“It isn't crowded now. It is said, Leo, that there will always be plenty of room for all the people, so long as the people are not counted. It is also said that there will always be enough land for everything, so long as the land is not measured,” Ramsworth Armstrong argued.
“But there may come a time, Ramsworth, when we are not afraid to count, and to measure, and to project. The whole world has been pretty placid mentally. I think it's an accident that one particular seed hasn't rooted so far; but I believe that we can root it on purpose even if some of us are destroyed by it. In Detroit itself, the cutting edge of all that is new in technology, we have the sheep for a symbol on our flag. We do not question enough. We do not invent enough. It is time we took a great leap off of our little stepping stools.”
“Leo, just before we left the north on our latest flightway to the south here, there were thirteen men who took leaps off their little stepping stools. They didn't go far, just to the ends of their ropes that hanged them by their necks. It only seemed as if they were men of hasty authority who hanged them. Those thirteen men really put the rope around their own necks.”
“Yes, I know that,” Leo Carrottop said.
“Those thirteen hanged men, do you want to end as they did, Leo?”
“Really, I don't mind if I do end that way. People are telling some pretty interesting stories about those thirteen men now. I want them to tell interesting stories about me after I'm dead.”
It was a very dry winter everywhere. In the north it did not snow, and in the south it did not rain. Everywhere, the ground and its plants stood dry and brittle and dusty and in danger of the evil fever. This was tinder land now, and of particular danger was the dry lightning from the rainless electrical storms. It was quite windy all that winter and particularly at the end of winter. Well, the weather wasn't a great hardship. There was always corn and cereal grain in storage for such a year as this might be shaping up to be. Years that began so were usually of the “years that eat up the corn.” There were plenty of haycocks in the hay meadows, also, for the previous seasons had been lush. For the dryness, outriders and guards were doubled everywhere and the people were very careful. Most of the music that season was Watchman music.
It was such a season, right at the start of spring now, as weeds will grow well and early crops will not grow. It was such a time when kinky and whispered notions came up everywhere like cockleburs in the springtime, and balanced judgments hid ungreening in their dry and stunted ground. Three young people of a league of nuclear families, Leo Carrottop, Jasper Frostchaser, and Very Softstep, had very many of these kinky and whispered notions, and there must have been such a whispering group in every league of families. They hinted at things they would not say out loud, and they gnawed like mice on the edges of reason.
“It may be that the time has come to invent a lightning,” Leo Carrottop often said. “Then we could reduce the size of its danger and control it. And, having it controlled, we could look for its uses. Oh, I know that many of us would have to die from it first, but good might finally come of it. It is only an accident that miniaturized and controlled lightning is not already in use on our world.”
“On our world?” Agnes Sourstate asked. “You daffy, what other worlds are there?”
“I believe there are alternate worlds where controlled lightning, fire to use the plain word for it, is in common use for many things.”
“And just where are these alternate worlds to be found, Leo?” Argus Brownscum asked.
“Well, at present, ah, so far as I know, they are found only on analysts' couches,” Leo admitted.
“But that indicates it is all present in the unconscious,” Very Softstep told them, “burningly present.”
It was ready-time for taking the bright flightway road back to the springtime north. There were the ready-fairs and the ready-music (still with its strong Guardsman theme this season) and the dancing and the orangebang drinking. There were little dramas and masques. A new and sly theme was introduced into these — the tinder scarecrows. Leo Carrottop, Jasper Frostchaser, Very Softstep, and a hundred other such small groups from a hundred other leagues of families, masqueraded in their tinder scarecrow costumes. These were stuffed full of very dry straw.
It is traditional that scarecrows do not smile, and that they be funny anyhow. Well, these were funny at the dances and at the drinking parties and courtings and dramas and masques. But, besides being funny, there was one other thing about the scarecrows that everybody noticed: They were scared.
The signal for the northern migration (as the freezing of the applejack was the yearly signal for the southern migration) was the blooming on a very old and honored Gershwin's Palmetto plant. It was nearly certain that it would bloom on an afternoon in mid-March, and the joy wagons and cargo carts were loaded, and all backpacks were packed. It was hot, it was dry, it was windy; and there were ugly and feverish clouds sliding across the blue. There were double outriders and double guards, and everyone was on the alert.
But the scarecrows, the legs and arms and bosoms of their clothing stuffed full of dry straw, formed a carry-over from the galas and the ready dances. They were still in costume. Some of the scarecrows talked about their tattered notions more openly than they had before. (The garish-green lightning began to flame in the skimpy clouds.)
“If it comes as we believe it will come,” Leo Carrottop mumbled to some of the young, “then we will take up pieces of it, no matter what pain to ourselves, and we will spread them ‘til no one can put them all out. It will not matter whether the guards do extinguish it finally, so long as we force them to extinguish us also. Then our souls will be in it, and it will come back again and again.”
“What are you talking about, Leo?” Ramsworth Armstrong asked. “Have your brains all turned to straw?”
“They will have turned to it quite soon,” Leo said, “to flaming straw.”
“This brave death business doesn't go with me at all,” Very Softstep said. (The air was so dry that it blasted the eyes, and the dry lightning still spat and fumed.) “Mine is a scared death business. It doesn't matter even that it might be all wrong and that it might not work anyhow. If we die to bring it, it will make it a little bit more right. Say of me tomorrow, ‘She died scared, but she died anyhow.’ ”
“Very, what nonsense are you talking?” Agnes Solidstate asked her. “I always understood you, and now I don't.” (The dry lightning had become pretty rampant, and it seemed that the very hair on the head of the hot wind stood up with static electricity.)
“Maybe if we bring it about that it's all consumed, an alternate world will come in to take its place,” Jasper Frostchaser said. “The alternate world will have cooked food, and furnaced iron, and burning fuel for heating.”
“Jasper, do you want the whole world to burn up?” Ramsworth cried in outrage.
“If that is the next big step in transforming the world, yes, I do,” Jasper insisted. (A shout went up from the people: The Gershwin's Palmetto had bloomed.)
“You're crazy! You're stark mad!” Ramsworth shouted while the kinky green dry lightning was already making sky-earth contact. “You're playing with fire!”
The lightning struck, and it set the world on fire. It flamed and crackled in a snakey thicket of dry brush, and outriders and guards rushed in with prepared wet sacks and mats to beat the flames out. But three hundred costumed scarecrows from a hundred different family leagues were there before them. These rushed into the flaming thicket itself and stuffed handsful of fire into the straw of their own bosoms. They set themselves afire; they made torches of themselves; and they ran with the wind, in three hundred different directions, to ignite other thickets and copses and trees and fields and grasses. There was no way that the outriders and guards could stop these three hundred other fires that quickly turned into three thousand and then into thirty thousand fires and would not stop ‘til the entire world was burned up. Oh, the entire world would perish in the fire, there was no doubt about
that. The rocks would melt, the ocean would evaporate, and the entire globe would burn to a cinder. That had always been feared and always been predicted.
Ramsworth Armstrong, Agnes Solidstate, Argus Brownscum, they were standing on a small island of smoking earth that had not yet vanished in the sea of flame. They saw there the burning body of their deluded and lately scarecrowish friend Very Softstep. They recognized her by her fiery initials on the very hot iron bracelet she had been wearing. There had always been something about Very they had liked. Now there was something entirely different about her that they liked very much. What a fragrant girl!
“Very and I were always very close,” Agnes Solidstate said. “She wouldn't mind this, not if she knew it was I who did it. And now, in the very last moments of the world, I have to know whether it really is better that way. Maybe there'll be another world and I can tell them. No one but you here will know what I do, and in two minutes there will be no one anywhere to know anything.”
Neither of the two answered her.
Agnes screamed when she put her hand to Very's burning flesh. She screamed again when she brought a fragment of it to her mouth. But she was still able to whisper after a moment, “Yah, it's better cooked. It really is.”
They all seemed to melt together as their island of smoking earth turned into flame.
The whole vanishing world was fire-bright. There were brilliantly bright flightways shining in every direction, but no one would ever travel on them again.
Love Affair With Ten Thousand Springs
Ranwick Sorgente, a primordial man, had been following the little stream for about two hours before dawn. The stream had gone under, hopefully, its last road culvert, and now was climbing, steadily and backwards, in a withdrawing and snakey way. It was an easy and winding climb up layered rocks with their small cedar trees. Now, just before sun-up, he could hear the spring and its pegeid both, and he knew that there would be something a little bit wrong with both of them, and that they would still be better than most right things found elsewhere. The spring spoke a liquid greeting. And the pegeid called out in words and ran down to meet them.
“Oh, what a funny looking man!” the pegeid cried out, and she kissed him with a laughing sort of soppiness that was almost a slaver.
“Oh hi!” she said. “I always do that. It's my failing. Cliveden almost didn't marry me on account of it. ‘Gad, what a slurpy woman!’ he always says, but I can't kiss dry. I'm sloppy. I'm Crescentia Houseghost. My husband and I live in the lodge that belongs to the Bureau of Minerals. It has a laboratory and is wonderful. You don't mind if I'm slurpy, do you?” she asked, and she kissed him again.
“No, no,” Ranwick said. “All springs are slurpy, and all pegeids of springs are slurpy too. We would not love you so much if you weren't.”
“You love me then? And what is a pegeid?”
“You are one, Crescentia. The nereids and the oreads and other nymphs, while not small, are mere woman-sized. The pegeids are of more heroic dimensions. You are a water colt, you are the spirit of a water-spring. You're the spirit of the spring just above us.”
“But I don't even know where the spring is. I'm not allowed to remember it.”
“Oh, you really do know. You've just forgotten. You met me here to bring me up to it.”
Ranwick and Crescentia the pegeid went hand in hand up the slippery and mossy green rocks in the cedar-scented early morning shade. Crescentia was barefoot. She was very strong, and she twice lifted Ranwick in her arms, laughing, and waded the stream with him. She, like all water-springs and all spring-spirits, was highly imperfect. She was wrapped in some sort of dressing robe over short pajamas. She was too tall and too angular, too bony, too large of hand and foot, too long of thigh and of arched neck. Her eyes were just a little bit awry; one of them was slightly crossed. Her mouth was always crooked with its smile, and there was ever a trickle of saliva or spring water at one corner of it.
With sparkling suddenness they came to the spring right at the break of dawn.
“It is perfect,” Crescentia said as they came up to it, and she was wrong. It was as little perfect as she was herself. It came out of the ground lopsided. It formed a pool that was ledged and bottomed and clear for six feet of its width, and then dropped off into green darkness and apparently considerable depth on the other half. No more than half of the water coming out of the gushing spring was overflowing the pool to tumble down the rock-layered hills. Some of it was finding another channel down inside the hill again, to come out at still another level somewhere below.
Crescentia was breast-deep in the pool of the spring, belonging there. “You love it, don't you?” she asked old Ranwick. “That part of it doesn't have any bottom. You love all springs, don't you? How many? Do they all have names?” “About ten thousand of them, I believe. Yes, each one has its name, and each pegeid.”
“How long?”
“Oh, fifty years I've been having these affairs with them. I only regret that I didn't seek them out sooner.”
“And they are all so perfect?”
“No. None of them is. The best ones are shockingly imperfect.”
“Do you ever feel that you are the first person who has come onto one?”
“I used to feel it. I would like to feel it, but it is no longer possible. They are all faithless. They have all been had before. They are all strumpets. Every one of them is second-hand.”
“Oh no.”
“Oh yes, Crescentia. That's the part that we have to live with. I ask ‘Who was with you here before me’, and the springs just smile with their crooked smiles, as you do.”
“I forget who was here with me before you. I will go and wake my husband now.” She came sopping out of the pool. “I will start the breakfast. Then you come down to breakfast in a very little while. You can see the roof of our lodge right there. Count when the spring has gushed one thousand gallons, and then come.”
“Maybe I will forget to come,” Ranwick said. “I will sit by a new spring for hours sometimes and forget the world. What then?”
“Oh, I will send my husband for you if you don't come. And if you don't come with him, then I will come back and take you up on me and bring you down there. And you be faithful while I'm gone.” The pegeid Crescentia kissed Ranwick Sorgente again with a splashy smooch and then ran down the green-stone slopes like a filly colt. Too leggy, that one. Was anyone ever so leggy? And she wasn't very young. Rough, rank, yellow hair was on her head as on a shaggy bay pony, a very high standing one. All the pegeids were so.
Ranwick enjoyed the gushy small spring which was really quite loud at this short range, and he tried to place the spring with her kindred. All the springs share a sort of cousinship, but there are degrees of kindred. She was a bit like Iron Mountain Spring which would always remain as a type. There was the sexiness of the iron-water sparkling in the daylight, and there was flint-stone derision and mockery in the crooked grin of the spring. Ranwick could feel the mist-water on his face and hands. He could smell the brittle and blue skin of the snake-doctor dragon flies as they hovered over this new-hatched pool. He could empathize with the shock of this born-blind water breaking out of its underground darkness to its first dazzling daylight, and he could hear interior rocks being rattled by the resonance of the tumbling water. “But you did not wait for me,” Ranwick told the deceiving spring. “You've been had a very long time ago. You've let someone else put a bit in your mouth and a throttle in your throat. You are a wanton, and you are rotten.”
The man who was Cliveden Houseghost was coming up the slope to tell Ranwick that breakfast was ready down in the lodge. Cliveden was clean-shaved and bright-eyed, so some space of time had gone by for this man to have been awakened and readied.
“I hadn't even found the spring,” Cliveden said. “Crescentia told me that you had found it here. I had been coming up the wrong draw, and the sound of it is deceptive. There's another draw that carries more water, but it gets it from a long ooze and seep, not fro
m a spring. More than half of this water seems to turn back inside the hill here. It comes out gradually into that other draw, without a spring. And she looks so honest and so innocent.”
“But she isn't, Cliveden. It isn't in their nature to be. If I find one that is, I'll look no further.”
“Do you test them all, man? Or do you guess? I will test this one sometime today or tomorrow to see what is in her throat. Crescentia says to tell the funny old man that breakfast is ready. I guess that's you.”
“Yes,” Ranwick said. “I will be down in a very little while.”
Cliveden Houseghost went back to his lodge below. He seemed to be a pleasant young man. He even seemed to know about springs. And he probably knew about one pegeid Crescentia, and perhaps he had even mastered her. But Ranwick would never know all the springs or all their spirits. He would never know enough about any of them, except that one thing about all of them that he wished he didn't know. They were lovable though, even though they were never conventionally lovely. Springs, sources, fountains, how they did break out of their green hills! There was Old Carp Springs. That was almost as much a type as Iron Mountain Spring. Really there were six Old Carp Springs that Ranwick had known, and he would distinguish them by their state or region. And who were the old Carps who lived in the Old Carp Springs? They dwelt, one each to a spring basin, in those pools that were so small about them that they became like houses or skin. How could the carp have come to the various pools, and how could they remain there forever with no contact with their fellows? Inside their carp disguises, just who were they anyhow? Oh, there were a lot of very friendly springs, slushily affectionate springs.
Bright-Wine Spring was one. Fox-Fire Spring in Georgia (Oh, remember the long-legged lady with fox-fire in her eyes who was pegeid of that one!), Broken-Dog Spring in Texas, Stump-Water Spring in Minnesota, Left-Hand Spring in Oklahoma. In New Mexico there was a very small spring that was named Saint Angelo's Ocean. But the litany of the full ten thousand is required for the whole appreciation of the music of their names.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 242
