“The chosen people among us will leave Robinsonnade World forever in a very few moments, almost at once. We will take nothing with us as we enter the satellite ship to rise to the Mother Ship. We will take nothing with us because we will be given better things on the Mother Ship than are to be found on Robinsonnade.
“These people and these alone will go on to a greater world, having passed the test: Myself Hugo Katz; my wife Monika Katz; my eldest son Konrad Katz and his wife Irene Phelan; my eldest daughter Rita Katz; my second son Frederik Katz, my second daughter Olive Katz; my third son Max Katz, and Barbara Constantino who is pledged to him; my third daughter Veronika Katz; and my two grandchildren William Katz and Lily Katz. These twelve shall go to a brighter place. The other thirty-five of you, for your perversity and for your ordinariness, will remain on Robinsonnade. You all know the proverb ‘There is no room for ordinary people on any of the bright worlds.’ It is your own fault that you have been undistinguished persons.”
“Father!” Frederik Katz called loudly. “That list must be amended! Antoinette Phelan is pledged to me, and she must go with me. I have never in the seventeen years of my life protested a judgment of yours. I do protest this one. Antoinette must come with me.”
“That girl may not go with us,” Hugo said solidly, “and she is not pledged to you in good faith. Of all forty-seven persons on this world, she is absolutely the last and the forty-seventh. It were better for us that there had been only forty-six of us here, and that she had not been. Superstitions attach to her as to a primary. Shadow-Men and monks and snakes attach to her. She is a witch, and she must remain here forever. We enter the satellite ship now, the twelve of us. Go in, wife! Go in, children and grandchildren and bride and pledged-bride. Frederik, I said that all twelve of us enter the satellite ship now! Now!”
Frederik Katz was red with travail and passion. He was torn apart. But he had never disobeyed his father in his life, and he did not do it now. He turned to enter the satellite ship, as ten had already entered it, and only his father Hugo Katz remained waiting for him.
“Wait!” Antoinette cried out like ringing bronze. “Forever apart from him is so long a time! Let me have a minute with him, a quarter of a minute. Ten seconds!”
Antoinette embraced Frederik with absolutely overwhelming passion. She tore the shirt clear off of him, and she raked his loins and back and shoulders with her strong nails, leaving furrowed wounds that began to seep blood. She bruised and battered him in her love.
“That's close enough to ten seconds with him,” big Hugo Katz said sourly. “Be off, young witch. Get in the satellite, Frederik.”
“Oh, wait, wait, I wounded him in the violence of my love!” Antoinette cried. “He is broken and bleeding. But I have healing unguent here. Let me staunch the blood.”
Antoinette's brother Barnabas handed her a jar of special healing unguent, and she kneaded it into the deepest of the bloody furrows she had raked in Frederik's loins.
“That can do no harm,” Hugo Katz said with a look of infinite patience. “There is no sepsis or infecting substance on Robinsonnade World. That's enough though, young witch. Be gone!”
“Short words with him yet,” Antoinette cried. “Frederik, from this quick encounter of ours that has unfortunately wounded you there will come things that will remind you of me. Cherish these things, in secret at first. Do not on any account let them be destroyed. Promise me this small favor, and your promise to be forever.”
“I promise you this too-small favor in a promise that is forever,” Frederik swore. “Anything that reminds me of you, I will not let it be destroyed.” Frederik entered the satellite ship. His father Hugo entered it. The satellite lifted off towards the Mother Ship five hundred kilometers above them.
The twelve extraordinary persons had left Robinsonnade World for a more excellent place. And the thirty-five ordinary persons were left marooned on the little island-planet for as long as they should live.
Why did they give such a hearty cheer then when they found themselves irrevocably abandoned?
“What was the unguent that you kneaded into those deep gashes that you tore in Frederik, Antoinette?” Steven Huckleby asked as the group of them, along with the Shadow-Man, who was made out of paper-thin slate stone, went down to the white rock in front of Shadrack's Cave. “Snake eggs,” Antoinette said. “Culebra Caleidoscopia snake eggs. They are so small, and they survive and hatch so well! Snake eggs in incubation jelly, with ‘Run-Away Fertility Inducer’ added. There will be snakes aplenty wherever they go. And they'll be cared for and not allowed to perish; there is a forever promise on that. They really will remind them of us.”
The first show that the Shadow-Man put on that night was ‘Like Snakes From Home,’ a comedy.
Happening in Chosky Bottoms
1
“I know that football is not really the most important thing in the world,” said the big and ruddy man named Melvin Schermerhorn. “But it is presently the most important thing in the world to my son Malcom, and my son Malcom is one of the most important things in the world to me. Therefore we will base this discussion on the thesis that football is the most important thing in the world.” “All right,” said the chunky brown man named Charley Goodbeaver, who was the football coach for Lost Haven Consolidated High School.
“My son Malcom is the best high-school quarterback in the state,” Melvin Schermerhorn said positively. “He would have made All State last year except for the miserable Lost Haven team that you fielded. This is his last year, and he must make All State. This means that there has to be a great improvement in the team here. To obtain this better team, there must be some completely new thinking on the part of the coach, or there must be a completely new coach. What do you think of that, Goodbeaver?”
“Yeah, I got an idea,” Charley Goodbeaver said. “It's a completely new idea.”
“Tell it to me.”
“No. I don't tell it to anyone yet. But it's a sure idea, and it gives us a sure-winner team.”
“Last year we lost to Coweta, Catoosa, Honey Locust, and Scraper.”
“Scraper wasn't a high-school team. It was a town team. They had three players who had played junior college ball. But this year we don't lose to anybody.”
“I will hold you to this, Goodbeaver. If we don't have an all-win team, I'll nail your hide to the door.”
“Yeah, I got an idea. It won't miss.”
2
Maybe there were eight or ten of the Slew-Foot or Quick-Lout people in the Chosky Bottoms. Maybe there weren't any of them at all, not there in the Bottoms, not anywhere. There was a dispute about these people, who were also called the Bear-People, the Hairy Ghosts, the Saturday Night Specters, the Green River Monsters, and the Wagoner County Apes. Two-thirds of the people said that the Slew-Feet did not exist at all, that they were hoaxes and stale stories. Most of the rest said that the Slew-Feet were not human persons, that they were a different kind of men, or that they were animals. Quick-Louts was the local name for them, and there was dispute about its meaning. The Quick-Louts seemed to have their own language, a grumpy clatter of sounds. But several of them could talk a few words of Cherokee, and several of them (they may have been the same several, since all of them looked alike) could talk a few words of English. The most frequent phrase they used in English was “Aw hell, Jake.” They called all human persons “Jake”.
One of them used to come to the Bait Shop in Lost Haven to buy fishhooks of the biggest size (six inches across the hook) for a dollar each. These were deep-sea hooks, but Henry Stone, who ran the Bait Shop, stocked a few of them especially for the Quick-Louts. “I don't know what they hook with them,” Henry always said, confessing his ignorance. “Whales, I guess. Yeah, Wagoner County whales, I bet.” These very large fishhooks were the only things that any of the Quick-Louts ever bought, the only commerce that they ever carried on.
A week and a half before Melvin Schermerhorn had jumped Coach Goodbeaver, Crescent Harvestman had
come to the coach and told him that her aunt Ronda Harvestman had made friends with a Quick-Lout boy and had instructed him and had found him to be a rapid learner and very intelligent. Aunt Ronda Harvestman had a hard-to-find cabin and garden plot on the edge of the Chosky Bottoms. She thought that this young Quick-Lout should go to high school. “He is very tall, very fast, very tough,” Crescent Harvestman told Coach Charley Goodbeaver, “and if what Aunt Ronda says is true, then he is smart enough to learn the plays. He is your all-win season all in six and a half feet of hairy monster.”
“Yeah, I get the idea, Crescent,” the coach said. “I wish you were a boy. You've got brains. You see the big picture. We will have to handle this right, will have to pick a day not too soon and not too late, and have your Aunt Ronda send him in. What is his name?”
“He calls himself Tsalki. He says that means ‘Big Hero’ in Cherokee. Aunt Ronda says it doesn't.”
“Nah, it doesn't. Maybe it means ‘Big Hero’ in Quick-Lout. Tsalki! We'll call him Chalky. This is a good idea. I bet it saves my hide.”
Aunt Ronda sent Chalky to Lost Haven the day before high school classes started. She had given him a week's special instruction in English. He already understood it from listening to people talk it, almost always when they didn't know that he was anywhere around; so all he had to do was improve his own talking of it. Well, he talked it funny when he first came, but he made himself understood. And he could read, on the sign-board and the comic-strip level. He could read at least half the stuff in a newspaper. And he could block-print letters.
As soon as he learned the several signs that regular people use, it was apparent that he knew mathematics. Oh, how he knew that stuff! Aunt Ronda Harvestman had been a schoolteacher for thirty years until, in a fit of anger at the world, she had gone down and moved into an old cabin in the Chosky Bottoms. And she had been teaching Chalky for several years.
Chalky passed his high-school entrance examinations. They weren't very stringent with him. “After all, he's an ape,” Mr. Franklyn, the principal of the school, said. “He's the smartest damned ape I ever saw. And how he can run!”
Perhaps Chalky did lack polish at first, but he picked it up quickly. And he was always willing and good-natured. “All right, Jake, I do it,” he said to any request or command from any person, man or woman or child. He had a nice room fixed up over a place where Charley Goodbeaver stored rock salt and range pellets and such stuff for his cattle.
About his amazing mathematical ability, Chalky said, “Aw, we think about numbers and sets and functions all the time. What else is there to do down in the Chosky Bottoms?”
About his amazing football ability, Chalky said, “Aw, the hardest part is that the kids break so easy. I have to be careful not to break them, or I get the boot. It's fun to gain a mile in just three games, though. It's fun to sack a quarterback fifteen times in a game.”
“He's unreal, isn't he?” Melvin Schermerhorn said to Coach Goodbeaver as he came by to watch on the first afternoon of practice. “He moves like a ghost, really. I believe he can move right through people without touching them if he wants to. And he can touch them plenty when he wants that. He made seven knockdown blocks on that one play. And on the series where he was playing defense he threw the runners for losses of nine, thirteen, and thirty-nine yards, and then blocked the punt. He can go all the way every time he touches the ball. He can catch any pass that's even on the same field with him. And he has made eleven interceptions of the eleven passes thrown by the B team. Yes, I see that we already have our all-win season. It is important, though, that my son, the best quarterback in the state, should not be so overshadowed that people won't remember that we even have a quarterback.” “Your son Malcom can take care of himself,” Coach Goodbeaver said. “He is the one who calls the plays of the game. He, who is a journalism star as well as a football star, is the one who phones the accounts and results of the games to the papers in T Town and Muskogee and the City. He's the one who selects the game pictures that will go to the press, and he's the one who will write the background pieces and the feature pieces. Your son is as opportunistic a young journalist as a young quarterback.”
Malcom hadn't taken to Chalky as easily as his father had, though. He had bristled and bridled at him at first. Malcom was used to being best in the school at everything, and he didn't like to be ousted from any first slot. He could keep pretty good control on it as a journalist, though. As this:
“Quarterback has perfect day, forty-four out of forty-four passes completed, ten for touchdowns.” That would be a headline that quarterback Malcom Schermerhorn would himself send to the press after one game that year. But Chalky would have to stretch his six and a half feet to nine and a half feet to make some of those catches. He was very stretchable.
The Lost Haven Harriers beat Honey Locust, Coweta, Catoosa, Verdigris, Tiawah, Oneta, Scraper and Leonard, all of them by huge scores.
Nevertheless there was one-sided enmity between quarterback Malcom Schermerhorn and fullback-end-linebacker-monsterman Chalky. The enmity flowed only in the direction from Malcom to Chalky.
3
Well, there was a thing besides the permutations of numbers that the Slew-Foot Quick-Louts used to think about and devise down in the Chosky Bottoms. It was the tall story. “Of course we're not human,” Chalky said (he was talking much better after he had been in school for six weeks or so). “We're on the ape-angel axis. Sure we are the Saturday Night Specters. A people that doesn't get a shine on them on Saturday night isn't much of a people. Yeah, we almost always shine in the dark. Bubbles of methane or swamp gas get trapped in our fur, and specks of mica get stuck to us and refract the light. Sure we can walk through walls. Oh, without wrecking them? Yes we can, but it's harder that way.
“Yah, Jake, we can appear. We can take shortcuts through time and space. But we simply don't understand the ancestor-worship of humans. Simply because your ancestors spent most of their time in the past, you never go back there to spend any time at all. Is that not carrying reverence too far?
“And we don't understand this descendant-worship of humans. Simply because your descendants spend most of their time in the future, you are shy about spending any time there at all. You do not trip to the future at all yourselves.
“Death isn't final to us, no more than it is to humans, but we have more mastery over shape and change and bodies than you do. Why are we so hairy? When we all come to the end of all our lives here and come to the meadows of paradise, do you not know that we will be sheared like sheep? You act as if you did not know it. All of us will be sheared of at least ten pounds of our hair to pay our entrance fee. But you, most of you, don't even have ten pounds of hair. You can't go in then!
“We go down in the quicksand a lot and rest there. We can stay there easily. But the quicksand is inhabited by other creatures. Some of the things that are down in those bogs would horrify you. You know why there are only about a dozen of us in our group? There are things that come up out of the quicksand and devour our numbers and keep us few.
“Are we indeed ghosts? And do ghosts themselves have ghost stories? Sure we are and sure we have. There are many orders of ghosts. You are ghosts to your own cattle, being able to make appearances, having mastery of time and place, having strangeness on you. Some of us seem ghostly to you. And it may be that we have encountered steeper ghosts than you have. We are more receptive of these things than you are. We see out of shaggier eyes.”
It was weird just to hear Chalky, who looked at least as much like an ape as like a person, talk so knowingly on such slanted subjects.
“The ghosts we fear most in the Bottoms live in the quicksand there,” Chalky said. “They are invisible, but they do occupy space. They live down under the deep quicksand and have a town down there. When they are disturbed by something, they erupt out of the quicksand, and then their forms may be seen from the mud and sand and slime sticking to them. In fact, if they are only wet with water, their forms may be seen by t
hat wet sheen. They are shaped like ourselves except that they are a little bit larger and apparently very much stronger. They are the ghosts called ko-el.
“When one of them is displeased, he heaves up out of the quicksand and catches one of our children. He tears it apart, all four limbs and the head of it clear off. He leaves the pieces there, and every day he comes up and eats one of the pieces. Should the pieces of the child be gathered up and taken from there, the creature will come up again and again and catch and kill and dismember another child. So there is no profit in caring for the pieces. Besides, some people believe that the ghost creatures have the right to do what they do.
“You see, we bury our dead in the quicksand. We do not weight them down. We let them go free there, but they always sink at first. Then one of them may rise to the top again and again in the days after his burial. There is a restlessness in them. Sometimes when one rises from his quicksand grave he will speak words. He will speak in an oracular style, to use the English word for it. Such a one refuses to be clear dead. He is one who will turn into the kind of ghost named ko-el.
“The quicksand eels will finally eat all his flesh and bones, but they cannot eat his form or his displacement. But these cranky old ko-el ghosts are the ancestors of some of us. When they kill and dismember one of our children, it may be a descendant of theirs. Cannot dead ancestors do whatever they wish with their descendants?
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 266
