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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “A part of me stopped believing in it when I and a dozen others really did travel to the end of the universe and found it so heart-breakingly near. It was barely thirty light years out from the solar system that we came to the absolute end of the universe. And on that trip we discovered that there was something wrong with all our calculations and with our concept of light years. The trip that should have taken us forty years each way took us only two years each way. And yet we were thirty light years out by all the tenets of our astronomy. It was the absolute end of the universe, as I say. There were no stars beyond. There were not even any reflections of stars. Our imagined billions-time-billions universe had been no more than a house of mirrors reflecting and distorting the same few lights over and over again thousands of times. But we had come to the very end where even the mirroring failed. Do you know how near the end we came? We pushed into it until our ship stalled. One man got out on the hull and seemed to push his arm into the total nothingness. But when he withdrew from it, he didn't have that arm. Listen, that arm wasn't bitten off or destroyed. We examined it all too thoroughly. There was no blood, no bruising, not even a scar. It was as if he had been born without that arm. Once a thing goes into the nothingness, it becomes the case that it has never been. So, I suppose, it is with the old astronomy. But do you know what's at the end of the worlds? Nothing, nothing, nothing! That's what's at the end of the worlds! And that ‘nothing’ is too close to us, a billion times too close.”

  “Of course I know it, old man. We've always known it. It's in our songs.”

  “We don't have billions and billions of galaxies! We have only a small fraction of one galaxy. Oh, it's intolerable! It shuts us up in too small a box! It diminishes me. It diminishes all of us. It even diminishes God.”

  “Easy, old man, easy! You have been through both the short anguish and the long anguish. And now, happily, you have come to the last day of your frustration.”

  “But I'm not sure that I want to die.”

  “Of course you want to die. Everyone wants to die when his time comes. I think you should walk down this series of meadows towards the major canal exchange. It's all so pretty there, and so apt for you!”

  “Yes, yes, I am impelled to walk in that direction. Thank you, Bird Man. This day I have received good words from you, an anomaly in whom in my younger wits I could not have believed.”

  High Rider Charles-Wain, in the last afternoon of his life, walked with a light step through a series of lush and reddish meadows, and he found himself whistling that old tune ‘A Land Two Meters Long The Destined Home For Me’. He was met by two Martian girls who had been waiting for him. Grandfather of anomalies, those girls! Oh hell, they had ears like the Mars Maids in old Burroughs novels!

  “But I wouldn't want them any other way,” High Rider said. “It is strangely beautiful here. Were you two waiting for me?”

  “Oh sure,” one of the Mars Maids said. “We dig a grave for you here because we like you.”

  “And because it's an easy digging place,” the second Mars Maid said.

  “And because we will take the nodal enzymes and hormones and plasmas from your liver and gallbladder and pineal and other glands,” the first Maid said. “We can get nine dollars red money for that stuff. That's the fun part.”

  “How did you know I'd come here?” High Rider asked.

  “Oh, this is a burial meadow. You have come here like the Elephant to the China Shop, as your own Earthian saying has it. And this is the right burial meadow for you.”

  Yes, High Rider felt (those two funny-eared girls were digging the best grave you ever saw, and just for him) that this was the right burial meadow for him. The star plants, the star flowers were growing and glowing beautifully there, two by two, always two by two. But no, there was a singleton, just one singleton among the paired flowers.

  “I wish, if it were possible—” High Rider began. And those two girls were extracting nodal energies and hormones and plasmas and other things from the internal gathering places in the High Rider body. Of course it hurt, but how else could those girls earn nine dollars red so easily.

  “If it were possible, I wish that I could live into the late evening and see stars again,” High Rider was finally able to say out of his deep emotion.

  “Oh, we'll bury you with the stalks of the star flower plants driven into each of your eyes,” one of the girls said. “Then they will grow out of you, and it will be the case that you will be seeing the star flowers, the stars forever.”

  “Oh, that's why they grow so beautifully two by two,” High Rider cried with a certain delight. “Each pair is growing out of the two eyes of somebody who loved the stars. And yet, amid all the paired beauties, there is only one singleton.”

  “Oh, we liked him too,” the other girl said. The two girls laid High Rider down in the bottom of his grave then. “He was an Earth astronomer like you, and like you he was impelled to come to the beautiful ‘Star Burial Meadows’ to die and be buried. His named was One-Eyed McGonigal.”

  “I knew him well,” High Rider said. “It is a pleasure to be buried among old friends. Will it hurt, the stalks of the plants being driven into my eyes?”

  One of the girls was sharpening two star flower stalks with a brass hatchet.

  “Oh yes, it will hurt for about a year,” she said. “That shows that the plants are really growing out of you. That shows that you'll be able to see the stars forever. Isn't that nice?”

  “Tell me when I'm dead,” High Rider mumbled.

  The girl hammered the two stalks into his eyes. Bam! Bam!

  “You're dead now,” she said. “This part is fun. Stars for the star man! How ritual can you get!”

  High Rider's eyes hurt excruciatingly. That showed that the beautiful star flower plants were already growing out of them, out of him, that he was a part of those stunning little stars. And the Mars Maids were shoveling aromatic red dirt onto him to confirm the arrangement. Wonderful, wonderful!

  Pine Castle

  “Why can't we have more light in here?” Stephen Nekros complained. “They keep these barrooms too dark. And the walls are too rough. I've got splinters in my hands from them, or from something.” “No light at all is light enough,” came the soft whisky voice of Molly O'Lolly, the unemployed ‘Daring Aviatrix.’ Her real name was Molly Reed. Molly O'Lolly was only her ‘sky name,’ her trick-flyer name. “None of us looks like much now when we're down on our luck, so forget about more light. Forget the rough walls too, Stephen. Walls are to prevent things getting in. It's only incidental that they prevent your getting out. The ‘Fear of Falling’ is what drives me and haunts me all the time. It's the first of the seven archetypal human fears. It's brought me to the rottenest job in the world, that of an out-of-work trick-flyer, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. I have to get sky-high before I go up sky-high. I live in dread and I'll die in dread, but I wouldn't have it any other way.”

  “There ought to be more light,” Stephen said again. “I can't even strike a match, my hands are so clammy.”

  “The second of the archetypal human fears is the ‘Fear of Snakes,’ especially of the rampant poisonous snakes such as the diamondback rattlers and the hooded cobras,” said Jude Bushmaster, the unemployed snake-handler. “And most fearful of all is meeting one of them in a narrow place where there's no chance of retreating. I'm afraid of all my snakes, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Danger is my whole life, as it will be my death. I'm especially afraid of Diamond Johnny, the biggest of my diamondback rattlers. I have to shoot him with a sedation dart on days when he's especially rampant. But when he wakes up from the sedation he's twice as mean and angry as before. Anybody who's ever caught a whiff of Diamond Johnny would recognize him even in the dark. I'm going to rid myself of him, though. I see a chance where I can get rid of two snakes with one trick. It's tricks like that that make it all worthwhile.”

  “I have a weight on my chest,” Stephen Nekros said doggedly, “and I have an even heavier w
eight on my mind. I've got to get out of this dark dump and go home. What's the name of this damned tavern anyhow?”

  “Pine Castle,” said Claud Noyer. “It's the narrowest Castle in the world. I don't know why I come to this place either. It's too confining. Ah, yes, Stephen, they do keep it awful dark here. My nomination for the third of the archetypal human fears is the ‘Fear of Drowning or Other Suffocation.’ And I would have it otherwise if I could.” Claud Noyer, a remarkably powerful man, had been a professional wrestler. But now he could take part only in secret and unauthorized bouts. Two different men had died when wrestling with him, one in the throes of the Japanese Sleep Hold, and the other one in the grip of the Night-Time Choker. But both of these holds are phoney. They look punishing, but nobody could be harmed by one of them. Not unless it was done on purpose. Nevertheless, two opponents of Claud Noyer had died of strangulation. And two other persons had mysteriously died of choking while Claud was present.

  “Why can't we have more light in here?” Stephen Nekros complained again. And then he fell very very silent as though he were also choking. And he was choking, on a recollection and realization. “These six persons I am sitting with in the Pine Castle Tavern,” he said to himself in utter silence, “are the very six persons that I have wronged more than any others in the world. They all wish me dead, and they are all capable of effecting that wish. What am I doing with this raffish bunch tonight anyhow? I broke with them all some time ago. I will be very very quiet now, and perhaps I can slip away in the dark.”

  “Fear of the dead, especially of the walking and stalking dead, is the fourth of the archetypal human fears,” the magician Gregory the Great boomed in the hollow dark. “Oh, the clammy fear of the stalking dead! But it is better to be the stalker than the one stalked.”

  The weight on the chest of Stephen Nekros was somehow familiar and quite unpleasant. The weight on his mind consisted of the fact that he had forgotten how he had got into his present vague situation, and the abysmal chilling fear that he might remember it.

  “The fifth of the archetypal human fears is the fear of fire, the fear of burning to death, and the concurrent fear of burning beyond death,” came the purple voice of Niccolo Chort, popularly known as Nick the Devil. “The fear of final Hell and damnation death. I hear regularly from the other side, you know. ‘Hell is Hell’ say my erstwhile friends who are there. It's pretty bad, and it fulfills all the fears.” The mildly sinister Niccolo was the one whom Stephen Nekros had harmed worst of all.

  “The sixth of the archetypal human fears is the fear of being murdered,” sounded the sandpaper voice of Snake-Eyes Simpson out of the narrow-walled dark. Snake-Eyes was a gambler. He was also a moneylender. In either of these guises he would follow a man all the way to Hell to collect a debt. Snake-Eyes kept a rough pine box in his shabby office, and he sometimes made clients sign for loans or debts on the rough cover of that big, though narrow, box. “You might as well make one sign in blood,” one client had spoken in weary humor. “If people had any blood left they'd not come to me,” Snake-Eyes had answered. “And you know something, this box is lots rougher on the inside than on the outside.”

  “What's the seventh of the archetypal human fears, Stephen Nekros?” Molly O'Lolly the daring aviatrix asked in her soft whisky voice. The reason that Molly was unemployed was that Stephen Nekros had seized her airplane for a debt. And when Stephen had then loaned it to a younger rival daring aviatrix to get her started in the trick flying business, Molly had become somewhat sullen about the affair. “What is the seventh fear, Stephen?” “I don't know,” he said miserably, but perhaps he did know. And in a very soft voice he spoke to ears that didn't belong to any of the six: “Easy, Johnny, easy. I won't move if you won't.”

  “Wake up, Stephen, and tell us of the seventh fear,” the hollow voice of the down-on-his-luck magician Gregory the Great boomed. “You've napped long enough. You've been hoping that this is only a bad dream, and so it is. But don't fly your hopes too high because of that. The wakening will be much worse than the dream. Tell the fear, Stephen, and we promise we won't listen. We're not here, you know, except in your head. None of us is here.”

  “Except Diamond Johnny,” said the voice of Jude Bushmaster the unemployed snake-handler. The reason that some of these persons were unemployed was that Stephen Nekros had seized for debts a small carnival to which they belonged. “Johnny is really here, and you recognize him. Aye, anyone who's ever had a whiff of him will recognize him even in the dark. Did I ever tell you, Stephen, that I know a trick to kill two snakes at once? Oh, both are sedated, in a way. Then we stuff one of them in Snake-Eyes's box, and we set the other one in the middle of his chest. What's the seventh fear, Stephen?”

  “Waking up buried alive in a pine-box coffin!” Stephen Nekros croaked, waking up from his troubled dream. And he remembered the six doing him to ‘premature’ death by the strangling hands of Claud Noyer. He knew that he was six feet under. He knew also that the weight on his chest was the biggest of Jude Bushmaster's diamondback rattlesnakes, Diamond Johnny, nine feet of coiled length and forty pounds of him, cranky at being tranquilized, waking up angry.

  Both of them woke up at the same time, buried alive six feet under in the narrow coffin named Pine Castle. They both woke up furious and horrified, and striking out madly.

  One-Eyed Mocking-Bird

  Tobias Lamb, though not well liked, was held in high esteem by the scientific community. There were many of us who hardly liked him because — well, it was because his tricks and illusions sometimes shattered us completely. “And besides,” Alwin Garvie said of him, “he's an unlikely man.” Ah well, admit it, we were afraid of him. He was a harsh mocker; and yet he had a pleasant strain (or it was meant to be pleasant) in him. He was a hard driver. If he didn't actually hold a whip in his hand when he was working on a project, there was always a whip in his voice. He was avid, even feverish, to drive a project to success; and yet he didn't seem at all hungry for personal glory. When Paul Kradzesh stole the credit for the Crisley Communicator from him, we really feared for Kradzesh's safety and life when Big Toby should react to being robbed of that glory. But Tobias Lamb didn't react to it at all. Whether credit should redound to him or to another was less than nothing to Toby.

  And now he was talking about the new project that had hold of him and of us all.

  “The thing is to get a few nations accultured and thriving, and then to give the inventive tilt to them. And then we will let them invent. As we are looking for rapid invention, we will put a time limit on their inventiveness; the time it takes a rifle bullet to go four kilometers. In fact, I'll put one of the nations inside a rifle bullet here and shoot it off.”

  “What in the world for?” Francie Jack asked. She had always made an effort to understand Big Toby, but she hadn't understood him any better than had the rest of us.

  “Toby, you have a bad case of anthropomorphism, of putting things into human terms and analogies,” Lucius Cockburn chided the big lout Toby. “Nations that can only barely be guessed at with an electronic microscope are not true nations.”

  “If they are made up of thousands of individuals of a kindred, and if they are able to live, elect, and proclaim a destiny, then they are nations,” Toby insisted. “What for, Francie? For a test and an experiment and an opportunity. I will really be shooting at that mocking-bird singing so imperfectly on that bough. But whether I miss or hit the bird, the rifle bullet will still crash into that rock cliff four kilometers across the valley, and it will destroy itself and the small nation that I will have put inside it. It will do this unless the individuals of that nation shall wake to consciousness, form local governments, expand to a limited universal government, develop science and technology, form groups of empowered geniuses to apply that science and technology, learn to navigate the bullet, avoid destruction against the cliff; and return it here in quest of their origin, all within two and a half seconds of time. I have not set it an impossible task. It is a short
-aeon nation made up of miniaturized intelligences, and the concept of delay would not be possible to it.”

  “The ‘Reacting Jelly’ does react amazingly fast sometimes,” Paul Kradzesh admitted, “and most times it does not react at all. We have the package to perform miracles. We have the activator to go into the package. But it performs irregularly and randomly. We must induce uniformity. And, Toby, it is silly to refer to a supersmall glob as a nation.”

  “No, it is a sanity which in present company seems to be limited to myself,” Big Tobias Lamb said stubbornly. This harsh and clumsy man was held in puzzled esteem by the scientific community. He was admitted, yes, and there were even some persons who tried to like him. But did he conform to Elton Cabot's dictum of the ideal scientist? —

  ‘Serene, handsome with inner and outer perfection, into every field of the mind, something of a poet, totally cultured, completely free of hokum, very much of the philosopher, everything of the humanist.’

  It seemed that most of those were things that Toby Lamb was not.

  But Big Toby, physically powerful and exceptionally ugly, loutish and impossible, completely ambiguous in his own group; he was a cult hero of several other groups, though it puzzled us how those culties ever even heard of him.

  Toby made noises, it was too much to call it music. He made these sounds on supposed reproductions of very ancient instruments, according to probably faulty interpretations of ancient musical notations. He made these noises on clanging iron ‘harps’ and on howling flutes. And persons of the ‘rattling rock’ sort had intruded audio pickups into Toby's big studios and they had turned his sounds into cult things. A clanging, always a clanging, that was the ‘Toby Sound’.