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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “I am that Peter Luna, yes. I do not avoid that death. I die in 1928, and this is the very day that I die. That's why I've put this day on such a slow time-jog. It's my death-day and I'm not in a hurry about dying. And I want to transmit this set-up to the five of you before I die. And yet you have to come to the intellectual acceptance of it at your own pace. It's rather frustrating to me.”

  “What a cover story!” Annabella MacBean admired. “You're quite a spoofer, in addition to other things, Luna. But how do you (alive as you seem to be at this moment) know that you die on this particular day in long-ago 1928?”

  “Oh, another time traveler told me. He discovered that I had a time-satellite here and he used it three different times. He had a lot of equipment to move into the past from this easy jump-off bank. In between my visits here he looked me up and found my death chronicled. I had the reputation of ‘mad scientist’ so I was noticed a bit. My clock, of course, stopped at the minute of my death. And the big house here was taken down or wrecked later. At least there were no signs of it in his day. So I die a little bit after noon today, and it's a little bit after noon now. And it may be that it will take the psychic kick of my death to transmit the realization of this set-up to you.

  “You're here now. Everything you need is here. Dammit, don't bust on it, you five. In all logic, there isn't any way that you can bust on it: but there's an illogical aspect to every time jump and you just might bust.”

  “Where is your previous time-traveler now, dear Peter Luna?” Rowena asked him. “We love you, of course, old father-figure, old father-time-figure, but it isn't always easy to believe you.”

  “He's still in past time, Rowena. He intended to stay there, in a haven he had picked out and which he didn't disclose to me. He believed that the fewer futurians reaching the past the better it would be for those who did get there. He hadn't any intention of building a time-bridge. But I do wish mightily to build a time-bridge that can be used by all interested persons. I don't have to die today, you see. I could flee into the past alone and forget about today. But if I want to open a workable bridge, if I want to transmit what I have built to you five, then I do have to die today: or I have the particularly rank superstition that I have to.”

  No, Peter Luna didn't look old. He surely wasn't a father-figure to any of them except Rowena. But perhaps a father-time-figure or a master-of-time-figure will not look at all old. Suetonius mentions that “those about to die” sometimes take on a quite boyish appearance during their last moments.

  “Are you subject to rank superstitions, dear Peter?” Annabella MacBean jibed him.

  “Oh, when a rank superstition seems to be an intrinsic part of an equation, I don't throw it out. ‘Workable irrationalities’ are present in every theory that works.”

  Abel Roaring and Henry Kemp continued to look for the time-satellite. Peter Luna was so very cryptic about it, and yet they still believed that he might have it. “I can build a time-satellite myself,” Henry said. “I can build anything. I built a human corpse once. Oh, it was simplified, of course, but it should have been workable in all its working parts. There wasn't any reason why it shouldn't work, but it wouldn't. It hadn't the spark of life. Nor would my time-satellite have it. I've the feeling that Luna's satellite would have it, does have it, if he has really built it.”

  “And I projected a human corpse once,” Abel Roaring said. “I suppose that it was simplified, and yet it was consistent. I built it from rock-patinas from a particularly resonating valley. It was the corpse of a young woman who had imposed herself with stunning moment upon that valley in which she lived. But no, I couldn't give her the spark of life. She was as if she had just died. I'm afraid my own satellite (and I'm sure I could project one) would be similarly lifeless.”

  Kemp and Roaring were playing squash racquets. Luna had a fine walled court there. Imagine anyone having courts for both tennis and squash racquets. Kemp was the raging lion on the court, and Roaring was the quick and tricky and suddenly savage unicorn. They rested when it stood at one set each. “The walls of the court are especially resonant,” Abel Roaring said then. “I believe that, from the remembering-transparencies that form the deep patinas of these walls, I would be able to recreate a complete game played here in some past time. There would not merely be the ‘pok pok pok’ of the racquets hitting the ball and the ‘powk powk powk’ of the ball hitting the walls, there would be everything of sight or sound or smell. There would be the rumpledness and hard-breathing of the players and the smell of sweat and adrenaline, there would be the voices and the grunts, there'd be the sunlight warming the courts, there'd be the crows on wobbly wings coming to investigate the sound of the volleys. Ah, there'd even be the bead of sweat on the lip of one of the players.”

  “Would it be possible to analyze that drop of sweat, Abel?” Henry Kemp asked.

  “That's asking a lot. Yes, even that might be possible.”

  “How is it that your players would be reproduced full of movement and life and the corpse of your young lady lacked the life spark?”

  “No, no, the corpse was much more authentic. The reproduction of the game here would still be a picture, a solid, three-dimension moving picture in sight and sound and smell. I could not interfere with the players in the animated picture. I could not touch them, and I could not make them hear my words. But the corpse, I could touch it. It was the more valid. You and I can re-create time sets, Henry. But we cannot enter fully into them. We can picture moments of past time, but we cannot really travel in that past.”

  “Luna, I remember what the Walker truck is now,” Roaring told Peter Luna when they were all back in the manor house some time later in the second. “It was an American battery-electric truck made back in the 1920s and before. It would go twenty miles or so. And then, after its batteries had been on charge for quite a few hours, it might run for another twenty miles. It was clean and quiet. But is there something special about your own Walker truck?” “Yes, there is, Abel. If it hadn't been special, you wouldn't have been able to ride in it from your year to mine.”

  “Weren't we in the same year?”

  “Peter, Peter,” Annabella said, “wherever your damned time-satellite is, whyever did you build it here?”

  “This is the place I live in and love, that's why. I built my time-cliff here because I wanted it here. Does not Henry Kemp build his fabrications in his own territory?”

  “Henry, dear Henry,” Rowena said. “You're an evocative builder. You're a caveman drawing pictures on the stone walls of a cave. But you draw better than you deserve to. Your homeo-magic (for that's what all of us deal in) will work. When we do go out on the hunt, very soon now, we will find that the ‘animals’ are alive and genuine and infinitely detailed. Aye, and we'll find that the people (for it is really the people in animistic masks that you draw) are masterworks of living detail.

  “You can build, Henry, and Abel Roaring can project solid representations from old photographs taken by stones; but are the productions of either of you anything more than 3-D pictures?”

  “3-D pictures, 3-D smells, 3-D sounds, Rowena,” Roaring said, “and I'm not sure that primary life itself is more than that. Or is there something in life that is not recorded in even the most sophisticated pictures?

  “What if, within the next stasis-second or so, we do achieve time travel? Or what if we only believe that we have achieved it, and we are mistaken in that belief? What if it is only a truer-than-life séance, conducted in a sunshiny summer noontime rather than in a darkened evening room? But then, if we push it too far, may not life itself be only the mottled fruit of a garish conducted by larger but perhaps not more noble entities?”

  “Peter, when you died here that first time, were we five persons here with you?”

  “This is still that first time,” Peter Luna said, “and I am still a fraction of a second away from my first and only death. But yes, there is an underlay of you, a premonition of you, but dim. Shadows and voices only in
the premonition. But I recognized all of you from them when you came here.”

  “Peter, in your time-stasis somewhere in the past, in our past anyhow, how are you familiar with the things we have published in our own time, and other things that would be in your future?” Farquharson asked.

  “Oh, I get things delivered to me by the World Courier Service ('No Questions asked, Messages Carried Everywhere and Everywhen'),” Peter Luna said.

  “Then does the World Courier Service have a time-shuttle of its own?”

  “ ‘Other sheep I have who are not of this fold. Them also—’, I forget just how it goes in scripture. And the motto of the World Courier Service should be amended to ‘No questions asked, and no questions answered either’. I suppose they do have a time-shuttle of some sort. We seldom stumble over anything where somebody has not previously stumbled. But they seem to put their gadget to very limited use. They haven't opened the great portals, nor have I myself done it before I am terminated here. I hope that you five will be able to throw them open, with the impetus I am able to give you. Ah, the semi-stasis is crammed full. It's about to burst.”

  “What's it crammed full of, Peter?” Annabella asked.

  “Of clotted dreams, Annabella. And that's rather your own specialty.”

  5

  Time Reversal — In theoretical physics, mathematical operation of replacing the expression for time with its negative in formulas or equations so that they describe an event in which time runs backwards or all the motions are reversed. A resultant formula is said to be time-reversal invariant, which implies that the same laws of physics apply equally well in both situations… and that the flow of time does not have any naturally preferred direction

  … In any case, there is a more general inversion operation that does leave the physical laws invariant, called in its mathematical expression the CPT theorem. It comprises time reversal T combined with interchange of antiparticles and particles, called charge conjugation C, and a mirror-reflection or inversion of space, called parity reversal P. When all these are performed simultaneously, the resultant process or interaction is indistinguishable from the original.

  —Encyclopaedia Britannica

  “Oh, that's too simplistic,” Annabella MacBean growled. “The CPT theorem leaves out something. Maybe it's the RS or Rank Superstition Factor. Oh, I was arguing back against an old definition. I get absent-minded.

  “The dreams aren't clotted, Peter Luna. It's just that I have such a clotted time trying to explain them. The dreams I speak of in my work are the entire accumulation of the human affair, and I've found no instruction that they must be reviewed for only one direction.”

  They were having a sort of party there in the biggest of the dining rooms, and Annabella MacBean had baked a Death-Day Cake for Peter Luna. There was nothing morbid about this. Luna himself was quite willing to be gone, if he could be sure that these five time attempters were able to handle the legacy that he was leaving them.

  “I'll be out of this pantomime, out of this token shadowland, and I'll be in the main show,” Luna said. “But it has been very pleasant knowing you five people, even if for less than five seconds.”

  “Oh, Peter, this is part of the main show,” Annabella insisted. “It's at least the first act of it. I think it's a full show, five or seven acts at least, and at the end of each of them we die and are then reborn on a more vasty plane. But there aren't any skimpy acts in our main show; surely the first act isn't; and it's criminal for us to skimp any part of it. We must range forward and backward through the act we are living in; we must learn every direction and dimension of it. We have an obligation to understand and to explore, in every way. Life is made up of this compacted emotion and experience and happiness, and if we cut ourselves off from any dimension of it then we live the less. We must unclot it and open it all up. The ‘Road to Yesterday’ must be one of the opened roads, or we are the less for it.”

  “It's rather good cake,” Peter Luna said as he took a forkful of his own Death-Day Cake.

  “For a rather good guy,” Annabella told him.

  “I'm curious about the corniest touch of all, Luna,” Ethan Farquharson said. “Did it, does it, will the clock really stop at the moment of your death? Gah, that sounds like something in a murder mystery from back around—”

  “From back around the present year of 1928, Ethan? Yes, I've arranged that the clock should stop at the very moment of my death. The clock is parallel to my own living aura and it has a bascule coil in it; and it stops when my aura expands and then collapses and extinguishes itself. It isn't a very difficult trick. If you'd think a moment, Ethan, you'd see that you could do it yourself.”

  “Not a difficult trick, friend Peter, but corny. In you, though, it's likeable.”

  “I keep remembering something about throwing a dead or dying cat through a ring of fire,” Abel Roaring said. “It's in some old witches' rite for time travel.”

  “The cat through the burning hoop, yes, it's another form of my favorite rank superstition. They have it topologically backwards though. I am the dying cat thrown through the hoop of fire, but the hoop of fire is my own aura; and it is the five of you who will fling yourselves through it. And I am the slave killed so that the traveler may step through his expanded dying aura and be back in time for the length of the slave's life. Yes, it is the rankest of superstitions. Cannot you find it likeable in me?”

  “I can and I do,” Abel Roaring said. “But we do not need either dead slave or dead cat. We'll follow that ritual, though, that all things may be fulfilled. What we have to know now, Luna, is where we can find your time-satellite? Where is it, Peter, where is it?”

  “The clock has stopped,” Peter Luna said with a sort of pleasure. “So I'm in the last second of my life. The clock moved by one-second jumps and it will not move by less. I felt it flick off.

  “You five have slightly different ways of phrasing your go-backs, the ‘clotted dream break-out’, the ‘naked ghost impasse’, the ‘intuition as enabler process’, the ‘build a world and make it live schematic’, the ‘time is a pile of recorded transparencies reconstructions’; but the mathematics that all of you have worked out are almost identical, which is to say that they are nearly enough correct to work. There are cautions, of course. How many cautions is a man able to give in the last second of his life? You could enter false worlds that never existed if your reconstructions are too subjective. But you are five correctives to each other in this. You could be an abrasive on the past as some conscienceless travelers are, but you five are surprisingly good people and you should avoid those errors.”

  “The time-satellite, where is it?” Abel Roaring asked. “Tell us where it is now, Peter, now, or everything else is in vain.”

  “Oh, you're inside the satellite. All of us are. The entire estate of Moonwick is a time-satellite. You are all back in the year 1928, many years before your births. You are beyond the shoal, and you have clear sailing now. The ‘Road to Yesterday’ is wide open to you. ‘You will draw water joyfully from the springs of salvation’ as scripture says; and it is good to journey back a bit nearer to our well-springs. There are at least five rather furtive and sleazy persons already on the time-roads. Let you five be of a better kind. You could have taken the time-road five seconds ago, of course, but I desired your company for this little while.”

  “We've surely crammed a lot into these five seconds,” Rowena said. “Ah, those long horseback rides with Ethan!”

  “We played golf, Rowena,” Ethan Farquharson said.

  “And exploring those limestone caves in the north banks with Henry!” Annabella smiled. “How could we have done so much in such a short while?”

  “Annabella, we didn't find any caves. But we found mooring holes in the stones where boats used to moor when the banks were the shore of the Gulf of Lions.”

  “Was all of it subjective then, Peter Luna?” Abel Roaring asked.

  “Not all, but a lot of it. It's hard to cram such a
great amount of objective happenings into five seconds. I'm rather proud of this time-satellite. It's more than a million times as large as any time-satellite built or attempted by anyone else. This is one of those rare cases where it's easier to build large than to build small. The house itself here will be pulled down or somehow destroyed within a year or two, so I've been told. But the estate can still be called into service as a time-satellite whenever an instructed one calls. I have sensed that one of you has an aura-amplifier. Which of you?”

  “But of course, I'm the one who has it, dear Peter,” Rowena Charteris smiled. “I wouldn't be caught dead without one. You others are very robust and have robust auras. But mine has always needed reinforcing.”

  “One other thing, Luna,” Henry Kemp said. “It's rather a delicate thing to ask, but what do we do with your body if you really do die in this second?”

  “Leave it, guys, leave it. Don't worry about it. My doctor has an appointment with me here this noontime. He'll be here in just five minutes, for he's an absolutely punctual man. Doctors are used to certifying dead people. And I drew up and signed all sorts of papers with my lawyer just one week ago.

  “Oh, I'm stricken! Death will come almost instantaneously now, but it won't seem so on our slow-jog time. Time here will return to normal with my death though, to a normally-moving 1928 mid-summer day.