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

by R. A. Lafferty

  But where was Dixie Late-Lark herself? Was that not a pertinent question? More pertinent questions may have been: why did all the explorers stop wondering what had happened to their colleague Dixie Late-Lark? And why did they now feel that her disappearance was unimportant?

  “I have lost my judgment,” George Mahoon lamented. “I've still got most of the pieces of things in my mind, but I can no longer put them together. Putting things together is what judgment is. One of you others will have to take over the captaincy of this expedition.” “Oh, bother the captaincy!” Gladys Marclair rejected it. “Expeditions would be better without captains anyhow. And you can't lose something that you never had, George. Let's play ‘Ask the Question’ with this situation. And let's wonder why no bunch, coming here, has played it before. This is an Earth-sized planet and remarkably monotonous. On its look-alike continents, there are hundreds and thousands of little low plains or meadows comparable to this Plain of the Old Spaceships. Why have all the expeditions to this world, from that of John Chancel to our own, landed here within one thousand meters of each other? Instructions for exploration landing sites have always been ‘Random selection, tempered with intelligence.’ And another instruction has been ‘Examine new ground wherever possible.’ For whose convenience have we all landed in this one place? Oh, your diminished judgment, George! Probably somebody has been eating the hippo out of your hippocampus (I've always believed that the ‘little hype’ is the center of the judgment as well as of the memory), so now you're not as well hyped as you were. What if hardly any of the area of this planet has been checked out?”

  “Oh, we made sixteen scanning circuits of Thieving Bear Planet before we landed,” George Mahoon said. “Sixteen circuits will give a very good recorded sample. And some of the previous expeditions made the full sixty-four scanning circuits, and the full scan doesn't miss much.”

  “Do we believe that the Thieving Bears are to be found in all parts of this planet, George?” Selma Last-Rose asked.

  “I don't know. Do we believe it, Benny?”

  “Oh no. The Thieving Bears are strictly small-species and small-area creatures. Their crankinesses as well as their brilliancies indicate that they have far too small a gene-pool. They have to stay close together in a small area to ‘keep warm’ in the special (of a species) identity-survival sense.”

  “As to myself, I've lost more than my judgment,” Luke Fronsa mourned. “I've lost all my ideas, and all that I have left now are notions. Somebody is eating all my ideas right out of my head and leaving only the hulls of them. Did you know that notions are only the shells or hulls of ideas after the meat is eaten out of them?”

  The bears were toothless, and they were playful. Sometimes they came gliding in on the air, and they might be practically invisible when the light was in their favor. They came gliding in or ambling in, and they tagged the people gently as a breath. But whenever they touched the people, however briefly or lightly, they left what seemed to be very small entering marks. And they also left a redness, like the stings of nettles. One of the explorers (no matter which one; they had begun to run together, even in their own regard) said that the Thieving Bears were really a species of giant insects, insects with strange appetites and always hungry.

  Seven days and nights went by very rapidly. It was a giddy world in this respect, fast-spinning: for seven days and nights on Thieving Bear Planet were the equivalent of only about eighteen hours on Old Earth or sixteen hours on Astrobe. And the fast-spin did make a difference on Thieving Bear. It was because of the fast-spin that there were no large treelike plants, not even any very large bushes. There were small bushes, and there was the non-gramineous grass.

  2.

  “People without an accompaniment of ghosts are a deprived people. They will descend to almost any depth of ‘oriental’ cultishness or modish superstition or silliness or astrological depravity to hide the fact that they have lost their ghosts.

  “Ghosts without an accompaniment or ‘neighborness’ of people are similarly deprived, and they will cast themselves into the most bizarre roles or forms to try to create a company for themselves.

  “Both of these conditions are unhealthy.”

  —Terrance Taibhse, Introduction to Ghost Stories of Sector 24

  The storminess of Thieving Bear Planet wouldn't have permitted any botanical constructs taller than small bushes. And the fast-spin of Thieving Bear compelled certain surface conditions for that world. On most worlds, the hills go up. On Thieving Bear Planet, the hills went down.

  The upper levels of all the continents of Thieving Bear were flat and lush, and sometimes they were swept by violent winds. And down from them, the hills ran to the sheltered plains or meadows or circle-valleys (such as was the Plain of the Old Spaceships), and on these lower levels the winds were less violent.

  Two of the seven short nights just past had been “electric nights,” and the ghosts walked on electric nights. The electric nights were highlighted (literally) by massive thunderstorms and plasmal displays. (The odds are that these storms are more violent than the storms where you come from.) The lightning piled up on the high places, roaring like lazarus-lions. Then it rolled down the hills like waterfalls and formed hot and spitting pools on the lower plains and meadows.

  The ghosts were always there, but some of them were ordinarily like empty balloons. On the electric nights, they filled up with lightning and manifested themselves. But others of the ghosts were always low-key, living out their endless nights and days till they would finally fade away after a long era. One of the ghosts was that of John Chancel, one of the earlier visitors to Thieving Bear Planet, usually called the “discoverer” of Thieving Bear, but now he said that this wasn't true. During the second of the electric nights, Chancel's ghost sat in the cockpit room of the ship with the explorers and lovingly handled the eight hundred knobs, wheels, levers, push buttons, keyboards, and voice boxes that commanded the ship. The ships hadn't been so sophisticated in his day.

  “I catch onto all the new and enjoyable advances in ship control quicker than ‘he’ would,” Chancel's ghost spoke softly. “Oh, he has the physical brains with him, most of them; but I have the intuition. And he, we, were never very good on brains anyhow. We had the mystique and the personality, we had the intuition, we guessed a lot, and we faked a lot. But we were never a well-linked personality.”

  “Just how does one become a ghost?” Gladys Marclair asked. “Besides dying, I mean, is there any way to bring it about?”

  “It happens, in many cases, long before death. I was his ghost here for twenty years (Earth years) before Chancel died elsewhere. He left his (my) ghost here on his second landing. He came back here for me several times after that, but I wouldn't rejoin him or go away with him. He had become quite cranky in his ways, and I in mine. There would have been everlasting conflict if we had joined. But it was also psychic disaster (more for him than for me) for us to be separated.

  “It's not at all rare for a living person to be separated from his ghost. I see that two of you six have become separated from your own ghosts, and none of you can guess which two of you it is. On Thieving Bear, the conditions seem to be favorable for these split-ups. It leaves a great hunger (yes, a physical hunger) in the ghosts who are left behind. But each planet has its own ghostliness that is different from that of other places. Even Old Earth has remnants and tatters of ghostliness, and it isn't a hungry world. As a prophet said, ‘Happy the world that has iron meadows and rich essences on which the spirits may feed, and then go to sleep.’ But we spirits are most often sleepless here.”

  “What happened to Dixie Late-Lark?” Gladys Marclair asked this pleasant ghost.

  “Oh, she's a ghost of a different sort. There never was any Dixie Late-Lark as a person. There were only the six of you who arrived here. Dixie was your esprit de group, your group effigy, and also a manifestation of your ‘goofiness syndrome.’ But we made her visible to you for the first time. And you recognized her and accepte
d her in your unthinking way. This ‘unthinking way’ has become part of the environment of Thieving Bear Planet. She was the toothsome imaginative essence of all of you, the capriciousness or coltishness of you, and that made her very appetizing. We love essence. It's so concentrated.”

  “Why did you make her visible?” Selma asked.

  “Because we like to see what we're eating.”

  “Who or what are the Thieving Bears?” Luke Fronsa asked Chancel's ghost.

  “Oh, they're a sort of tumbleweed, a sort of nettle. Ghosts use them to get around in some of the time; so I myself am often a Thieving Bear. It is only on the electric nights that we can inflate ourselves with enough plasm to look like ourselves. We walk here a lot because we are always hungry and restless. Ghosts in places that are richer in organics and metals and minerals stay well fed by a sort of osmosis, so they walk and stir very little. They sleep their decades and centuries away. Notice it sometimes that active ghosts are only to be found in deprived regions. One of my counterparts has hardly stirred in a hundred years. I can feel my counterparts, but there's not much of them to feel.”

  “Where do the little Thieving Bears come from?”

  “From a very early landing, perhaps the earliest, for they were here when I arrived. It was an ill-advised settlement expedition of men, women, and children. Then all died of starvation, not knowing how to turn the lush grass into food. They were the first of the hungry ghosts. It was their crying hunger that has drawn all the ships to land in this one place. ‘Come let us eat you’ is their cry, and it is still a most passionate cry.”

  “You spoke of your ‘counterparts’ a moment ago,” George Mahoon said. “Did John Chancel generate more ghosts than one? Is he himself restless and hungry?”

  “Oh, I myself (the central John Chancel) have gone to my glory. But all of us great ones leave multiple ghosts behind us. He (I) left at least two others besides myself. We have a sort of awareness of each other, a loose feeling. He had real greatness (unlikely as it seems), and I didn't. And yet this is the paradox: he saw himself entirely from the outside, and he loved what he saw; I saw us from the inside, and I wasn't impressed. And we were not the first man on as many planets as is claimed for us. We were not the first man here. There were already Thieving Bears here when we came, ghosts of earlier explorers. But John Chancel had the greatness; and the earlier explorers had it not. So Chancel was credited with many first landings.

  “Good luck to you, ladies and gentlemen, when you lift off in your capsule this electric morning. There are several entries that you must make in your log immediately after lift-off, or you will forget them and never make them at all. And you will have to make these entries in something other than ink.”

  “Why should we lift off in our capsule?” Elton Fad asked. “We use the capsule only when the ship is inoperative.”

  “It's inoperative now and forever,” the ghost of John Chancel said. “Well, it's a good ship and it eased the hunger of a lot of us. You'd better lift off in the capsule as soon as possible now. We try to play fair, but we'll be feeding on it very soon if it's still here.”

  That John Chancel was a nice fellow, even in his fading ghost form.

  But a much more violent ghost (right at that electric dawn after the second electric night) was the ghost of Manbreaker Crag. After the second of the electric nights had ended, Manbreaker decided to remain apparent out of sheer stubbornness. They had all been feeling the powerful presence of this Manbreaker Crag for some time. “I'm the only one here of any moment or weight,” Manbreaker's ghost spoke in a rough sort of roar. “I'm not a person to crawl into pieces of nettle or tumbleweed or any weeds except my own mortal weeds. I'm not one to take on the form of a cutie giggling bear or other toy. I am not a ghost, nor any part of a ghost story. Ghost stories are for children and cutie bears. I am a simple dead man who is restless and hungry on this mineral-poor world. On electric nights, I go get my own body where I keep it. I enter it and I inflate it with the crackling lightning and the electricity that has gathered here. I'm a hungry dead man with a dead man's temper. Don't mess with me!”

  “Don't mess with us, fellow,” George Mahoon spoke sharply. “Our ship seems to be in a very weakened condition and we have to be getting out of here quickly. Stay out of the way, grave-rot oaf, and be quiet. Elton, go sharpen this, and then bring it back to me along with a heavy sledgehammer. I think I know how to deal with hungry dead men.”

  George Mahoon handed a thick and heavy hardwood dowel pin to Elton Fad. It was about the length and heft of a baseball bat.

  “The other ones, the real ghosts, which is to say the real unreal ones, have their little self-saving fables that they recite when they feed on people and the possessions of people,” the hungry, long-dead man, Manbreaker Crag, roared. The only speaking voice he possessed was this sort of dogged roar. “They say, ‘We do not steal important things out of your minds. We steal only funny-shaped, trifling things. Serious people like you are better off without them. Our gain is your gain.’ That is what they are telling you, but they lie. What we eat out of your minds are the most serious things that your minds are capable of holding. What we steal and eat out of your bodies are the tastiest things in your bodies. We come to table on you, and we feast on you. What we eat out of your ships and your stores are the most nourishing and sophisticated things you have brought, wotto metal, data gelatin, electronic reta, codified memories and processes. We eat these things because we are hungry. And I eat them more ravenously than do any of the others. I eat the essence of minds and leave gibbering idiocy in its place. I eat the bodies of whole people where they stand.”

  “Is everything possible transferred from the ship to the capsule?” big George Mahoon asked his party.

  “It is,” several of them answered.

  “I will eat the essence of your capsule-boat just as all of us on Thieving Bear have eaten the essence of your ship,” dead Manbreaker Crag roared.

  “Is it sharpened?” Mahoon asked as he took the thick hardwood dowel from the returning Elton Fad.

  “It is sharpened,” Elton said, “but something has gone wrong with it. It loses weight as I stand here. They feed across short distances.”

  “Scrawny ship captain, I think I'll eat you as you stand there,” dead Manbreaker roared at Captain Mahoon. “You'd make a big bite, but I'll eat you.”

  Big George Mahoon felled bigger dead-man Manbreaker Crag with a powerful blow to his dead face. Then he put the point of the sharpened dowel pin (“Yes, Elton, I believe that he ate the heart out of it, but how could it have been prevented?” Mahoon asked) to the region of the heart of Manbreaker and struck the pin a heavy blow with the big sledgehammer. But the wooden pin or stake came apart into weak splinters and pieces of worm-eaten (or zombie-eaten) wood.

  “Ah well, we'll have to leave him as he is,” Mahoon said. “I don't know any other way to kill a man who's already dead.”

  The six explorers got into the capsule-boat then and lifted off. They looked down on the ship they had left behind them then, and it crumbled down and became a part of its own outline and schematic. It became one more of the token spaceships that formed that part-circle that gave the name Plain of the Old Spaceships to that curious site. Those drawn outlines of the old space ships, they were the old space ships. There must have been a lot of good eating in each of them, though. “To the log!” George Mahoon howled. “I feel it all slipping out of my memory so fast! Each one of us take a long log page and write as rapidly as possible. Get it down, before we lose it as earlier explorers lost it.”

  “No use lamenting that there is no ‘ink’ in any stylus or pen or log pencil laid out or still boxed,” Selma Last-Rose rattled. “No use lamenting that even the electronic ink is eaten out of every recorder and that the remembering jelly is eaten out of every memory pot. The hungers of the Thieving Bears are unaccountable. All the earlier logs had a few words written in something other than ink. If we all write as fast as we can, we may get more
than a few words down. We may even get the explanation down onto the log sheets before it fades completely from our minds.”

  They all opened their veins and wrote on the long log sheets in their own blood. It was sticky going. So many free-flowing things had been eaten out of their blood that it was now viscous and thick. But they made it do. They got the explanation all down, even though (when it was shown to them later) they hardly remembered writing it.

  A simple explanation had been needed for the conditions on Thieving Bear Planet. It was needed because, as the great Reginald Hot had once phrased it, “Anomalies are messy.” And that simple explanation is herewith given, more or less as it was written in thick blood in the log book.

  Heart Of Stone, Dear

  “Trislan. A bogus or hoax metal on which chemists sometimes wax quaint or at least extrapolative. It does not exist in nature and it has poor prospects of being synthesized. The origin of the name isn't known. Its literal meaning in Irish would be thrice-safe, thrice-sound, or thrice-healthy, but the use of a number as a prefix would be a very un-Irish procedure. It is said that the name is the phonetic equivalent of the German Drei-Slange or Three-Snakes, supposedly from three intertwining radicals in the molecular make-up. Trislan is given the atomic number of 305, the specific gravity of 822, and the melting temperature of 6561° centigrade. All of these are alchemical numbers. It is extrapolated that it will be black, dense, stable, extremely magnetic, with an unlimited number of crystalline structures (how un-metallic of it!), usable in batteries, armatures, computers, that it is highly resonant (a remembering stone). It is also said that, because of its resonance, a fair-sized piece of it could make a penny whistle sound like a whole orchestra. It would be a handy metal, if it existed.”