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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Ah, I cloud over! What are these things around me? Five shadows, five voices? I knew them for a while, but now they dim out.”

  The aura of Peter Luna was quite visible, aided by the aura-amplifier of Rowena Charteris. It was a quivering and quaking loop.

  It expanded suddenly, and the five persons stepped through it. It collapsed and extinguished itself then, and Peter Luna was dead.

  And five happy-sad time-achievers went with lively step down the ‘Road to Yesterday’. They could have gone down it five seconds before this, but it does no harm to fulfill a ritual even when it is rank superstition.

  Unique Adventure Gone

  Not long ago, a major disaster happened to mankind. Or else, it was a rather droll non-happening.

  Something was reported to be lost, but the name of that something doesn't seem to mean anything at all.

  A group of top computers has made this statement about the event or non-event:

  ‘If there wasn't any such thing, it probably didn't happen. And since all indicators are sharply up, it sounds more like an anti-disaster than a disaster. ‘There was something about dangerous wild dogs also, but this may have been an unrelated matter.’

  Here is a completely unverified account of what might have happened:

  “There's whole mountains of luck and accommodation in the recent falling of events,” Susan Pfeil said. “It's like that old song:

  ‘Never saw the sun / Shining so bright.

  Never saw things / Going so right.’

  “Whatever is going on, it's working. Whatever was wrong, it's cured itself. All of a sudden, the world is in wonderful case. In just about three months it's well, and nobody can remember it ever being well before. There is plentitude, there is health, there is unity, there is unanimity. A single giant step has been taken, and we stand where we never stood before.”

  “Do you like it, Susan?” Ray Sharpstone asked her.

  “No, not very well. But I know that I should like it. My father, a sort of fox, ate sour grapes, so my own teeth are on edge. But I can see how almost everybody else likes it. Yes, and I can see how almost everybody else is right.”

  There were about a dozen of them who ate and talked together most days in O'Brian's Roast-Beef Noonery, a bar and grill, ‘the place untouched by the vulgar world outside’. Well, the world had touched O'Brian's considerably in the last three months, but O'Brian's was the better for it. The roast beef had never been so good. O'Brian had been able to raise the amount of beef in his roast beef from twelve to fifteen percent, all because the world was going so right in every way. And the flavor had been perfected. Anything can be brought to near perfection by single-minded effort. But single-mindedness was something quite new.

  “God in his paradise may have roast beef as good as this,” Morris Hatchel said. “As good, maybe, but not better.

  “Do you like the way things are going, Morris?” Helen Monarch asked him.

  “Why should I not like it? The blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the hungry are filled, and the poor have the single-minded gospel preached to them. But no, Helen, I don't like it as well as I should. Everything we might ask for has been given to us. But I've the feeling that some small things that we've forgotten to ask for have been withheld.”

  “I'm of two minds about all of it myself,” Dominic Tort said. And as soon as he said that he knew that he shouldn't have. There was a forbidden phrase there somewhere. A buzzer like an old burglar alarm sounded in the air above his head. Then, after no more than a minute, two official-looking people came and took Dominic away.

  The other eleven of them continued to sit there for a while, uneasy and even a little bit angry. It was because of things like that that some of them did not quite like the way things were going.

  But nobody could argue that the affairs of the world were not going well under the new, single-minded system. The people who had passed into the new single-mindedness had an unusual appearance though. For one thing, they were completely blank-eyed.

  The single-minded approach had been going on for several years. It had been going on for several decades with small groups, but it was only quite recently that it had really caught fire. Now, for the last three months, it had gone public, and it had quickly solved all the knottier problems that had been plaguing the world.

  ‘There was never much wrong with the world except a little confusion in the minds of its dominant fauna. The recent mutation to single-mindedness has cleared away that confusion.’

  ‘There was never much wrong with the governments of the world except divided authority and its attendant complexity. This has been cured by the institution of Monarchy which is total simplification of government. Why didn't somebody think of Monarchy before? It works perfectly.’

  ‘There was never much wrong with the production and distribution in the world except divided aims and divided interest. Corporate single-mindedness has erased the divisions and maximized the efficiency.’

  ‘A person can run faster when unburdened than he can when carrying a heavy load. This is so obvious that we cannot see why nobody understood it before. Divisiveness or doubleness-of-mind was a heavy burden that all persons carried until recently. Now most of the persons have gotten rid of that burden.’

  Those were some of the Analects of the new, single-minded credo. Well, they were all true, of course. And yet a few persons disliked having their noses rubbed too brusquely in that obviousness. And others of the Analects seemed a little bit doubtful when looked at sideways.

  “ ‘A person can run faster on one leg than he can on two or more legs’ is a hard saying, an Analect that gives me trouble,” Jim Hickory remarked. “It's a stumbler.”

  “It may not be literally true,” Lynne Einstein told him. “Or it may not have been true until quite recently. So many things are true for the first time lately. Yet it does express a single and splendid truth—that single-mindedness must be carried into every area of life. I wish I weren't one of the ‘Tardy’ ones. I still can't appreciate very much of the big change.”

  There were about nine of them who ate and talked together most days in O'Brian's Roast-Beef Noonery. O'Brian's now had the best roast beef in the world, but some of the group suffered nostalgia for the days when it hadn't been quite so good. Some of the group suffered quite a few nostalgias now. “I am in total admiration of the whole complex of improvement, however it is brought about,” Charles Singletree said, “but odd images keep sliding out of the other half of my mind, out of the scheduled-for deactivation half of it. I remember, from the days when I studied Photuris Entomology, about the species of blind fireflies who flashed in unison by the millions, covering extensive slopes and valleys with their waves of pulsating light at night. How did they do it, since none of them could see its own light, or that of the others? How do the, ah, ‘new people’, the single-minded people do such marvels, since by definition they do not know they are doing to them?”

  “It isn't much fun being ‘Tardies’ who are out of everything,” Jonquil Eerie said. “We Tardies can, so far, see the new developments from the outside only. That is why we're always so wrong about them. It seems, to my own obstructed vision, that the new ‘great ones’ are performing all their mental and cosmic prodigies in their sleep. It seems that they are a sleep-walking and a sleep-living people now. But how can they perform such wonders when they are virtually asleep? Can a person design a ‘new concept’ three-hundred-story building, down to its last fluid detail, in his sleep, and not even know that he's doing it?”

  “He can, yes, since he does, since many of them do,” Albert Whitelight said. “If computers perform mental marvels without being conscious, why can not people do the same? But I myself have second thoughts about these things (‘Second thoughts are infidelities that are as superfluous as they are illegal’ is one of the new Analects of today), I myself have second thoughts about the Great Ones. I feel that there is something very tinny about the tone of each of those great ones just w
hen he comes to his most majestic stage. Oh damn, there's a buzzer buzzing over my head. But I would never have been able to become a single-minded person in any case.”

  “Well, there is a new greatness afoot,” Ray Sharpstone said grudgingly. “The great and single-minded people are performing more and more marvels.”

  “But are they enjoying them less?” Maisie Hilary asked in an odd voice.

  “I don't know,” Sharpstone admitted. “Oh, that ‘Archaic Smile’! All the great ones wear it now. It's been here before, you know. It may have been here in the beginning. It's the old terra cotta smile, and I suppose that it does indicate enjoyment.”

  A couple of guards came then and they looked hard at Sharpstone. But the buzzer was buzzing above the head of Albert Whitelight, so it was Albert that they took away. The buzzing disappeared when they were gone with Albert.

  The ‘Tardies’ who were left (and there were only a few thousand diminishing groups of them remaining in the world) always felt a mixture of confusion and anger when another of their members was grabbed off.

  There was a little combo playing and singing ‘One-Horn Cow’ verses. The combo was made up of three computers, and it played mostly for other computers who were present in O'Brian's. People didn't care much for music nowadays.

  ‘The true minds soar intense and narrow

  And single-minded as an arrow.

  ‘They're mighty in their leap.

  They're even mighty in their sleep.

  ‘The one-horned cows rest on their haunches

  And are not really very conscious.’

  Well yes, one could see how the people wouldn't like those computer ballads much, and yet the new, single-minded people had begun to take them up. The thing about ‘One-Horn Cow’ music was that it hadn't any counterpoint at all.

  ‘The Sleepers shine at give and take,

  And guard the world from quirk and quake.

  But someone ought to be awake.

  ‘They climb the mountains tall and steep

  In active and untroubled sleep

  It makes my very flesh to creep.’

  There were about three of them who ate and talked together in O'Brian's Roast-Beef Noonery in those latter days. All the groups of ‘Tardies’ had been losing members. Most of the groups had disappeared completely. The three final persons of this group were Jonquil Eerie, Jim Hickory, and Charley Singletree. The group had lost members both upward and outward, and it looked as though Charley Singletree would be moving upward from the group.

  He had the appearance of the new mutation on him. And he had a lot of that tinniness of tone that most of the clangers show. He was hardly aware of his surroundings, and still less did he seem aware of the other two.

  As to Jonquil, it looked as though she would never mutate. She would be a ‘Tardy’ till the very end of her. And Jim Hickory, he could go either way.

  The roast beef in O'Brian's, though perfect, was not at all good today. Dog had been substituted for beef in it. Well, beyond the idea of it, there was nothing wrong with eating ‘dog’. But what had ‘dog’ been eating lately?

  “It is all right,” Jim Hickory said. “It'll put hair on your chest. And on your tongue.”

  “I really didn't want it either place,” Jonquil grimaced. “It all becomes very funny though, screamingly funny. I wonder whether the elevated ones, the great ones, find it all funny?”

  “No, they, we do not,” Charley Singletree rattled in his new tinny voice. “The sickness of humor was part of the sickness of consciousness, and it has been swept away with it. You must have no traffic with humor, person. ‘Funniness’ was a thing of no substance, and now it will be gone.”

  “Not for me,” Jonquil insisted. “It's still funny that the great ones do things and don't know that they're doing them. Even the act, they must do it without knowing that they're doing it. What's the fun in that? Oh, it isn't supposed to be fun, is it, now that fun will be gone.”

  “You misunderstand it, person,” Charley Singletree said. “The act always contained a strong element of the unconscious, even with people most afflicted with consciousness. Do not feel that people of the giant unconscious are somewhat deficient. No, they, we become as gods. What happens now is that a thin and unwholesome scum named consciousness is swept away from the surface of minds, and the great depths are able to move themselves and be alive again.”

  “I still feel that people who don't know what they are doing aren't really doing anything,” Jonquil insisted. “They're not real things. They're not real people.”

  “I have been having a series of nightmares about half-people,” Jim Hickory spoke in a worried way. “They are split-down-the-middle people. Each of them has one eye, one ear, half a nose, one arm, one leg. I think my unconscious is trying to show me what the unconscious people are like. They're only half there. They cannot know that they know. They cannot contemplate themselves. If they cannot know themselves, they might as well be someone else. It's a difficult and dismal series of nightmares.”

  “Your difficulty, person, is that you are on the outside rather than on the inside of the nightmares,” tinny Charles Singletree said. “You're not supposed to have the nightmare. You're supposed to be the nightmare. Of course all the people of the great unconscious are someone else. They're everybody else. They are the big everybody. Distinction of persons will disappear.”

  “Aw unctuous unconscious offal!” Jim Hickory cried in final exasperation. “Who pulled the plug?”

  “Yes, who let all the minds in the world go down the drain?” Jonquil asked.

  “Down the drain is where they're supposed to go, persons,” Charley Singletree rattled in his tinny voice. “Down the drain into the strong and validly rancid collectivity whose code name is ‘ocean’, down into the teeming monsterness what is the only real existence. We will pull every plug. We will let it all run together.”

  “What are the advantages of living in such a sewer, beyond not knowing whether you're alive or dead?” Jim Hickory asked sourly.

  “Physical impetus checks run on those recently cured of the disease of consciousness reveal that they will live to be four or five hundred years old despite the damage of the double-minded disease, consciousness, already received,” Charley Singletree recited. “Their children should live to be a thousand years old or even older. The Greek and Norse gods were free of the funky fungus of consciousness after the people had succumbed to it, and quite a few of those old gods are still as alive and unconscious as ever.”

  “In Greek statuary, the people always had pupils in their eyes, but the gods did not. The gods were always blank-eyed,” Jonquil said.

  “There was a reason for that, person,” Singletree said. (Charles Singletree was, in fact, brother-in-law to Jonquil Eerie, and in normal cases he would have known her name: but now he had begun to mutate, to shed the fetid fungus that was consciousness like a snakeskin in his mind.) “The pupils of an eye particularize and focus. But to focus on any one thing is to insult the Great Everything. Let us all have blank eyes, unfocused and open to everything. I tell you that there is jubilation in the wide halls of the unconscious over this new unchaining from the fetters of consciousness.”

  “The unchaining? Yes, the unchaining of iron monsters, as it were,” Hickory said. “I hear the clank and the clangor of them.”

  “Wrong reaction, person,” Charley Singletree rattled. “You should not hear the clank and clangor. You should be the clank and clangor, unconsciously, of course.”

  “You are wrong, Jim, a little bit,” Jonquil said. “They aren't iron monsters released. They're tin monsters. I wish the combo would stop playing ‘One-Horned Cow’. It's anti-harmony.”

  “You misunderstand the ‘one-horned’ symbolism, other person,” Singletree spoke. “The ‘Sad Adventure of Consciousness’, an unpleasantness that lasted no more than seven thousand years, was a sort of response to former dilemmas, a cure that was worse than the sickness. I believe that the solar system passed in
to a dilemma-cloud a few thousand years ago, but it has passed out of it again now. There are no more dilemmas or other two-horned problems bothering the world now. So we raise one-horned monuments, single-horned for our single-mindedness. We have the Unicorn Tower Institute of Unity as well as the Rhinoceros Palace of Plastic Arts, both built in three days by the efficiency of single-minded people.”

  “But the single-minded people don't know that they've built them,” Jonquil objected. “They don't even know that they're single-minded.”

  “And the ‘One-Horned Cow’ is our holy hymn,” Singletree finished his explanation. “A two-horned head, of whatever sort, was likely to have a two-pronged or conscious mind inside of it. But now it will all be easy and unopposed, and there will be no bother left in the world.”

  “I'm bothered by the bodies lying in the street outside, and by the dogs eating them,” Jonquil interposed.

  “Well, persons, perhaps it isn't good for the dogs, from the old viewpoint,” Singletree almost conceded a point. “But the dogs must revert and become feral, and they are doing it. And a gone-feral dog is incomparably more savage than a wolf. Do you know that dogs, to some extent, have shared the sickness of consciousness with people? But they'll soon be cured of that. Ah, goodbye, people, or whatever you are. Yes, I think ‘goodbye’ is the word.”

  Then a funny thing happened to Charley Singletree. The pupils of his eyes disappeared. He became as blank-eyed as a stone statue of a Greek god.

  “To be awake and conscious is unnatural,” Singletree said in a brisk but unrelated voice. “It's like being broken open and exposed in any interior function. It's obscene. Conscious persons give one a squeamish feeling. Conscious persons stop and contemplate now and then; and contemplation is a great devourer of time and of achievement. And there is something a little bit unclean about contemplation, as there is about all conscious activities.”