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

by R. A. Lafferty

  They ate the hotchpotch stew which has a long lineage of things living in it, in that incomparably rich and scaling hot liquid milieu where life first rose. The hotchpotch was of the oldest unbroken line. Mary Irish dredged a limey residue up on the edge of her bowl to examine it before eating it. Fossils, a world of fossils, that's what she dredged up! And sometimes she swallowed the livelier portions of the stew with a nervous queasiness. Living fossils, that's what the livelier portions of the hotchpotch were!

  It is a peculiar life that is found in hotchpotch and is not found anywhere else at all. It is immeasurably old. A sort of yeast or starter is carried over from one kettle of hotchpotch to another. This has been done from kettle to kettle for millions of years, and so the minute and primordial life in the stew has been carried forward. The yeast or starter contains both the fossil forms and the live forms. You have wondered why hotchpotch cooks are reluctant to give their recipes? This is the reason: there is a whole secret life in that recipe, and the cooks are pledged to keep it secret. It is so secret that—

  “I have discovered (no matter how),” said Swing, “that God himself does not know about the minute and continuing life in hotchpotch stew. He does not eat it, and he hasn't noticed it closely. And that life in the stew is not from him. This seems like a small matter, perhaps, but it is significant. We have the edge over him with this obscure secret. We know of this small world in dingy kettles, and it's a world not of his making. There may be others. God cannot guess what secrets we know, but he has guessed that there are secrets. It sends a shiver of almost-fear through him every time he thinks of it.”

  “You only guess that, Swing, and your guess carries its own contradiction. We are all contained in him, so all of our secrets are also contained in him. We are only dreams that God has. You know that, don't you?”

  “If we are only his dreams, then let it be that he shall (as we do often) wake from dreams with a strong sense of unease. Aye, let him experience the very fringes of nightmare from us. But I suspect something else that he has not even suspected yet.”

  “And what is that, prideful Swing?”

  “That there is a place (this is only travelers tale as yet, but it is from trustworthy travelers) where there may be found magnificent blanks of god-worthy genetic material. There are these ‘Valleys of the Giants’, these ‘Valleys of the Slumbering Principalities’. There are such places where his rivals and successors are to be found in unaware forms. He will nod once too often, and they will wake while he nods. And one of them will topple him.”

  “It isn't that way at all, Swing,” Mary Irish said. “You are like a dog snapping at the moon. And you are not able to tear it or scathe it at all.”

  “No? Look at it tonight, Mary. You will see new fang marks on it that were not there before.”

  They finished their hotchpotch stew in easy and subdued splendor. To know things that God does not know, and to make no great thing about such knowledge, that is to be civilized!

  After supper, they went out to Flanders Field for an evening session with several thousand excellent people. Being such superior and specialized people, they were most of them filial one or two or three generations of Swing's own genetic engineering. Swing made his gift of one million gold guilders early in the proceedings. It is more civilized to give gifts easily and early than to wait till the very end when the plaudits will follow one out.

  Then Swing unburdened himself more than usual. He told the people that he was going home after very many years, and that he wasn't sure when or if he would come back. He told them many great and prideful things and hinted at things even more prideful.

  “Pride goes before a fall,” called a young woman of the filial three generation of Swing-genetics.

  “Before a fall? I'd never heard that,” Swing said. “Pride does go before an ascent, I know. Pride is what fuels an ascent.” Then Swing's final speech ascended in power. He poured his hearers out like water and he mixed them like broth. He surpassed himself, and he led all those people into the way of surpassing themselves. And he left them all with one wondering thought: ‘Where can so great a man have come from anyhow?’

  The next day, Griggles Swing went home. He went to the planet Apateon of the sun Beta Centauri. It is one of the Trader Planets and it is one of the Nineteen Worlds. He knew that he was followed by some of his more intense admirers and he didn't care. They would not be able to follow him all the way to his home unless the time were ripe for that home to be revealed. He went towards the back country. After three days he came to a wooden building that bore the sign ‘Honest Schzhoultskio, outfitters’. He shopped a while with Schzhoultskio. He bought a thorn-jacket to protect him when he went through the thorn-barriers; and he bought thorn-boots.

  “How far back are you going?” Schzhoultskio asked him.

  “All the way back,” Swing said. “Back to the cliff formation they call the ‘Palaces’, back to the biggest trees anywhere.”

  “You know the story about the carnival owner who went back there to find a replacement for his Wild Man of Borneo,” Honest Schzhoultskio said. “Ah, he found that replacement, a fine big ‘wild man’ and took him away with him. He toured quite a few of the worlds with his carnival, and the genuine wild man was the main attraction. But he came back in about a year and took the wild man back to the big woods. ‘I'll want my money back,’ he said. ‘This wild man has shriveled and shrunk till he is no good wild man at all. Look at him, look at him.’ ‘Let me outta here, let me go back,’ that wild man sniffled, ‘he pulled a switch. I'm not the one. He's the one.’ And a switch had been pulled. The wild man from the big woods had fashioned himself into the appearance of the carnival owner, only bigger. And he had changed the carnival-owner to look like a wild man, only smaller. Some of those wild men will follow you.”

  Swing went three days deeper into the back country. There were swamps (Oh the deep dimensionality of swamps!) to be crossed and thorn barriers to be breached. A troupe of monkeys brought him fruit; then they accompanied him on his way in a chattering fringe. Then Griggles came to his own people. He first met a guard in the path. He greeted him with “Gri, gri, grikky,” but the guard pointed to his lips and throat to indicate that he was one of those incapable of speech.

  But that guard was magnificent with his giant brain-case and his strength and poise of body; and with that certain style, which is the same thing as grace or power-in-balance. And he was blank; for his big brain was still waiting, available and unkindled. Ah, but should one of those big brains somehow be kindled, it would really take off.

  Then Swing saw a number of his magnificent kindred flying through the air, and this was the real coming-home thrill for him. He knew that, since he had geneticized himself to such an extent, he no longer looked very much like them; but he felt like them.

  He climbed the cliffs towards a remembered set of caves, and that fine flying and swinging was going on through the tops of all those trees that were nearly as high as the cliffs. And then Swing met a magnificent kinsman with at least a half-life in his eyes.

  “Grig, grik grik,” Swing said. And the magnificent fellow answered “Grik.” He was one of the talking ones.

  Above Swing on the cliff, a grizzly and motherly ape was using a tool that is found on many of the worlds and whose use is sometimes misunderstood. It has been called a stone-hoe or a stone-spade, but it wasn't made for delving in the ground: it was for higher work. It was a curious tool. It was made for dragging ordure out of caves and other dwellings when it became so deep that one banged one's head on the ceiling. The motherly ape was using the tool with great vigor, lowering the floor of the cave by a full meter as she sent huge globs and swishing slabs of the strong stuff down through the strong air.

  “She knew I was coming,” Swing said.

  And the swingers, the flyers, the brachiators were cavorting in the tops of the cliff-high trees. Griggles Swing would join them soon. How those swingers could swing from branch to branch with their power
ful arms! How they could take off on those fearless flying leaps! Those fellows could really fly through the air!

  Swing came up to the old mother ape as she dragged a great slurping mass of the stuff out from the cave floor and let it tumble down drenchingly through the aromatic air.

  “Grig, grik, grik,” Swing said in ape-man talk, and she looked up at him in amazement.

  “Grik— gri— Griggles!” she cried in recognition.

  “Hi mom,” Swing said. The Swinger was home.

  Haruspex

  Certainly present circumstances and coming events can be read from animal or bird entrails, if one has enough shrewdness of vision to bring to them. Entrails are gut-level books with everything in them literally. Horoscopes aren't in it with entrails at all. Crystal balls aren't, and fortune-telling cards aren't. The entrails of hot-blooded animals give the deepest readings. The entrails of fish and squid give the most elegant interpretations. But bird entrails are the easiest, and they are the most commonly used. The beginner is urged to stay with bird entrails till he is completely proficient, and really there is nothing wrong with staying with them forever. Entrails of only one sort are easier to read than bird entrails, and so these are used to great advantage where local custom permits.

  Jimpson Ginseng had an old loose panel in the cyclone fence that he could bend and go through. These inmates were of dim but not extinguished minds; they did not wander farther than Mobley's; they had weekly money provided to them free somewhere; and the guards always knew where they were. ‘What a way to run a booby-hatch!’ a philosopher cried once, but there were only a few of these exceptions, and such things do happen.

  One evening, Jimpson Ginseng did not get all the way back under his own power. He left the tavern while there was still a small spot of light left in the sky. Two bulky men got out of a car there on the road and stopped him. One of them took Jimpson's hat off his head and set it on the ground. The other one went around Jimpson's head with some sort of instrument as though he were giving him a bowl-type haircut. What happened next isn't at all clear. There were some weird openings being made in the man, but it was pretty dark. If the guards had reported what they thought they saw, who would have believed them?

  Then one of the men picked the hat up from the ground and put it on Jimpson's head again. Those two men got in the car and drove off. Jimpson stood there in a wobbly and twitchy condition. Then he collapsed slowly into a heap on the ground as though all the air were let out of him. The guards had to go get him and carry him back in. When they discovered the meaning of the red mark around his head, when they discovered that something was missing both from his head and from his belly, they carried him directly to his room and his bed.

  “We will let the doctors decide what to make of his case when they come by in the morning,” the guards said. Then they went on about their duties.

  We heard later that the doctors were not amused when they examined Jimpson in the morning and discovered what was missing.

  “Whatever else we call it, we are playing power-poker with the Hazh-Bazh,” Director-Designate Marc Edel said. “If we let them read us, then we are lost. Ah, Staff, Staff, shape up for me! I can't let this guy be better than I am. You can't let his staff be better than you are. Some millions of lives are riding on this, as well as our own pride and reputations. We should have the advantage here on our own world. Why do I feel that the advantage is sliding away from us and to him?” “There aren't too many ways that real advantage can have swung to him,” said General Gilbert Sung from the Pentagram. “There is no way that he can have intimate knowledge of us. Our security is too tight for that. Moreover, if he has access to our data at all, it will prove mostly bogus. Our own self-knowledge is badly put together and is generally faulty. How could he know us better than we know ourselves. He hasn't been around here long enough for that.”

  “Our knowledge of his people is surely better than his of us,” said Sylvester Tsumbo of the Chthonian Response Institute. “We have access to a dozen leaks. He's won a dozen games of power-poker from some pretty salty federations, but he's been scouted in every game. The reports are beginning to form a pretty clear pattern of the Hazh-Bazh and his people. We know, for one thing, that they are very superstitious. They use haruspication — you know, entrail-reading.”

  Those on the staff of Director-Designate Marc Edel were Johnny Greeneyes the gambler-psychologist, General Gilbert Sung, Sylvester Tsumbo, Darius Parsee the third most intelligent person in the world on the Darius Parsee scale, and Cecelia Fitzpeter the second most qualified person in the world on the Cecelia Fitzpeter Qualified Scale.

  Those on the staff of the Hazh-Bazh were Hazh-Ksu, Hazh-Gow, Hazh-Song, Hazh-Fung, and Hazh-Li, five nephews of his. So the two staffs would seem of about equal quality.

  The Rim-Raiders, who were represented by the Hazh-Bazh and his staff, had never completely overpowered any force or federation. They often underplayed themselves: they liked to give the impression that they were mere nuisance invaders who might be bought off with Danegeld. But they were a little bit more than that.

  And World had been whipped more times than any place we know, but World had never been whipped badly or permanently. Indeed, after the passing of some time, the World-Conquerors would sometimes wonder just who had conquered whom. But, by this time, the World-Conquerors were quite worldly in outlook and partly so in blood. But it wasn't quite a top-world group that was in ascendancy just now on World. Leading position was rotated on a seven year sequence. The Chthonian Response Federation was spokesgroup for the World this year. It was made up of many of the old grass-roots nations along with some of the newer third-world folks, a catch-all bunch.

  “We will not lie to you,” said the Hazh-Bazh as they began another informal negotiating session. “We are not looking for loot or blood here, and you haven't much of either. We are looking for a base. We haven't any base in this sector, and World would be nice. So we want an undevastated planet and a docile people inhabiting it. You can fit that exactly.” “And why do you suppose that we would stand still for such a takeover?” Marc Edel asked. “How far do you think you can push us anyhow?”

  “We know exactly how far we can push you,” the Hazh-Bazh purred. “But you yourselves haven't any idea how far you may be pushed. We have this one advantage of knowledge over you, and we won't need any other.”

  “Your computers are no better than ours,” said Edel. “Your information-gathering teams are clumsy. You simply cannot appraise us. We keep our basic secrets from others by keeping them from ourselves also. You cannot know our base, or our slant, or our shape, or our fundamental processes. You do not know our reactions. And how do you propose to find them out?”

  “How? Is there more than one way?” the Hazh-Bazh asked in real puzzlement. “We use the tools that leading peoples everywhere use. The World names for these tools are Augury and Divination. And Haruspicy.”

  The World spokesmen laughed at the Hazh-Bazh with biting merriment, and they put the bridle on their laughter only when they noticed the dangerous anger seething in several of the nephews.

  “We're sorry, Hazh-Bazh,” Edel said. “It almost seems as if you are serious.”

  “We are, and you cannot cover up your ignorance with horse-laughs. Worldlings, Worldlings, there is so little to you! But we do have all the data on you, the data of your impoverishment of mind and of your shallowness of persons, the data of your dangerous soft spot. And we have this data by augury and divination.”

  “What do you use for your divinations?” Edel asked loftily. “Chicken entrails?”

  “Sometimes, yes. But we usually prefer the braver birds to chickens. Birds are a basic. When their viscera are all unwound, they are a map of the temperament of their particular world. And fish intestines are so revelatory of the deep and subterraneous faultings of the local dominant species. The hot-blood animals are good too, but usually they give only surface guidance which we could get elsewhere. And then there is an ambiguous cre
ature that has both the lower and upper entrails (we are using a prime specimen of this creature now, and we may obtain another), and this creature is the most informative of all.

  “Oh, by the way, Edel, we have just put a bit more pressure on the twelve thousand captives that we hold. And we have thoughtfully given the information of this escalation to your media. Aye, to your bleed-ia media! Soggy stuff, they, what?”

  “You don't for a moment think that such trifles would have any effect on our bargaining, do you?” Marc Edel asked with fragile assurance.

  “It does seem preposterous,” the Hazh-Bazh admitted, “and I don't know any other place where it would be possible. But our data, taken from the upper entrails of an ambiguous creature, shows that you do respond to such trivial needling. It's laughable really, but our latest escalation of treatment, white-hot irons driven into the apertures of the twelve thousand prisoners, does seem to be having some effect on you already.”

  Well, it did have an effect on the bargainers. It had such an effect that Marc Edel asked to have the bargaining session cut short that day.

  The affair of the twelve thousand prisoners was this: the taking of twelve thousand worldlings from the orbital stations had been an opening move of the Rim-Raiders. Such things really were no more than conversation pieces, no more than declarations of actions. And who could take them for anything else? But there was a secret soft spot in the make-up of some of the new worldlings, and there was another group of nine-times-contemptible worldlings who loved to feed and fatten themselves of that soft spot. These were the people of the media, the bleed-ia media, the parasites from under the rocks who were too vile to face the sun. But the media had raised issues about the prisoners, and the people were duped into making a noise about it. The Rim-Raiders caught on to the weakness quick. Worldlings were people who might have spots of the compassion-sickness. The Rim-Raiders had lucked into the thing, but they would make a good thing out of it.