothers Inc.’ He was a good relations man. He talked now to the men of the firm that handled the maintenance of his personality. “There is no need for misunderstanding here,” he said. “I beg of you to take no action on this now. I beg you to take no action till tomorrow morning. Misunderstandings often disappear overnight.” Silvester thought that he had them convinced, but something must have gone wrong. That firm did take action against Silvester that night while he slept. A nightshift man at the firm found a note on Silvester that had been written by a day-man. The day-man had forgotten to put a hold on that note. So the nightshift man routinely had Silvester destroyed in the area of his strength: his sureness in things, and his ability to remove misunderstandings. A split-second echo had gone and come from the world mind that this was a man who was Mr. Quagmire himself, the man who would always be bogged down in indecision and misunderstanding. On the day of the misunderstanding, Silvester Sureman had phoned the Morning Enterprise to tell them to begin delivering the paper at his new house. “These changes take a little time,” the man at the Enterprise said. “It may be the day after tomorrow morning before you receive the paper at your new place.”
“I am sure that it can be done by tomorrow morning,” Sureman said. “With effort and understanding all things can be done quickly.”
Then it was the next morning and Sureman went out from his new house early in the morning to get his paper. Yes, it was there. Or was it his? The paper was exactly midway between his house and the house next door. Did the people next door take the morning paper? The light was on there, so Sureman went and knocked on the door. A huge man with oversized eyes and lather on his face came and opened. (Those oversized eyes, the man either had a thyroid condition or he was a Groll's Troll.)
“Do you take the Morning Endeavor newspaper?” Silvester Sureman asked brightly.
“That is no possible business of yours,” the man said bluntly. “No, I do not take such a thing. What this neighborhood does not need is one more nut. Don't be one.”
“Thank you, thank you,” Sureman said, “I am just trying to prevent misunderstandings before they start.” He patted the man on the shoulder and the man winced. How awkward of Sureman! Possibly the fellow was a Groll's Troll, and they are very touchy about being touched.
Sureman picked up the paper and sat at the little sidewalk bench in front of his house to read it. And after a while the huge, shaven man came out of the house next door. He seemed to be looking for something. Then he came over to Silvester Sureman and punched him in the nose and took the paper.
“I told you not to be a nut in this neighborhood,” the man said. “Stealing my morning paper is in the order of being a nut.”
“But you said that you didn't take the Morning Endeavor,” Sureman said reasonably out of his bloody face.
“I don't,” the huge man said. “This is the Morning Enterprise. There isn't any such paper as the Morning Endeavor.”
The man started back into his house with the paper. Sureman had gotten his tongue twisted on the name, that was all. Oh, oh, that big man was coming back again!
That huge man came up to Silvester Sureman again and punched him in the nose so hard that he broke it.
“It's one thing to be a nut,” the huge man said. “It's something else to be a nut with a worm in it. That last punch was because you have a worm in you.”
And Silvester Sureman did have a worm in him. It rotted him and it ate him up from the inside, and it brought him down and still further down. Silvester lost his business, of course. He lost everything. He was prone to total misunderstandings and he could do nothing right. He went down and down till he had become one of the vile untouchables.
Conchita Montez had once been legendized as a stunningly beautiful woman of the Latin persuasion. It had been believed that she had great charm and elegance and intelligence and presence. Her way with the English language had seemed enchanting, with all those delightful slurrings and mispronunciations. Her eyes and her wit twinkled, and she was one of the persons who brightened her era. That was the legend. But beautiful legends are not always self-sustaining: there is a fragility about even the best of them. And those were the times of fragile personalities. It isn't known quite where Conchita went wrong. She had given so much enjoyment to everyone! But it was said that she was very particular about whom she gave more special enjoyment to. She apparently didn't know who was running the world in those years. Her rejections of some of the high lords were resented.
“The old way would be to throw acid in your face and so wreck your beauty,” one of those lords told her. “We are more subtle and more thorough now. We throw the acid behind your face and it wrecks your whole person. Then your face will crumble of itself.”
So those Person-Projectors did a job on Conchita and she became repulsive at once. Became repulsive? She had always been repulsive, of course. Hers was a repulsive nature.
What did we ever see in her? Old posters of her had shown her as absolutely beautiful. That was when those old posters were new. Well, why didn't those same posters still show her as beautiful? Because she was repulsive and always had been. And now they showed her as repulsive.
But no poster could show her as repulsive as she really was. A poster could not show the mush-mouthed offensiveness of her speech or the screaming tediousness of her person.
So she became a hooded and swathed untouchable, ringing her cracked bell when she had to be out-of-doors, avoiding and avoided by all decent people.
3.
My wife is like a doll with a crooked back
And a voice like a broken fiddle.
I love her like a potato sack
With a rope around her middle.
—Rotten Peoples' Rollicks
Crispin and Sharon Babcock went that evening into what was probably the most beautiful sly hall in the world. If it had not been so before, their entering almost guaranteed that it would be so now. The sly halls were the last refuge where obnoxious people could gather to enjoy (it was as if the word ‘enjoy’ had been minted fresh just for the sly halls), to enjoy the rousing old pleasures and beauties. The enjoyments and the beauties were very subjective and selective, and they were awfully tenuous. But they were the only enjoyments and beauties that these people could bring about. These places ought be kept enjoyable as long as their people held together on their clear courses.
“The thing will work as long as we are all faithful to each other,” Crispin Babcock said. “Oh Lord of the Sick Scorpions, please don't say that again, and again, and again!” Sharon Babcock moaned to herself. (Crispin's statement was one that he mad
e a thousand times a day.)
All the members of the sly halls were outcasts of the untouchable class. They ate and drank in the sly halls. They played music and chukki there. They had shows, they had arts, they had books and all graphics. There were body sports and mind sports. There was song and dance, conversation and cookery and casuistry.
In every sly hall were the one and two room mansions for the couples and for the families (though there were few children; most of the children of the outcasts had been destroyed. There were the single rooms for the singlings. There were the blessed rituals that are at the heart of every sly hall; and there was the intense civilization that is the seal of all the sly people.
Some of the folks in the halls were neither masked nor veiled. Some did not even wear the great cloak, the wrongly called ‘invisibility cloak’. They were guised of themselves, they said: they had no need to be disguised. But that was only fancy talk. Most of them were as masked and swathed as it was possible to be.
“Wintergreen was knocked off today,” Judge Baluster said. “That's nine of the sly halls knocked off in four days and nights. Somehow the companies are shattered and the people flee out of the halls. So they are arrested for being persistently in public places, and some of them are executed for it. They can't live anywhere except in the halls. Who would rent or sell rooms or houses to the outcasts? But the people get more fun out of the outcasts when they are driven into the open. There was complaint before that they hardly got to enjoy those of us who made such shelters for ourselves. Some new technique is being used to break up the companies and make the outcast people flee the halls.”
Baluster was keeping his hands busy arranging the ritual places in the sly hall: the 3.05 meter long poles, the pairs of mittens, the desperation-philosophy texts, the tin cans and the wires to run between them, the electric helmets with their euphoric vibes, the piles of good-will mottos.
“What is the new technique, Roger?” Silvester Sureman asked. “Dammit, Roger, can't you do something about your appearance?”
“I'm sitting out of your line of vision, Silvester,” Roger Baluster said, “and I'm completely swathed, so that not one particle of me can be seen in any case. What do you mean by my appearance?”
“It's nauseating, you know, and your voice is worse. Well, what is the technique that they're using on us now?”
“I don't know, Silvester, but they're attacking out of a new dimension. I thought that they couldn't hit us with anything else, but they seem to be doing it. We thought we could set up asylums here and there, the sly halls, and make them into worlds of our own. We thought that, in our own circles, we could gradually become less repulsive, be ourselves and to each other, and so regain a measure of self-respect. And we have made progress, very slow progress.”
“Oh yes. In a thousand years our progress might be seen clearly, to one with sharp eyes,” Silvester Sureman said dismally.
“At least we still have each other, Sharon,” Crispin Babcock wheezed, and he pressed Sharon's hand.
“Aw, ugh, ugh, ugh,” Sharon said with a complete lack of enthusiasm. “Don't, Crispin. It's like being touched by a reptile.”
But it was a pleasantly contrived world that they had made for themselves in the sly hall. The great skylights let the sunlight in during the daylight hours; and there was profuse greenery and striking garden arrangements. Otters played in the stream and in the fountain. The bright weavers were everywhere. Salamanders ran like quicksilver and fire over everything. There were cascades of ivy. Eagles perched on the entrance posts, and there was a certain architecture of pride in the big building and in its people.
“We are all celebrities now, you know,” Conchita Montez mumbled. “People everywhere in the world know us and know who we are. It isn't much, but it is something. We are valid characters, even if we are only characters for the popular hate-culture.”
“The ultimate pornography, hatred,” Crispin said piously.
“Yes, that's so,” Silvester agreed. “The Projection Lords are not really superior to ourselves any more than an axe murderer is superior to his victims. But there's no denying that they have the advantage over us, and it may be the ultimate advantage. You do know why they keep a few of us alive?”
“Oh, it's necessary for the balance of their system that the people and themselves have something to hate intensely,” Baluster said. “And it's quite true that hating is fine, that it's a deep and furious pleasure. But we ourselves can't hate the Projector Lords, and we can't hate the populace whom they control. They simply are not programmed to be hated, and the Lords have the control of the programming. But we can hate ourselves and others of the outcasts; we can and we do. It's the last pleasure left to us. That's what is behind our scapegoat trick that we have agreed upon. By it, some of us will be saved when our company is stricken. We don't yet know who our scapegoat will be. Whomever the lightning of our hatred strikes first, that will be the one.”
“They want us out in the open where they can have cleaner shots at hating us,” Conchita said. “Oh well, I guess I want us out in the open too. It's stifling in here.”
“A three-point-oh-five meter pole, two pairs of mittens, a couple of tin cans, and a length of wire,” said Crispin Babcock. “Who would believe that they would be last-chance things? I don't know how we will use them yet (it will be given to us in that hour how to use them), but this is the list that comes to my mind for Sharon and myself. And all these things are here among the ritual objects of our own sly hall.”
“It's remarkable how little hardware they have to use in Person-Projecting,” Silvester Sureman said. “It's just a combination of coded frequencies to express a displeasure, to contain a person-identification, and to call for an echo, all formed into a wave transmission and set to travel around the world on a common carrier wave. And there is filtering as needed and amplification as needed. And behold! a person is smeared to destruction, forever and to all the world. It's the Dynasty of Hatred that now obtains in the world.”
“And also there is very little software that they have to use in Person-Projecting. A repertoire of hatreds is maintained; it is added to from the residues of broken persons, and it is dispensed freely and rather imaginatively. A person-smear will be manifest to almost every sense including the unorganed intuitive senses. Except smell. Smell is transmitted only by actual physical particles from the smelled object reaching one.”
“But could not smell-reminders be triggered electronically? Could not smell be transmitted in some coded fashion? Nothing comes into our minds without a reason, and the sense of strong and murderous smell has just come into my mind. People, is smell the new technique? Is it the attack out of the new dimension? I feel that it is, and I feel that it's upon us now.”
Wisteria Manford burst into the sly hall. Wisteria had long since fallen into the outcast condition. She had run out of money for her personality maintenance. It is very dangerous to run out of money. And it takes a lot of money to maintain a borderline personality.
“Garden City has fallen!” Wisteria cried. “Exaltation Heights has fallen! Beggar on Horseback has fallen! Snug Harbor and Bright Shores and Citadel and Gold Beach and Pleasant Gardens and Tomorrow Land have all been shattered. All the sly halls are being emptied by this new attack, and we're next. It's a stink that they use to split up the people, a killing stink. And it's coming to us right now.”
Indeed, the first heavy wave of stench had come into the sly hall with Wisteria. They shrank away from her. Through the holes in the walls they shrank away from her. The stench shattered the Company, and it changed the sly hall itself completely.
In the light of, in the odor of the new and overpowering stench, the sly hall changed. It does not matter whether the change was subjective or objective. In the new order, there is no difference between the two conditions. The great skylights of the hall — what great skylight? — were sky holes, roof holes. The roof itself was fallen-in and happy; that's why there was always sunlight during the day
light hours. The famous greenery of the hall was not so very green. The plants growing there were stink-weed and sick fungus. The otters playing in the stream and fountain were seen to be slashing rats skulking out of the stagnant water. The bright weavers were uncommon spiders of unusual size and malevolence. The salamanders were snakes. The quicksilver-and-fire was a slimy decay lit up by methane-rot. The ivy was poison ivy. The perched eagles were vultures and buzzards. And the only pride to be found in the hall was the stubborn pride of carrion flesh. The people wanted out of that hateful hall at once. How had they ever gathered in such an offensive place?
With the second heavy wave of stench the people did all burst out of the hall. It was necessary that they get away from their rotten refuge, but it was even more necessary that they get away from each other and the foulness of their former company. The supreme necessity was that they should get away from their stinking selves, but how was that to be accomplished? But Crispin Babcock, in spite of the furious urge to be gone, did pick up certain ritual objects that had already been in his mind.
With the third heavy wave of killing stench, the scapegoats were chosen blindly by the scattering company. And those scapes whom the lightning of hatred struck first and most violently were—
4.
We are the stenchy actors cast
In the reeky, smelliferous role.
We are the folks that nobody da'st
To touch with a ten-foot pole.
—Rotten Peoples' Rollicks
Those scapegoats whom the lightning of the hatred struck first and hardest were Crispin and Sharon Babcock. All the people broke away from Crispin and Sharon in revulsion, and they looked at each other in sniggering horror.
“At least we have each other,” Crispin said sickly.
“If you say that once more I'll scream my head off!” Sharon wailed shrilly.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 222
