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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Yes, this is blackmail,” the Hazh-Bazh had laughed to his opponents at the little conference table. “You thoughtfully gave us the paper and pens to write the blackmail notes; you gave us the content itself; and you have been very helpful at filling us in on details. And you add suggestion after suggestion. And now there are another twelve thousand of your simple persons who have made a unilateral offer of themselves in the places of the twelve thousand prisoners. Funny people, are you not, Edel?”

  The first torture of the prisoners that the Rim-Raiders shared with the media was the head-in-the-vice torture. It was a pretty stark presentation, with the jaws of the vices being closed on the prisoners' heads a centimeter an hour until the various demands should be fulfilled. And there were some (actually only a few dozen) living illustrations of what would happen tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that: crushed and gorily-busting heads with cascades of blood and bones and brains and convoluted matter.

  The Hazh-Bazh and his nephews razzed Marc Edel and his staff over the ridiculous success of this little joke. And the Chthonic-Worldlings had to make a few new concessions every day on account of the prisoners and the popular clamor.

  “You know, Edel,” the Hazh-Bazh said, “that we have with us on this expedition only a few more than two thousand vices large enough to accept human heads. This means that only two thousand of the prisoners are having their heads crushed and ten thousand are not. But your silly media are carrying on as though all twelve thousand, or even twice that many, prisoners were being tortured in the vices. We don't understand you very well in these things, but we understand you well enough to take advantage.”

  Yes, and the Rim-Raiders were leading the Chthonic-Worldlings on points in the negotiations, and their advantage was based on just such damnably trivial things as this.

  Yes, the Rim-Raiders did have a prime specimen of the lower and upper entrails of an ambiguous creature. It was really a first-class divination mass, and when the Rim-Raider nephews put on their haruspex hats and examined the material, they found sufficient data for almost everything. They interpreted a lot of information out of the entrails, about what makes Worldlings tick, about how they will react to various conditions, and about how far they can be pushed. These entrails were quite large, and the expert manner in which they had been procured guaranteed that they could be kept fresh and lively. These were very useful data banks. Anatomists made an error about entrails many centuries ago, and this error has been repeated ever since then. The error is that all entrails will unwind into one series and that they will form a single passage through. But in every complex there is one blind loop that will not unwind at all, and it is not part of a through passage. It obtains its content through its walls, and it retains parts of it for many years. It constantly refines and upgrades. These blind loops are the bodily memories and the bodily maps. They are the microcosm of a person (all creatures are persons in our context), and the person is a microcosm of its fated or fortuned world. Everything can be read in these archives if the Haruspex who reads them is a consummate practitioner, and the five nephews of the Hazh-Bazh were. This is the lower or greater entrail which has been spoken of here.

  But there is another entrail in the ambiguous creatures. There is the greater entrail for day, and there is the lesser entrail for night. The night content is accumulated in the upper or lesser entrail which is mostly in the head. It accumulates always, but it is most lively when the body sleeps. It's a fine looking thing with its impressive mass and its dangling ganglia and spinal cord.

  And this upper entrail, like the lower, has its closed loop of rich content. It is body-and-mind memory superimposed; it is body-and-mind map superimposed. It is often called the unconscious, or the seat of the unconscious, and it is as interesting an entrail as will be found anywhere. Many worldling haruspices have examined this upper entrail, but they have examined it only by implication and surmise, or by various secondhand recordings and suborned shadows of itself. They haven't examined it physically or directly. They have not had the heads of the head-patients opened up and the contents spread out for display and study. And that is the pity and mystery of it.

  The prime specimen that the Rim-Raiders had (Marc Edel bypassed his erudite staff, and hired a rock-headed private detective to find this out) was the lower and upper entrails of a cheerful and highly compassionate mental patient named Jimpson Ginseng. And this man had become now, in a second sense, the very bowels of compassion. So, for a while there, Jimpson served the Rim-Raiders as the memory and map of things worldling.

  “We have got to cut out these distracting influences,” Director-Designate Marc Edel told his staff. “We must do this to strengthen our hand at the negotiations. We must disregard all these side noises, and we must bring it about that the people will disregard them also. So please convey to the media that they should cease transmitting the soggy stuff to the public.” “Oh damn the people and triple-damn the media people!” Cecelia Fitzpeter exploded. “The media are anti-World, and they always have been. They are treasonable. They will favor any sort of malodorous and alien monsters over the World, because they themselves are secretly alien and malodorous monsters. They are the ‘negatives’ in that they have all their values reversed: they have black in the place of white, and good in the place of bad. I believe that there is something about the scotographic (miscalled the photographic) process that requires this reversal in the reproductions that the media people use. It is the deviltry of the darkroom. It puts murder in the place of benison, and there is no cure for it.”

  “Oh,” said Director-Designate Marc Edel.

  So the Chthonian Worldlings went to the next day's meeting determined to take a hard line. But the product and pressure from the media, flowing through the people as if they were one large entrail, tended to prohibit the real toughness. Those white-hot irons up the apertures of the now twenty-four thousand prisoners (you didn't believe that the Rim-Raiders released the first twelve thousand just because the second twelve thousand offered themselves unilaterally as sacrifices and substitutes, did you?) had all the people of World considerably anguished, and that anguish overflowed and got into everything. Well, the negotiators had to be stoney-eyed and deaf-eared against the prevailing anguish if they were to avoid a greater anguish for all.

  “We are calling you on everything, you six-headed Hazh!” Edel roared angrily to bypass all formality and open the new day's meeting with a turmoil. “Order everything withdrawn at once and all prisoners freed, or you are six dead ones!”

  “And there will be twenty-four thousand dead prisoners if you do so,” the Hazh-Bazh countered automatically.

  “It is time that we bit off our noses to save our faces,” Cecelia Fitzpeter cried furiously, “and I'll be the first to do it. Withdraw everything or you are dead!”

  “We have left automatic orders,” the Hazh-Bazh said. “If we are harmed or silenced, all the prisoners will die, and other dire things will happen to various of your people.”

  “You have no idea how many dire things will happen to you,” howled Darius Parsee the third most intelligent man in the world. “We can teach you six fellows a few things about torture. Give orders to withdraw everything right now!”

  “No,” said the Hazh-Bazh. “You're bluffing. We know what you people are like.”

  “No, no, you only half know what we are like,” Cecelia sparked at him. “But there are ways you can find out whether we are bluffing!” Cecelia glowered at the Hazh-Bazh menacingly. She was the most wrought-up of all of them.

  “Yes, I do think of one way in particular of finding out whether you're bluffing,” the Hazh-Bazh said, “and we will use it. What if it does lose us a day? We will find out. And now we will all recess for twenty-four hours. Then we will reassemble here for our final session, whichever way it goes.”

  “We will not give you twenty-four hours! We will give you about ten seconds!” swore General Gilbert Sung from the Pentagram.

  “We are taking t
wenty-four hours,” the Hazh-Bazh told them. “Orders are now given that the tortures be suspended for the prisoners. Orders are transmitted that each of the prisoners will be given a full kilo of Rim-Raiders Interior Balm. It's very healing stuff. Orders are transmitted that several other leniencies will be granted to different Worldling groups. But if you have us killed in our quarters, then the twenty-four thousand will suffer automatic death. We will meet you here again on the exact tomorrow.” And all the Hazhes walked out of the meeting.

  “You're faded, guys,” Johnny Greeneyes the gambler-psychologist called after them.

  “We will take another specimen just for a check,” the Hazh-Bazh told his nephews when they were back in their quarters. “And at the same time we will get rid of a very obstreperous opponent. This is what the Worldlings call ‘Killing two wabbits with one wock.’ ”

  It was about midnight that a couple of bulky men of the Rim-Raider persuasion nabbed Cecelia Fitzpeter the second most qualified person in the world. She had always come and gone as she wished without regard for ruffians. Now she was coming out of the dark windings of Executive Alley with the flint-stone clatter of her rock jewelry. And they had her. “I supposed it would be something like this,” Cecelia said coldly, “and I've been thinking it might be the best form I can battle from and give testimony from.”

  One of the bulky men took the little hat off of Cecelia's head and set it down there on the cobblestones of Executive Alley. The other man went around Cecelia's head with some sort of instrument as though he were giving her a bowl-type haircut. What happened next isn't quite clear: it was pretty dark there. There was something about weird openings being made in Cecelia, both in head and body, and something being taken from her. Then one of the men picked the hat up from the cobblestones and put it on Cecelia's head again. She stood there, rattling and sparking for a moment. Then she collapsed slowly into a heap in the alley as though all the air had been let out of her.

  “That's funny, they weren't bluffing,” the Hazh-Bazh confirmed an hour later as, tall haruspex hat on his head, he examined the Cecelian entrails with his five nephews. “This bunch is ready to go ahead and have us killed in spite of the prisoners. This one here hasn't an ounce of compassion in her. We came very near to being killed by relying on insufficient evidence. Well, let's get out of it. There's plenty of other places.”

  “We have released the prisoners,” the Hazh-Bazh said at the next meeting. “We have undone a number of other things that we had done. Now all we want is to get away from this place and call it quits. Agreed?” “Not quite,” said Marc Edel. “You killed Cecelia Fitzpeter. So we must have the life of one of you in exchange.”

  “No problem at all,” said the Hazh-Bazh. “Kill any of my five nephews here and let the rest of us be gone.”

  “You would make the best reparation, Hazh,” Edel said. “We want your life.”

  “For personal reasons I'd rather it not be myself,” the Hazh-Bazh said.

  “For personal reasons I insist that it will be yourself,” Edel answered sharply.

  “Oh very well then,” the Hazh-Bazh said. “Kill me and let the rest of them go.”

  That's what they did. And so the world was saved.

  (A thirty second post-climax silence here.)

  Actually, the world is saved regularly. It is saved on twenty-seven-and-a-half-month cycles, but most of these salvations are never known by the public. But all the old war-horses are returned to their pastureful homes after any such experience. Let them re-live past glories, if they wish to, but let them do it privately. Past glories in present office-holders are always dangerous.

  Johnny Greeneyes and Darius Parsee went by the house of Ex-Director-Designate Marc Edel several days after the end of these happenings. They found him with a haruspex hat on his head. He was poring over some tiny mess on the table. They went closer to see, and Johnny Greeneyes immediately recognized what the small mess was. “Canary entrails!” he cried. “Whatever are you doing with canary entrails, Marc?”

  “Ah, Magda's cat mauled the canary,” Edel said, “and split it open and killed it. But the entrails are still warm and communicative.”

  “Canary entrails!” Darius Parsee spoke in disapproval. “What is a man of your former station doing fussing with canary entrails?”

  “You gotta start somewhere,” the Ex-Director-Designate said doggedly.

  And You Did Not Wail

  1.

  What words for such a childish mésalliance?

  In market-place, how skittishly they rail!

  “We piped you music and you did not dance.

  We sang you dirges and you did not wail.”

  —Matteo Rimato

  “What an absolutely unhuman response!”

  —Caspar O'Malley.

  “There's a spider on your neck, Basil, a big one,” Andrew Giro the impresario said.

  “That means the devil is plotting against me personally,” Basil Cubic laughed. “That fellow can never let bad enough alone.”

  “Eekers-bejeekers! Don't kill it!” one of those new girls from the O'Malley agency shrilled. “Oh what a horribly human reaction! How unhumanly human! Here, let me take the mumms tumms goowoo dumms mumswums—”

  “Baby-talk to a spider!” Basil groused in disgust.

  “I think we are all parts of the same person,” the girl said, “spiders, rats, snakes, even people. There cannot be any such thing as unshared ecstasy. If the least microbe in the universe is unhappy, how can I be ecstatic? I think the spiders are better people than a lot of people are. Ow Wow Gow!”

  “Bit you, didn't he,” Andrew Giro smiled happily.

  “Oh, but he didn't mean to,” the girl syruped. “He was just frightened.” The girl's nose began to bleed gently but emotionally, and she cried a little bit with the pleasure and immediacy of it all. But the spider meant to bite her. It glittered with the meanest eyes ever seen, and there was a noise right at the lower level of sound — malevolent spider laughter.

  “Gentlemen, how can the two of you sit there with dry eyes and uncolored noses?” the girl from O'Malley's asked. “Are you totally void of all human feeling?”

  “To me it's a crisis,” Andrew Giro complained to Basil Cubic. “I like to work with quality stuff, but what passes through my hands now has no quality at all. It's the sniveling madness returned and it's the enemy of quality. The last such movement, and it was incomparably weaker and not nearly so abandoned, was during my childhood when my grandfather was the leading impresario in town. And I was not even born yet at the time of previous visitations of ‘The Thing’. But it's really too much. It affects everybody. It affects even myself.” And Andrew Giro began to weep softly. “Ah lacrimoso infectuoso!” Basil said sadly. “I pray the soggy stuff may pass me by. Does the thing go by cycles, and was such a cycle due?”

  “Yes, it was about due. The skittish cycle has never been a sun-spot thing. It's been a low-sky, demiurge-intrusion cycle most of the time. But now it returns with a putrescent over-ride to it. It's rotten, I tell you, Basil. I can only speak of my own field, which is the arts, but it's in all the arts like a plague.”

  “I always got a secret enjoyment from thumping bad art myself,” Basil said.

  “But this isn't thumping bad art, Cubic. This is puling and gibbering bad art. It's in all the arts and all the styles. It's in all the pleasures and all the interests. It's a total trend, and it may be the sickest trend ever. Is there any possible remedy, do you suppose?”

  “Oh, certainly, Andrew,” Basil Cubic said. “It's the old ‘I and C’ to the rescue. That is the state of mind and the process of action that cannot fail. Put enough engineers on it and they can solve anything.”

  “I don't even know what the ‘I and C’ is, Basil.”

  “It's the ‘Identify and Cure’. It works on most things. I may as well try it on this little silly sickness of the world.”

  But things ran on still looser for a week or so. All the arts had become very tearfu
l, part of the time. And all of them had become happy-jappy part of the time; and they swung like vanes between the extremes. Except that these conditions were not really extremes or opposites; they were the same thing. There hadn't been such sentimentality in fiction since the eighteenth century German and the nineteenth century Russian. There hadn't been such extroverted introspection ever. Painting was decadent and sculpture was simian. Drama was strictly lights out.

  People shouted a lot and they cavorted a lot in those days. But, for some reason, they were not able to shout very loudly; they used those throat microphones for amplification. All their acts, even the most private had to be electronically amplified for them. They couldn't cavort very well either, but they had little bells sewed all over them to give a semblance of liveliness. They went ecstatic and they spoke in tongues. And the thing spread.

  It infected philosophy and industrial design finance and bridge-building and agriculture and mathematics. It infected rapid transit systems and Italian winemaking, and sex and soulful communion and narcotics, and pub-crawling and concert-crawling, and travel and nature-cult and psychology and group-poop and bluegrass fiddling and barbershop quartet singing, and statesmanship, and the very act of ambivalence itself.

  People wept a lot and they snickered a lot, and the two manifestations merged. People had ecstatic spells (group-ecstasy had moved to number one place on the groupie scale) and fainting spells and creative blackouts. People had a lot of nosebleeds, and this became one of the more lofty forms of self-expression. Nose-plugs with little vials attached to them became popular, and many persons would exchange their own latest blood with that of their passionate friends.