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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “That is a very reactionary remark, Maurine,” Bannock said. “And the food doesn't taste as funny as it used to. And it will feed all the multitudes of the Earth with inexhaustible health-giving food. Really, these are much better than the ones I gave you three months ago.”

  Drexel Bannock had a wagonload of his bread-from-stone and he began to break loaves of it and give pieces of it to all the scientific people there. The loaves looked like bread and they smelled like bread— “—and if they don't taste like bread, you still have two out of three,” Ike Casad said. “Ah, well, we'll just blend them with a little real food here. We'll eat and drink and be merry, and we will contemplate the problem of ‘The Great Doldrum Reef’. And then we will scatter again till three months hence.”

  “Just a minute,” Jorden Dorner protested. “You know there is no way of blocking me from giving my own speech.”

  “You will be allowed to make a stirrup-cup speech only, Jorden,” Ike said. “Talk while we eat and drink. It will be a little bit like having fiddle music with our banquet. One-string-fiddle music.”

  2.

  “It was a dozen years ago that I felt the strong compulsion to write left-handed and backwards in doing the first drafts of my histories here. That is the way that Leonardo wrote his notebooks, but he was being cryptic. I recognized this compulsion as having psychological roots and so I obeyed it. I began to use palindromic paper: I wrote left-handed and backwards, then turned the sheets over, and they were as if written right-handed and forwards; and so I bound them into my brochures. But why was I compelled to write my histories backwards?

  “I surmised (correctly, I believe) that it was because history had indeed begun to run backwards, and my inner self demanded that I use this symbolism in recognition of the fact. I checked with other historians. Two others had the same compulsion that I had. Five others were compelled to other sorts of symbolism to express the reversed flow of history. It will take a little getting used to, but history has indeed been running backwards for at least a dozen years now. Why have so few people noticed this?”

  —Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History

  “Are you going to contract the universe again this session, old pumpkin-head?” Alice Oast asked Jorden Dorner. “When my grandchildren ask me ‘What did you do in the time of the Great Doldrum, grandma?’ I will say ‘I listened with sorrowful ears to old father doldrum himself’. And so I will justify myself.”

  “I will reiterate today that the universe has begun to contract, yes,” Dorner stated bravely. “If we but stretch our eyes we will see that the question whether our universe is ‘steady state’, ‘big bang all the way’, or ‘oscillating’ is settled. Ours is an oscillating universe, and we have just completed part of an oscillation. Within three million years we will be able to verify that some of the closer galaxies are showing a violet shift rather than a red shift. If light weren't so slow getting here we could verify it right now. Of course there is no direct-observation, first-class proof that the universe has begun to contract, but neither is there any proof that it has not. There are very many small-scale indications that the reversal has begun.”

  “I hear that you're getting a team of Cleveland Bays, Ike,” Doctor Elton Karns said. “For beauty, there are no horses like them.”

  “My presentation will be a disappointment to whatever ‘steady state’ advocates are left,” Dorner was continuing. “No longer may they say ‘Ah, consider the wonderful species and civilizations that may have already passed over the event horizon’. Nobody has passed over that horizon, nor will. And I doubt if there are any species or civilizations more wonderful than ourselves. We will not pass over the horizon from anybody, nor will anybody pass over the horizon from us. We draw together again.”

  “I didn't feel any jerk when the universe stopped expanding and began to contract, Dorner,” Charles Cogsworth said with smiling malice.

  “Yes you did, Charles. You felt it and were nearly shook apart by it,” Dorner replied. “I myself talked you out of suicide and led you back to hope. ‘Oh the changes, the changes, they are too much for me!’ is what you kept crying out when you were most shook by the reversal.”

  “The changes that I cried out against had nothing to do with the universe reversing its processes,” Cogsworth barked in quick anger.

  “Oh, they were quite closely connected,” Dorner insisted. “But physically the reversal was hardly felt. Our universe hasn't been expanding at a uniform rate from its beginning. It expanded much faster at first, but it has been slowing down from that very first instant. Now my calculations show that the expansion has stopped, and indeed that its contraction has been under way for some time, a decade or two by Earth time-measure. It will be a while before the contraction is observable to astronomers, or course.”

  “But that would mean that our universe is very much younger than is usually calculated for it,” Shalimar McGuire protested.

  “Certainly. Likely it's no more than a tenth or a hundredth of its usually calculated age. Old cosmic speeds do not leave any clear records of themselves in the most obvious places, but I begin to find their impression in the less obvious places.”

  “This rock-bread is not a great improvement on the last, Bannock,” Doctor Karns said. “Ah well, I'll use a little bit more ketchup on it, I guess.”

  “There is, however, one small weather vane that swerves and possibly shows that the direction has changed,” Dorner went on. “That small vane is ourselves and our world, and the culture and furniture of our world. Surely you all see that it has been running backwards for these latest few years. This is only a small indicator of the change, of course, but there are quite a few of these small indicators and they add up.”

  “I'm not going to take the return trip,” Fausto Barra said. “I'm going to stay in this approximate present. It won't bother me that I'll be transparent. There are eyeglasses now that permit one to see the human aura. We who remain need not be invisible to each other. And it is one of those archetypal dreams to live in a well-stocked world from which all the people have fled except a very small and most excellent elite.”

  “It's hard to think of you as belonging to any sort of elite, Fausto,” Alice Oast said. “Is this your spoof-of-the-month?”

  “No, this will be real, or at least contingently real. Stay with me here in the anomaly, Alice.”

  “All right.”

  “As to our local-world, slight indication of the change, I believe that one of the markers of it was our landing men on the moon,” Dorner said. “We were permitted that grand gesture at the turning of the tide. That happening, only thirty years ago, may have been the turning point. That was as far outward as our cosmos went before it began to draw together again. Our biological and cultural evolution, having reached its limit at the same time that the cosmos reached its limit, began to recede and fold back on itself. Now we will begin to merge with slightly previous people, with simians of common ancestry, with proto-mammals, with archaic life. The first indication of this is already with us, that the domestic breeds of dogs and horses and cattle and goldfish are disintegrating, are coming unbred.

  “Oh, the return journey will be as long as the outward journey, and maybe more interesting. But I won't make it myself. I'm another of those who will stay here. But our ‘human affair’ does recede and merge with other affairs.”

  “Dorner,” Drexel Bannock shouted with his mouth full of food (not from rocks) “I'll bet you that out of maybe one hundred million civilizations there are always about forty-nine million receding and fifty-one million advancing, and yet that inch-worm advance will be a real advance. And this nexus of civilizations will have nothing to do with any expansion or contraction of the cosmos. For that is on a different scale entirely.”

  “I knew that the reversal had taken place the morning I decided to grow a beard,” Dorner said. “I was a brash young man then, though already quite intelligent. ‘It was surely a short beardless interval,’ I said to myself (from the
beards of the 1890's to the new faddish beards of the twentieth century was only about sixty years), ‘A larger cycle has pre-empted the old beard-beardless cycle and scissored its time in half. We are going backwards over an old oath’. So I joined them for a while, even though I looked ridiculous with whiskers. But beards, of course, are only one of the hundreds of signs of our regression into the past.”

  “Dorner, I repeat that our mundane thoughts and the cosmos are on entirely different scales,” Bannock said. “Get that straight.”

  “One more for everybody, the stirrup cup!” Ike Casad cried. And he began to fill the cups of all of them. “And when the last stirrup cup is drained, we will scatter and leave Dorner to his own notions.”

  “So is the moon on a different scale from a picture of the moon,” Dorner was saying to Bannock. “And yet they are counterparts. Our own lives and our civilization and society form a very small vernier scale that is counterpart of the cosmic scale. And we signal that the contraction is under way.”

  All of them were on their feet now. Some of them finished their stirrup cups with a foot literally in their stirrup, then tossed their cups away, swung a-mount, cried ‘Tally-Ho, all!’, and rode away.

  “We're at the end of the ‘Gasoline Century’ of course,” Jorden Dorner was saying. “I suspect that it will quickly be shoved out of the popular consciousness and the popular memory. Such an oddity as the ‘Gasoline Century’ doesn't leave a permanent impression. The irony is that there is enough refined gasoline on hand to supply the world at its maximum consumption for ten days. This was set aside by edict. But technically we never did run out of gasoline, nor of many other terminated things. Enough for the world for ten days is enough of everything for a self-selected elite for a thousand years. Will those who go down the regression path even check on these sealed supplies? If they do, will they know why they are diminishing very, very slowly?”

  Almost all the scientists had now mounted their single-seaters, their riding horses; or had climbed into their horse-drawn buggies and carriages, their Ford Phaetons, Toyota Curricles, Nobility Surreys (those beautiful vehicles!), Chevrolet Cabriolets, Porsche World-Class Sportsman, Stanhoper Imperials, Dodge Cruisers, Rolls Tycoon Travelers, and all of those other splendid horse-cars. And all of them (except the half dozen who remained behind) rode off in high amusement at the idea of Dorner that their civilization had begun to regress, and his even fuzzier idea that the cosmos itself had begun to contract.

  3.

  But there is an elite that remains at ‘The End of Outward’, and that elite is still there. We cannot know it well because a mini-event-horizon has pulled back from it and left it to itself. But rumor of it dies hard. The people of that elite have the best of everything, so the rumor says. They belong to a special race, a race that once flew to the moon, so the rumor says. They are as far out as anybody ever went, and nobody can ever take that away from them.

  New People

  1.

  Mind-enhancing and strength-enhancing substances had been used for a dozen years. Their effect was remarkable and even spectacular, and often the effect on a person was permanent. But the substances themselves had not been isolated. They were come by only in unsuspecting and unpredictable combinations. And yet it was the ‘new’ or enhanced people who, every year, came to the fore and became the leaders of the world in almost every field. This year, many of the new and enhanced people were common, not at all distinguished or elegant in their persons; and this became rather painful. They could not be ignored. The ‘new’ people, despite their failings, were the people who mattered. There is no denying that the present year has more of the powerful new people than usual, and that they are more than usually vulgar.

  Well, there was Lenny ‘Toadskin’ Leim. He reported to a mid-western university as a freshman in February of this year, and he was a walk-on in track and field. In the field of athletics where charisma counts for so much, he didn't have any of it at all. But he could high-jump nine feet and nine inches. That was two feet higher than any human had ever jumped before. But he was a slight man with nothing impressive about him except his ability to skim through all the texts and lectures of a difficult course in one hour and then pass an examination in that course with a full A.

  And there was Sven Singleton, who could throw anything further than it had ever been thrown before: the hammer, the javelin, the shot-put, the discus. He hadn't any style, and he was a rather short-armed, lean man with no particular ‘swing’ to him, but he could throw all those things. “How far must I throw it for a record today?” he'd ask whenever he came up to the mark for any of them. He didn't believe in breaking a record by too much. There would always be tomorrow for that. He also threw the baseball (one thousand and one feet) and the football (one hundred and thirty-three yards) farther than it had been thrown before.

  There was Bob Bunchy, who broke most of the weightlifting marks for the eight different classes. He was a small man, but he outlifted the heavyweights and super-heavyweights also. His records couldn't be disputed, but the strongest man in the world should have come on a little bit stronger in his person.

  Elton Spree did the hundred yards in 7.9 seconds, and his sister Audrey Spree did the mile in 3:03. In the autumn of this year, Jimmy Joe Jimson began to run through everybody on the football field. As of now, after six games, he still has not been tackled. He is averaging a little more than five hundred yards a game, and he is always taken out after he has carried the ball ten times. And Billy John Bilberry at Alabama, Randy Andy Anderson at Oklahoma, and Circus Charley Crump at Arkansas are all about as good. Circus Charley was tackled once this year, in the third game of the season, but that was only because he was showing off too much and got tangled up in his own feet.

  All of these athletes, and a hundred other new and prominent ones, were slobs to some degree; or at least they were commoners. But all of them were mental giants as well as physical phenomena. Each of them, except Sven Singleton, had written a meaningful and monumental work of philosophy, and those works remain meaningful even after nine or ten months have passed.

  And as to the true intellectual giants among the ‘new people’ of the present year! Casey Yantra, August Tooms, Joyful John Tolliver (so he's the greatest physicist in the world and he goes around barefoot, in faded blue overalls, and shirtless, but he's hairy enough not to need a shirt except for appearance), Ivan Tottlebeam, Jessica Wigtown (how we are blessed with talent this year!), John King-Stephen, Henry Saxo, Rafael Ricardo (the ‘Big Think’ had finally arrived with Ricardo), Caroline Yap, Efram Rickets, Demetrio Garcia, Sulky-Jane Surrey, Tom Benbolt, Terrance Tripuill! Since the beginning of the world there had never been such a bunch of extraordinary minds appearing in a single year, and this was in only half of the world. In the other half of the world there was only the relentless excellence that might have been predicted, not this sensational excellence that almost exploded in what used to be called the ‘New World.’

  2.

  Mother Maderos (her real name was Conchita Anita Maderos) was being advocatorily interviewed (about the chili powder on which she held copyright) by an Investigative Reporter and a Federal Person traveling together, as had become the custom. IR: “Mother Maderos, we must know exactly what you put into your Mother Maderos Dawn Chili Powder. I said that we must know exactly what you put into it, not approximately.”

  MM: “I heard you said it, punk. But I am not an exactly person. I am an approximately person. I say there is only an approximately formula for what goes into the chili powder. It is never the same for two different batches. Besides, it is none of your affair what is in my chili powder. It is the other one there who is the federal person and he can ask questions. You are the nothing person.”

  IR: “You may just have talked yourself into a prison sentence, Mother Maderos. The word of any investigative reporter is law to any federal person. They could not, or would not, conduct any meaningful investigation at all without us. Tell her that our word is law with all
federal persons, Clyde. Explain it to her. No, you wouldn't be able to do that. Just say ‘That's right’ to whatever I say, and say it resoundingly.”

  FP: “ ‘That's right’ isn't one of the phrases in our repertoire. The closest thing to ‘that's right’ in our repertoire is ‘right on’.”

  IR: “Say it, Clyde, say it resoundingly.”

  FP: “Right on!!!”

  MM: “Oh, I see. Well, my chili powder is made up entirely of additives. The one thing that the ‘Mother Maderos Dawn Chili Powder’ does not contain is chili powder itself. All my franchised outlets (actually I have only one franchised outlet: ‘Crum Bums Junk Food Emporiums,’ but there are one hundred locations in their system), all of them start with standard Arizona Greaseless Chili. My powder contains Prusopis Fuliflora (Mesquite), Apion Sayi (the corn weevil; sure they're alive; but they're small as the powder), ground-up rhizome of the Helleborus Foetidus or bear's-foot plant. And androsterone, of course. And chili wouldn't be chili without Lophophora Williams (Peyote Cactus buds) and the Psilocybe Mexicana Mushroom. And Bufotenine (Ah, Bufotenine!) (from the skin of toads, and also from banana peels). Bufotenine was the active element in most of the witches' brews, you know.”

  IR: “Are you a witch, Mother Maderos?”

  MM: “Sort of, but don't advertise it. I'm also head of the Saint Cecelia Circle of the Altar Society at the Parish. That's the main things I put into my powder. The others are impulse put-ins, never the same twice. Oh yes, I do put a little bit of nitroglycerin in each batch. I figure that a lot of people have bad hearts and my nitroglycerin probably saves countless lives every day. And I put in estrone to make people feel good. I hardly ever put Spanish Fly in my powder lately. You can go to jail for using that stuff.”