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

by R. A. Lafferty

It was so typical of him that, in his loud talking, when he banged his palms together for emphasis, he did not make the ‘clap’ sound that other persons make. He had a ‘clang’.

  And Big Toby painted strong and grotesque pictures. Perhaps ‘painted’ is the wrong word since it is not known how he achieved them; but he ‘effected’ powerful and vulgar and disturbing pictures. He called them his ‘Cainite Space Ship’ series. They were wrenching and a little bit distasteful, but they were also funny.

  “You are a mocker,” Lucius Cockburn told Toby often.

  “Oh certainly. There are all too few of us. What we want are mockers who at the same time have total faith. I want that in the director of every project and every public board and government. And I want it in the short-aeon inventive realms and in the miniaturized intelligences that make them up. But deliver us from the mocker who sings too sweetly.”

  Tobias Lamb had other activities which, in any other man, would seem to contribute to Elton Cabot's dictum of the ideal scientist. Well yes, he was 'into every field of the mind'; in that much he conformed to it. But how clumsily he was into many of those fields! He wrote several books. But his New Physics for the Middle-School Children was not well accepted. It was forced off the market. He seemed to be teaching physics by means of a hairy sort of mythology. Even his mathematics was more myth than math. And his Not For Everybody Book, well, it was not for everybody.

  But now Big Toby was teasing an invisible glob of activated molecular syndrome into a microscopic hole drilled into the lead-shot part of a rifle bullet. He used a complicated microscope with a variety of eye-pieces impinging on his eyes; and he fingered a keyboard that created and controlled finger-shaped electrical fields to nudge the small glob into the hole and settle it there.

  “Principality and Nation, in you go!” Big Toby spoke to the little glob that was quite a few orders below bare-eye visibility. “Your history and your destiny begin right now. This is the first instant of your Heroic Age. Be Heroic then, which is the same thing as being inventive.”

  “Why all the attention to that particular smudge that you are putting into a place difficult to study?” Alwin Garvie asked. “Should not all of the smudges have equal attention?”

  “You folks talk to the other smudges,” Toby said. “I'll talk to this one.”

  “Well, Creager over at the ‘Evolvate Science Conglomerate’ does talk with much success to his reactive molecular jelly,” Paul Kradzesh admitted, “but I don't believe that he tells it such fairy tales as you tell yours.”

  “He should!” Toby Lamb barked harshly. “Perhaps you don't understand Faerie at all. When it is finally discovered (which is to say ‘When its lair is finally unroofed’) it will be found to possess thousands and thousands of annals. Ah, heroic history, primordial inventiveness, ages of greatness! I wish that one of you would unroof that complex. I really haven't the time. I believe that there is a stunning impetus for invention to be found in it.”

  “Well, there is dispute as to just how we should regard the organizing facility of these reactive molecular groupings,” Lucius Cockburn said.

  “Why dispute?” Toby asked with that laughing clatter in his voice. “Regard them as realms. Regard them as Empires in their heroic period of discovery and invention. They will prefer to be so regarded.”

  “I smell tyranny in the wee realm you're establishing, Toby,” Alwin Garvie bantered.

  “You smell right, hump-nosed man. The strong impetus of outright tyranny! There is nothing like it for a realm that is at the same time a space ship.”

  “Your idea here seems to jibe a bit with your pictures in the ‘Cainite Space Ship’ series. If the units (if there are units in one of those globs) of a reacting molecular group should have faces, I would have to imagine their faces like those of the people or slobs in the ‘Cainite Space Ship’. Yourself, of course, have one of those faces, Toby.”

  “Yes. And they should have faces, for there is a tight and almost total analogy between our old flight and the flight that I'll shoot off in just a moment. Damn that mocking-bird! A mocker that will not mock must be changed, or extinguished.”

  “Even the worst of analogies will stretch only so far, Toby,” Alwin said. “You are not seriously suggesting that—”

  “Yes, I am seriously and joyously suggesting that a group to which, in a way, I belonged did make a space voyage parallel to this one, did make it in a little less than eight thousand years of elapsed time. That's about equivalent to the time of two and a half seconds for a short-aeon nation. There is the order of size to be considered, direct cubical relations, inverse squares, angular velocity, and the relationship of tight-turning to elapsed time and to the pace of technology development. Yes, our eight thousand years was a very close equivalent to their two and a half seconds, if in fact they do learn to navigate in time to bring the bullet back at all. Oh, we had a better start than they have, but we may not have had as good an inclination and indoctrination. We already had a city established on Earth, no mean city; so we had come a respectable ways in corporate organization. We had metallurgy. We had been working bronze and iron for a full generation. A dozen of us shot ourselves off, half accidentally and half on purpose, in a sealed sphere.”

  “You were there some eight thousand years ago, Toby?” Francie Jack asked.

  “I say ‘we’, for I have a racial memory of it. All of you were born yesterday. I was born several days before yesterday. But we had to learn a lot: to orient ourselves in space, to develop a propulsion power from nothing while traveling at something more than escape velocity in cramped quarters in the dark. We had to develop from less than nothing a purpose and a philosophy, and a navigation to return to earth, and to soft-land on earth. That latter was very difficult for us, as it will be for what Alwin calls the ‘wee realm’ that I am putting into this rifle bullet here. Had the thing been done by any other than my own family I would call the whole thing impossible.”

  “Who was running your space ship, Toby?” Alwin Garvie asked. “Who were the tyrants who made it work?”

  “Two brothers, Jabelcain and Jubelcain. And their half-brother Tubalcain. Our very take-off from Earth was an hysterical and amazing feat of invention, but it was necessary for our survival. Oh, our intelligence gathering system was good. We knew where the Earth-faults in our neighborhood were. We knew which one would blow with the most power, when the fountains of the deep should burst open, and we believed that if we set our bronze sphere as a cork in the throat of that erupting fountain, we could be blown clear off Earth. The wee folks in this bullet have an easier task here. They don't have an intelligence system sufficient to know when next a rifle will be shooting off in this part of town, nor the means to get there and set themselves in the chamber of that rifle by themselves. I do this for them.

  “But we, in the old days, had to go. If we'd stayed, we'd have drowned. And in that case we would not have had such future progeny as myself, a heavy loss.”

  “Oh what stuff, Toby, what stuff!” Viola Rafter admired. “That is the sort of stuff you tell to the small chemical smudges to motivate them, is it? That is something like the stuff I tell to my own house plants to motivate them; but I don't do it nearly as well as you do. Is some larger person telling you this to motivate you for something?”

  “Yes, somebody larger tells me such narrations now and then. Yes, to motivate me, I suppose, as I motivate the small molecular smudges. And I do find myself curiously motivated now and then, and especially now.”

  Tobias Lamb had now scaled the sub-microscopic ‘realm’ into the rifle bullet and had put the bullet into the chamber of the rifle. “I never heard that legend before, Toby,” Lucius said. “I have met the myth that either Gog or Magog rode astraddle of the roof-ridge of the ark for the whole trying time of the flood and so prevented the old race of giants from being entirely wiped out. So we have half-giants in the world even now. But that the descendents of Cain escaped Earth in a space-ark, that is new to me. I believe that i
t's cheating.”

  “No, not cheating, not cheating at all. To have taken the gamble with the odds a billion to one against, that is not cheating. To suppose that we of the left-handed fraternity, of the goatish rather than the sheepish brotherhood, had no purpose, that is unreal. We of the line of Cain, we who lost our innocence for the second time, we who ate of the horrible tree of knowledge for the second time, there must have been a reason for us. We were the only early inventors, you know. Genesis 4:20-22 gives only the barest hints of our inventions, but they were the only human inventions in their time.”

  “When did the Cainite Space-Ark return to the Earth, Toby?” Lucitis asked with a failed smirk.

  “I don't know. Within the last several hundred years. When invention returned to the Earth, that was the space-ark homing back.”

  “What stuff you must have in your unconscious, Toby!” Francie said. “You're sheer mythic. And it's said that, in the circuit of re-entrant thought and style and mentation, the mythic meets again with the subatomic and the atomic and the molecular on the field of small aeonics. They'd make no sense else, its said. They make no sense as it is, I say. But our other smudges of reacting molecular jelly are not reacting at all today in the perfect conditions we have set up. We do not know what your own ‘realm’ is doing in the conditions you have set up, but ours do not move.”

  “They do not move because you do not move them, because you do not motivate them,” Tobias said. “You can't motivate them, except accidentally, because you don't believe them to be alive and subject to motivation. But there is not any such thing as inanimate matter. The smallest subatomic particle is alive and at least partly conscious, and at least partly thinking. If you do not believe this, pretend that you believe it at least. You'll get better results that way.”

  Then Tobias Lamb raised the rifle to shoulder and eye, slid off the safety, sighted with the gun, and crooked his finger around the trigger.

  “What are you really going to do, Toby?” Francie Jack asked with apprehension in her voice. “You're acting very strange, even for you. You're up to something, Toby. You're up to something tricky!”

  “The minor thing I'm going to do, on either the first or second fly-by, is plug that mockingbird that is too saccharine to mock. And the main thing I'm going to do is set a living realm in the position where it must invent or perish. I'm betting it will invent.”

  Tobias Lamb shot the rifle then. And, after an interval that seemed about two and a half or three seconds, the rifle shot Tobias Lamb. It shot him in the right eye and clear through his head. It killed him too.

  Tobias Lamb was dead standing up. He was so stocky and solid that he did not fall. He did not even lower the rifle. He was in a cataleptic rigidity. He had no breath and heartbeat. The shot had entered his right eye and had exited massively from the back of his head. He still had his big grin, more grotesque than ever, almost more life-like than ever.

  “This is not real, this is not real. This is something happening out of time,” Francie lack spoke as if in a daze.

  “What is that misfit bird-song?” Alwin Garvie asked in inconsequential amazement. “The mockery of it, the arrogance of it! That part, at least, is real.”

  “The coroner will decide what is real,” Paul Kradzesh stated heavily. “And here he is now. I never saw a call answered so fast. It's almost impossible.”

  The coroner was busying himself about the standing dead man, going through what seemed like a burlesque routine.

  “Oh, he is rigid in death,” the coroner said then. “He's dead standing up, and he rigidified so swiftly and he is so well balanced that he did not fall. Ah, he still has his finger on the gun trigger. Don't stand in front of it. It's a rare happening, and yet I've seen it twice before in my practice.”

  “You lie,” said dead man Tobias Lamb in a pleasanter voice than usual. “Such a thing never happened before. It didn't happen this time either. Oh, don't look so angry and repelled, good friends. Did you want me dead? You really don't understand the possibilities and paradoxes that are present in the context of ‘unelapsed time’? It's a property of very small realms and societies. It's a bonus that almost dwarfs the rest of it. Oh, how howlingly valuable it will be to us!”

  “We do not like you, Tobias!” Paul Kradzesh swore savagely. “We do not like you because of tricks like this. But it did happen! And the coroner was here.”

  “And he is not here now,” Toby Lamb laughed. “You cannot say properly ‘He was here’ because there are no tenses in unelapsed time. Nor will I assure you that my death is an illusion. It is a valid event in unelapsed time, that first remarkable fall-out of the miniature space flight and return.

  “No, of course I'm not all right, Francie. I have a shiner. The soft landing of the returning bullet-space-ship was not all that soft. It blacked my eye.”

  “I hate you, Toby,” Paul said tightly. “Why did you do such a thing as that?”

  “For the joy of discovery, for dramatic affect, for open fun, and to perform a valid experiment. Ah, that bird-song! It's near perfect now! The inimitable mockery and arrogance of it! And the burning belief! A little discipline in its life was all that bird needed. Aye, get that glob of irony in its song! Mock, bird, mock! And believe at the same time. A one-eyed bird had better be a true believer around here!”

  The mocking-bird, still singing on its branch outside, had lost an eye to the fly-by either coming or going. But it had a new song that you had to respect whether you liked it or not.

  “The reactive jelly, as you so ignorantly call it, will react astonishingly now,” Big Toby said. “It has become a nation of consummate atomic-speed invention. Set it any problem and it will solve it. The ramifications of all this, they are endless.”

  “We do hate you, Toby,” Lucius Cockburn growled.

  “Oh sure, oh sure. Whether the little nation did those space marvels or not, it is absolutely essential that it believes it did them. Its motivation lies in its high history.”

  “We can't accept knowing that even the dust is inventive,” Francie Jack said sadly, “but we'll profit from it. We have the perfect activator now. But it will take a new sort of people to accept it fully. Some day you may have them.”

  “Some day, today, almost immediately,” Tobias Lamb gloated. “Oh, the most promising students for it can be selected with no time elapsed at all. I've already put a realm to work on that, and the selection is already waiting for me.”

  Those students who are now developing best ways to motivate and mythologize sub-microscopic smears to get maximum performance and invention from them are an odd lot. They have to be, for they are working with small, left-handed orders that are more goatish than sheepish, that are very near to the grotesque heart of matter. And some of those students had a hop on the subject, those who had read Tobias Lamb's New Physics for Middle-School Children and had been enchanted by it. They have accumulated and analyzed a frightening amount of dream material from molecular-level and smaller entities, and the dream material in those little worlds is absolutely grotesque. And the mythic configurations can not even be conceived of in the geometry of human myth. They are quite otherwise.

  Those brilliant, odd-lot students have their own cultus and fraternity now, and their token and mascot is the One-Eyed Mocking-Bird.

  This Boding Itch

  The Palmer Itch, the Palmer Itch

  Assuaged with oil and honey,

  It means that we will all be rich

  In everything but money.

  C. S. Wynward Lewis

  On all channels, the comedians on the early evening (6:05-6:10) comedy spot had jokes about itching palms. Yes, and they were all jokes about the left palm being itchier than the right palm.

  “I didn't know that anybody except me had itching palms today,” one hundred million wives in just one country said when they heard the comic.

  “I didn't know that anybody except me had itching palms today,” one hundred million husbands gave the echo. “And I sur
e didn't know that anybody except me had their left palm itchier than their right one.”

  And six minutes later, it was on all the early (6:16-6:21) news spots. “If only they don't call it the ‘Itchy Palm Syndrome,’ ” a young lady named Vera Vanguard said. “I can stand any thing except that.”

  “I suppose that we may as well call it the ‘Itchy Palm Syndrome,’ ” the spot news commentator said. “The phenomenon is with us and it may well be with us for the foreseeable future, possibly until the 7:01 news spot. Our foreign contacts assure us that it is now worldwide. Oh, there is professor Arpad Arutinov. Professor, can you give us an opinion on the ‘Itchy Palm Syndrome’?”

  “See page 982, paragraph 2,” Arutinov said. He was an imposing man except for his shocking weasel-like face.

  “Page 982, paragraph 2 of what, sir?” the spot news commentator asked.

  “Of the book,” Arpad Arutinov said. “And don't ask what book. There is only one.” The Professor disappeared from the screen. He always seemed to be just passing through, and yet he was always seen briefly in very many places, dozens every night, wherever the TV lights were shining.

  “I wonder what book he means,” the commentator said. He looked at his next note. “So far, the wave of suicides attributed to the ‘Itchy Palm Syndrome’ has been quite light. The Syndrome is driving people bugs, but it is not driving very many of them over the buggy edge yet. The death rate is sure to pick up as the evening unrolls, if the itchiness holds.” The commentator didn't know what book the Professor meant, but at least two of his listeners did know.

  “Hand me the book, Fritz,” Vera Vanguard said, “and then look to your Happy Ox Hodgepodge. I think it's burning.”

  “There is no way my Happy Ox Hodgepodge can burn,” Fritz said. “The hotter the fire, the more juice will bubble up in it.” And Fritz Der Grosse handed the book to Vera and she turned to page 982 paragraph 2 and read: