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

by R. A. Lafferty

  But these were the golden days and years, the “Era of the Golden Brains,” the prime time of the people. The mood was “Enjoy it; it's fun to be smart; let's have the fun.” But there was a darker mood running also, and it said, “If they don't want a piece of it, we'll carve a piece of them.” There was also a movement running through the land to do away with all the people who didn't much want to be smart in any of the offered ways. But the bulk of the people did want to be smart, and they did become smart, so smart that it would scare you. For the safety of the land, guidelines then had to be set up for the whole complex of group braininess.

  For the safety of the land, not of the lands, for there was now only one land, the United States. All other lands in the world had ceased to exist. There had been, you see, a lot of show-boating at the time of the appearance of the first massive braininess. Show-Boat exhibitionists had discovered that they could do such things as moving mountains by their new brain power alone. Then some of the more brash of them began to top each other in their ostentations. They began to destroy, or to consign to the outer darkness, whole countries and continents, till only one land was left. Here, here! A halt must be called to such doings.

  So everybody received a jolt of a new admonition-module, a stern warning medication. As it happened, it probably wasn't necessary. Things were happening rapidly in the brain field. The Show-Boat impulse and manifestation passed as suddenly as it had come. The rapidly rising level of braininess had quickly left that early destructive phase behind it. But that didn't bring back the lost lands.

  There were only a few people who did not go along with it all, who did not walk bright-eyed into “Brain-World” and all its glories. Surprisingly, the people who had started it all, the Quacksalvers and Confidence People, were among those minorities who didn't go along with it. They didn't use the steroids themselves. Nor the information-modules, nor the gateway-couples.

  “I sure don't want to be burdened with any more brains than I have now,” Jerome Blackfoot said. “Carrying too much of those things around makes a weighty burden. Sometimes I think I'd like to dump about half of the brains that I already have in my head.”

  “Sometimes I think you are about to dump half of your brains,” Whitehead said. “I don't know anybody who comes as close to it as often as you do.”

  “A brain-glutton I don't want to be,” said Thor Thorgelson (“A Square Deal from the Square-Head” was his business motto), one of the most accomplished of the Quacksalvers.

  Ah, Blackfoot and Whitehead and Thorgelson and the rest of them didn't really have much brains. They just stayed ahead of things by getting up so early in the mornings. Drinking of the morning fountains before they are roiled is almost as good as having brains. “Joy cometh in the morning” it says in one place. “Make the morning precious” it says in another. “Men and morning newspapers” it says in still another place. Ferndale Whitehead would always pick up a morning newspaper from a neighbor's front step before that neighbor was awake, and this action was a type of getting to the world before the world was awake. Then Whitehead would stroll to the Break-of-Day Donut Shop and be the first customer there right at opening time.

  “The first cup of coffee out of your Reciprocal-Movement Coffee-Maker is always a little bit bitter,” he would say conversationally.

  “Yeah, I know,” the sleepy-eyed waitress would agree. “I always throw the first cup out.”

  “Give me that first bitter cup,” Whitehead would say. So, at no expenditure of coin, he acquired a taste for bitter coffee very early in the morning.

  “The first tray of Long John Fritters in the morning will always have one fritter a little bit burned,” Whitehead would say.

  “Yeah, I know,” the waitress would agree. “It's the one in the highest corner, before the grease really gets effective. I always throw the burned one out.”

  “Give me the fritter that is a little bit burned,” Whitehead would say. So he would have coffee and fritter free, and a sociable place to read the paper. Then, after he had cut the usual free coupons out of it, he would reroll that paper carefully and put it back on the neighbor's doorstep where he had found it. There had been a chilliness develop between the paperboy and the neighbor from whom the paper was borrowed for a little while every morning. Neither of them understood how the paper had all the holes cut out of it when it was first unrolled.

  But, by these simple movements, Ferndale Whitehead was able to get a head start on the world every morning. And it was a rare day when the world ever did catch up to him after such a start. Kathrynne Klunque and Elizabeth Queen Mab and Thor Thorgelson were out early every morning also, as were almost all the other quacksalvers. It is always the “First Morning of Creation” when you get up early enough. Certain demiurges have always known this and have always risen early. But most of the people have known it not.

  Whitehead's partner, Jerome Blackfoot, also got up early in the mornings, and he liked to walk in the countryside that is just on the edge of town. Jerome usually carried a basket and a toe-sack and a jug. “You have heard of the guy who went out when it was raining fish, and he didn't have anything to catch them in,” Jerome said. “I'm not that guy. I'll always have something to catch them in.”

  Actually, fish were far down on the list of things that Blackfoot filled his receptacles with every morning. In season, he picked produce of various sorts. Sometimes a chicken or a duckling went into his toe-sack. Almost every morning he stopped by one of the places where cows were kept and he always milked a jugful from one of the cows. “I don't care who keeps my country's cows,” he would say, “so long as I have the milk free. A cow-keeper I am not.”

  Dogs sometimes harassed Blackfoot a bit, but he had a trick of slipping a muzzle onto the barking head of a dog and then stuffing the whole dog into his toe-sack. People will almost always advertise when a well-voiced dog disappears, and they will pay small rewards when he is returned.

  The Quacksalvers were a bunch of inclined twigs and they grew from that into a profitably slanted forest. So Jerome Blackfoot, like his partner, like most of the other quacksalvers, got a head start on the world every morning. In the very early morning there is always enough freshness to go around. And beyond that, the quacksalvers all did their best thinking on their early morning rambles.

  Their best thinking? That? But let us go from the ridiculous to the sublime. How was it going with the people who could really think? How was it going with the brainy majority? Oh, it was going well with them.

  What do people think about when their thinking power is many times increased? Oh, they think about the same things, but they do it with greater power. And they think about nothing new? Yes, they think about everything new. To think of a thing with greater power is to think of it new. And at top-thinking, things draw together so that sympathy and affection are all parts of the same thing, along with logic and exposition and excitement. The material problems of the land simply packed up and went away. They were solved automatically. Problems of weather proved amenable to solution. It would rain if enough people thought “rain” powerfully enough. The south wind would blow if enough people thought “south wind will blow” intelligently enough. There was successful problem-solving, and there was an activating peace of mind. Peace has nothing to do with inaction. It was a highly active, dynamic and kinetic peace-of-mind that prevailed. And there was a lot of love, of everybody for everybody, imbuing the whole life-weave. “We make a stunning picture,” said Hadrian Pigendo, a Scar-Tissue man and a painter. “Our whole land is now one single picture, and a scanning frame on it will be filled with nothing but masterpieces wherever it stops. A century ago, John Masterman said that there couldn't be a perfect picture until every element in it, animate and inanimate, was in thinking accord. Now everything is in thinking accord, and everything is a part of a perfect picture. This table here is in thinking accord with me and with everyone else who enters the room. It resonates to us. So does the light that breaks and spills through the window
there. Ours has now become an intellectualized world, achieving the identity of intelligence with beauty. The two are the same, both being aspects of “perfect order.” The only drawback to the perfect living picture that we form is the business of the invisible cobwebs. But perhaps that is not a drawback either when it shall be perfectly understood.”

  “There is no longer any difference between individual thought and group thought,” said Felix Acumen, a Necklace-Clan man and a thinker's thinker. “At its apex of exaltation, thought merges everyone together. This is not to say that everyone will think alike. It is to say that the infinite variety of human thought, when it flourishes in its essential life-greenness, weaves itself into a single seamless (and limitless) garment every part of which is conscious of every other part. It may be that this seamless thought encompasses everything, that it is all inside and that there is no outside to it. Or it may be that there is a very slight outside to it. There are invisible and barely sensed tendrils of cobwebs that brush against the multi-surface of our thought, and they may be from outside the context.”

  The courtship rites of the super-intelligent clans were interesting. There was the “interlocking antenna” effect of the Necklace-Clan people, their gateway-couplings that made up their necklaces seeking their counterparts in those of the other person and rushing together with a great clattering. There were the double needles that the Scar-Tissue People used that resulted in highly intricate steroid sharing. There was the business of each lover placing his brains in the wagon of his loved one in the case of the Little Red Wagon People. And there were the non-standardized courtship proceedings when the courtships were between members of two different brain clans.

  Other things enriched themselves. People no longer played three-dimensional chess. They played sixteen-dimensional chess, which is harder, but more rewarding. The music that they made now was an intellectualized music. Some people said that it was a computerized music. But it was not, somehow, the expression of the identity of intelligence and beauty. It was really bad music, considering that it was the music of an intellectual era. But it was not nearly as bad as the music of the preceding non-intellectual era had been.

  And the super-intelligent people couldn't tell good jokes. Otis Ramrod, a Little Red Wagon Person and a social mores expert, explained it:

  “No, super-intelligent persons cannot tell good jokes. There is no such thing as a good joke to a super-intelligent person. Humor disappears from the world now. There is no longer any place or purpose for it. Crocodiles may shed tears over its passing, but I will not. Humor is a ridiculous bridge thrown across a chasm of maladjustment. In the super-intelligent world there is no maladjustment, no chasm, and no places to throw the bridge named humor. In our now almost-perfect-world, on careen-course towards perfection, there are only slight and disappearing flaws where residual humor may still flicker faintly. There are, for instance the ‘cobweb jokes’ which most persons do not understand (I do not). And there are residual antibrain people such as the Quacksalvers who still have humor and still have maladjustments. Our aim is totally to sweep away both the mysterious ‘cobwebs’ and the mopey Quacksalvers this very year.”

  The super-intellectual world could not allow maladjustment in itself. So it could not allow self-doubt. So it could not allow dissent. And something had to be done about the tendency of people to brush imaginary cobwebs away from their faces too.

  The non-participating Quacksalvers represented dissent. Them at least you could get your hands on. Them at least you could obliterate.

  A whole complex of surfacing questions represented self-doubt.

  The cobwebs represented the cobwebs themselves.

  A small congress of ultra-super-intelligent persons was assembled to consider the three problems. They came quickly to the possibility that the three problems were all one problem. Here are bits of scattered conversations and comments from the “Self-Doubt Congress.”

  “Someone is kidding. It isn't really like this. This business of us being super-intelligent is all a put-on. Well, who's putting it on?”

  “Are we indeed a Noble Experiment? And who is it who is experimenting with us? We know that Noble Experiments have a high incidence of failure.”

  “What is the mysterious ‘Micro-X’ element that has always been in all our brain steroids that we have never been able to take out of them? Does somebody monitor our brains by it?”

  “Are we being milked? I ask are we being milked? What godly race is milking our brains and our persons?”

  “Has there ever been a successful revolt of puppets against puppeteers? Is such a thing possible? How would puppets have any motion if it were not imparted to them by their puppeteers? No, I do not say that we are puppets. I merely ask whether there has ever been a successful revolt of puppets against puppeteers.”

  “What if it is fortunate that we are not able to brush the invisible cobwebs or tendrils away from us? What if they are our life-line or our light-line? What if we break just one of the invisible tendrils, the wrong one for us, and the light in us switches off? I believe that this has been the true cause of deaths of a number of persons this year. Indeed, one doctor I know of wrote ‘broken cobwebs’ in the line for ‘cause of death’ on the certificates of several persons. He has since been barred from doctoring for persistent drunkenness.”

  “Is Quacksalver Row Olympus? No, no, consider that question unasked. It cannot be Olympus. It cannot even be Valhalla. It is something much else and much less. It is so much less that it must remain beneath our notice. Quacksalver Row, I mean.”

  “We are met to solve these three problems. One of them can be solved within an hour by a little bit of bloody extinction. So let us solve that one problem now, and then inquire whether the other two problems have not somehow solved themselves with it. That's the way that super-intelligent persons would go about this. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” said the other members of the small congress of ultra-super-intelligent persons. So they went out, it being evening now, with staves and swords and garroting ropes to effect the extinction of about thirty nonconformist persons.

  The Quacksalvers of Quacksalver Row all maintained cluttered quarters which they believed to be elegant. These were all in three or four adjacent buildings on the Row. The Quacksalvers were really a “Beggar's Opera” of very gamey folks.

  The people of the small congress that had been looking into the three problems, their numbers being about thrice the numbers of the Quacksalvers, came before their quarters and made an evening tumult in Quacksalver Row.

  All the Quacksalvers tumbled out of their buildings and came to the confrontation in the street. One of the Quacksalvers, Thor Thorgelson who did business under the motto “A Square Deal from the Square-Head,” drew his own sword and cut off the ear of the leader of the congress party. This leader began to cry with the pain and surprise and loss, and many of his companions began to cry with him. Super-intelligent persons have very close sympathies with other super-intelligent persons.

  “Why all the fuss?” Thor Thorgelson asked. “It's his deaf ear that I cut off. Don't you think that I have any sense at all?” This was all the bloodshed, all the violence of any kind that took place at the confrontation.

  “This is ridiculous,” one of the super-intelligent persons said. “Why should we, the brainiest of all delegations, have come to parley with you beggars? What compels us to do it? What strings are on us anyhow?”

  “We don't know why you came,” Kathrynne Klunque said. “We are all agog about it ourselves.”

  “You are like horrible caricatures of puppeteers,” the super-intelligent speaker said. “How do we come to be a-dangle on your strings?”

  “What strings?” Kathrynne asked.

  “He means the cobwebs,” the confidence woman Elizabeth Queen Mab guessed. “He thinks they are puppet strings. He thinks we manipulate them.”

  “Well, do we?”

  “I don't know. A little bit, I guess.”

  “Eve
rybody dangles on several sets of strings and is manipulated by them,” Ferndale Whitehead tried to explain. “This could not bother you. Is what bothers you, brain-people, that the strings seem to be manipulated from an unexpected direction, that they seem to be manipulated by ourselves?”

  “Why should we be at odds?” Jerome Blackfoot asked. “You are good cows. You feed and maintain yourselves, a thing that I wouldn't like to do. Let's keep it the way it is, you smart and us dumb. It seems to me to be a fair division.”

  “No, no, this cannot be,” one of the super-brains protested. “We are not, we cannot be—”

  “You cannot be clowns' cattle?” Elizabeth Queen Mab asked. “Well, say that you are not cattle then, and we will agree that you are not. We will remain the clowns without any cattle. But don't you quit giving milk!”

  “We will revolt! We will overthrow you!” a super-brain threatened.

  “Oh no!” Jerome Blackfoot swore. “Then in the turnover you would be dumb and we would be smart. Do not hang that on us! We'll never accept that burden. We thought we had it fixed perfectly the way it was. We'll take to the woods, we'll take to the wastelands, we'll never come back!”

  “Except for the milk,” one of the super-brains jeered.

  Believe it people, there was tension there for a long moment.

  And never could you guess what broke that tension when it had stretched out longer and longer.

  One of the super-brains laughed.

  And another of them wailed. And one cried out in pain.

  But then a second one laughed, and then a third one. They broke it when they did that. “You laugh too hard and I'll turn your little red wagons over,” Elizabeth Queen Mab threatened.

  But another of the super-brains laughed. There was a chasm, and there shouldn't have been. There was maladjustment, and a ridiculous bridge was the best that could be thrown over it.