—Twentieth Century Comprehensive Encyclopedia, 1988 Edition
Selim Mahmud was a well-rounded (at three hundred and fifty pounds) young American man of Syrian descent. He was, in his well-roundedness, a professional wrestler, a museum curator, a theoretical chemist, a diamond cutter, an Arabic and Koranic scholar, and a creative daydreamer.
As a theoretical chemist he reasoned that the hoax-metal Trislan was really a noble stone, the Philosopher's Stone, the Alchemist's Stone, the Touch-Stone, the Key-Stone, the remembering stone, the speaking stone. And he came to believe that it did really exist, that it was in fact the best known stone in the world. He went to Mecca to verify this belief. He took with him twenty thousand dollars American with which he believed he might obtain a small (4" x 4" x 8", very approximately) piece of the great stone.
The name of the best-known stone in the world is unknown. It is usually called the Black Stone of Kaaba, but the Kaaba is the name of the building that is built around the stone. The Black Stone itself is too holy to have a name, or to have its name known.
In Mecca, Selim made contact with a flint-hearted confidence man. He showed the twenty thousand dollars American. He was told that the small piece, a little larger than a brick, could indeed be had for that sum. All Selim had to do, after paying the money, was pick up that small piece of stone in his right hand with a single swift motion and walk swiftly away with it. And the confidence man would have cast a deep sleep on all the guards and observers for a short time. What could go wrong? How could it fail?
Selim knew how it could fail. He extrapolated that the small piece of Trislan, if it was such, a little bit larger than a brick, would weigh slightly more than four hundred pounds. He guessed that, for that reason, most persons who attempted to gain the small stone would fail at it. If one fumbled the small stone and failed to pick it up in one swift one-handed motion, the guards and observers would wake up and capture him and kill him.
Well, Salim was not a top heavyweight wrestler for nothing. He had remarkable strength of hand. He had been practicing, with the handle of a four hundred pound barbell shaped like a 4" x 4" x 8" brick, and he could make a quick snatch of the four hundred pounds by such a handle.
Selim entered the Kaaba. He was a devout Moslem and he had certificates to prove it. He passed a test in Arabic; and the confidence man, who seemed to be well-known, guaranteed him absolutely.
The great stone itself was a murmuring stone. It was said to contain the whispered prayers of every pilgrim who had ever prayed before it, to remember them all. And the small stone was just a little bit larger than Selim had been led to believe. Oh, if it were truly of Trislan, and if the extrapolation was correct, it would weigh nearer to five hundred pounds. Well, he had to do it now.
“The money!” cried the confidence man. And Selim gave him the twenty thousand dollars.
“The sleep!” cried the confidence man, and he made a gesture that sent all the guards and observers into deep sleep; exaggerated deep sleep, it seemed.
“Yes, the guards seem to be asleep, but the pilgrims are not,” Selim said.
“I would not waste really deep sleep on such shallow persons as the pilgrims,” the confidence man said. “They are not deep persons. A shallow sleep is enough to cast upon them. And they are all in a shallow sleep now, although they stand and mumble.”
“Oh, all right,” Selim agreed.
“The small stone!” cried the confidence man. Selim Mahmud picked up the small stone that was a piece of the big stone, with a single swift one-handed motion, and he walked swiftly away. He heard the gasps of amazement behind him, and he walked still more swiftly.
“What will we do, what will we do?” some of the guards wailed as they came out of their sham-sleep.
“We will do what it is written that we should do,” said one of the guards who seemed to be a sort of leader. This guard then went outside, climbed a tamarac bush, took a single egg out of the bird's nest that was there, and brought it into the Kaaba building. He then made a kabalistic mark on the egg, after which he put the egg into a hollow in the big stone, a hollow that only a few inner persons were aware of.
Selim had arranged for two fast dromedaries, one to carry himself, one to carry the stone. They were both sturdy animals. Selim had also arranged for a fast Ford fifty miles down the road, and a fast airplane another hundred and twenty miles down the road. He flew to Damascus. Then, in a public plane, he flew to Rome and London and to the United States.
He had the real thing, the Philosopher's Stone, the Alchemist's Stone, the Touch-Stone, the Key-Stone. It checked out by every test. The chemists, being quaint and extrapolative, had guessed right in every case. It was Trislan, and it had all the characteristics of the royal metal-stone, or so it seemed by the first several hundred tests. It was a stone that remembered everything it had ever seen. It was a talking stone, if only somebody would interpret it. Selim set it up in the ‘Fine Stone Room’ at City Museum, which was a major part of his life.
Selim examined the intricate crystalline structure of it. Then he got his heavy hammer, struck the stone a terrific blow, and fractured it. The last person who had been able to fracture one of these smaller pieces of the Great Stone (there had originally been nine of the smaller manifestations) had been the Giant Al-Giour about a hundred years before this.
Selim, a practiced diamond cutter and expert at crystalline structures, a very powerful man, had fractured the black Trislan stone into two hundred and forty three pieces, as he had hoped he would. This is an alchemical number and very important.
Selim knew about the bird, back in Mecca, that was growing in the egg with the kabalistic marking on it. What Moslem scholar does not know about it? And he knew that the bird, when it came, would be able to count to only two hundred and thirty-nine.
Alfred Freck was a thin little boy with red hair and with almost colorless gray eyes who collected rocks and stones. He was very lucky in his collecting. He said that the special stones called to him to come and get them. He had hundreds of garnets, red and orange (his red hair was the exact color of orange garnet) and black and green and almost colorless gray. This latter is the gray that sometimes clarifies; it is mostly found in spherical or ‘onion’ crystal. It is the ‘Crystal Ball rock’, and is also the exact color of Alfred Freck's gray eyes. Alfred had garnets that were more than a foot in diameter. He had emeralds and rubies, jade-stones and opal-stones. He understood the stones and could recognize all of them when they were still imbedded in their clay. Some of them were remembering stones and some of them were whispering stones. They told him about the big stone that is the Emperor of all the stones on the Earth.
Alfred not only found rocks but he also traded rocks. He had a unilateral way of trading them. Oh, he always gave a fair value, but the people he traded with often didn't know about the trades until weeks later, and then they didn't understand them at all.
Alfred was very thin and very agile, and he could climb like a squirrel. He could get into any house or building, and he mostly entered late at night. The stones would call to him clearly, and he would go to them in the total dark and take them and leave others in their place. It was not only jewel stones, or the cheaper costume-jewel stones like garnets that he traded. He dealt in that variety of remembering stones called fossils, but the people he traded them to did not always recognize their value. And he dealt in those real and rare remembering stones who patinas can be lifted off in transparencies only one molecule thick, each transparency able to be turned into a total holographic scene, a perfect panorama of an instant in time.
Alfred Freck had a girl friend named Catherine Klutz, but he barely had her. She was known in the eleven-year-old circle as the Empress Catherine, and she was the most imperious eleven-year-old girl in the world. She demanded, for her favors, a constant stream of gifts. She latched onto Alfred Freck when she found that he sometimes gave jewel-stones to the girls. The Empress Catherine preferred diamonds to all other stones, and her demands
for them were constantly escalating. Diamonds were stones that Alfred could not find in his own area and had to trade for. So a large part of Alfred's stone trading had to do with obtaining diamonds for the Empress Catherine who herself had a heart of stone. Alfred traded more stones with the City Museum than with any other institution or person. Sometimes there would be hundreds of stones calling to him at one time from the City Museum. He would wander through its halls at night and open its cases. He had a Key-Stone that would unlock any case by a sort of rocky magic. He would take a dozen stones here, a dozen there, and leave others in their places.
Selim Mahmud often sat in the dark museum at night. It was not really dark to him. He often watched Alfred Freck opening the cases and making his trades. Selim always checked afterwards to see what had been taken (he knew each of the half million stones in the museum) and what had been left in place of them. And he satisfied himself that the trades were always good trades for the museum.
He thought at first that Alfred was a Samailt, one of those flame-haired spirits out of Arabian mythology. Then he caught Alfred and found that he was a skinny eleven-year-old human boy with a flaming case of lithomania.
“You caught me,” Alfred cried in his rusty-colored voice, “but what can you do with me?”
“I can eviscerate you and stuff you and trade you off for a stuffed monkey.”
“Oh no, oh no!”
“Or I can miniaturize you and put you into this bottle and wire the cork in.”
“That's all right. People don't get any older when they're in bottles, and I can say to get out of the bottle again in seven years.”
“I know it too,” Selim told Alfred. “It's one of the first spells that people learn when they begin to dabble in these things. I'll tell you one thing though: you won't get any older during those seven years that you'll be in the bottle, but it sure will be tedious in there.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Do I have any other choices?”
“Oh, I can let you go.”
“I'll choose that one.”
“You're not afraid?”
“There's a catch to it. And I'll still take that one.”
“That's funny, I don't know the catch to it,” Selim said. And he let Alfred go.
“Tell me then,” he called when Alfred had skittered a hundred feet away from him. “What is the catch?”
“The catch is that you can't catch me again.”
And, of course, Selim couldn't. There are lots of places that a seventy-two pound boy can go that a three-hundred-and-fifty pound young man can't follow. But they became friends after that. They did their trading without furtiveness after this, but still in the dead of night.
Alfred knew it when Selim came back to town with that very heavy black stone that was only a very little bit larger than a brick. He knew it because the stone had called to him and told him all about it. And he knew it when Selim fractured the metallic stone into two hundred and forty-three pieces. Thenceforth Alfred was able to hold conversations with all two hundred and forty-three manifestations of the stone, wherever they were. And Alfred knew about the bird's egg in Arabia with the kabalistic mark on it, and how it had grown to one hundred times its original size and was ready to hatch.
Selim Mahmud sent two hundred and thirty-nine of the pieces of the stone to persons who cared about such things. And he kept four of the pieces himself. No, it was not correct to call them pieces. Each one was a totality. Each one was a complete manifestation. It was magic metal that did not always act like metal. It was the Philosophers Stone, the Alchemists Stone, the Touch-Stone by which all things could be tested. It was the talking stone, skipping over language and speaking directly to persons out of deep reminiscence. It was the remembering stone that remembered everything it had ever seen. Ah, perhaps you do not understand the full significance of that ‘everything’.
Remember that the original big black stone had fallen onto Arabia out of the sky, but how far and how long had it fallen? It had fallen for well over a billion years, and it remembered every moment of it. Yes, and it was avid to tell about that exciting journey.
The stones had unique amplifying qualities. They had unique sensing, and selecting, and resonating qualities. Every molecule of the metal-stone was a multi-purpose transistor. The stone had predictive qualities. And, like the kings-stone, it would cure scrofula with a touch, and also cancer, barrenness, thickening of the arteries, and most disorders of the heart. It induced sanity, piety, rectitude, general good humor, and happiness.
Yes, some of the interested persons quickly synthesized Trislan, after they had analyzed their stones a bit. The synthesizing process almost dictated itself, after the molecular pattern was apparent. At least two hundred and thirty of the two hundred and thirty-nine owners of the small stone totalities cried out “Why didn't I think of that before!” It was almost the easiest element ever synthesized. And the world moved into the Trislan Age. Then the stone was the hoax-metal Trislan, element 305? Yes, the stone was Trislan, and more. That means that Trislan was the stone, and less. And most of the investigators were delighted that it was so, that they wouldn't have to be concerned with all those grotesque and outré characteristics that were inherent in the stone.
But one of the possessors of one of the manifestations of the stone did cry out “We will synthesize the magic part of it too, if only we have time for it. Why do I have the premonition of something coming on big wings to steal that time away from us?”
(The big bird meanwhile had hatched out of its egg, had eaten three hundred sheep and nineteen camels to build up its strength, and had begun to fly.)
“It is the most sophisticated and multi-utile of all the elements, and without that mystagogic aura that surrounds it in its fractured stone form,” one of the investigators said. “Who wants an element that will cure disease and make people happy! That's not our friend. Let's keep it pure. But for plain electronic and telemetric and computer-extrapolative function, the synthesized element is perfect.”
But the synthetic Trislan was not a remembering metal. What did it have to remember? It had just been born. It was not a talking stone. It was not the Philosophers Stone, nor the Alchemists Stone, nor the Touch-Stone by which all things could be tested, not the Kings Stone that would cure almost all diseases and deficiencies. It hadn't the knack of inculcating sanity, piety, rectitude, good humor, and happiness. And the owners of the small totalities from the fractured stone didn't understand that some of these things are important to some of the people. So they didn't attempt to synthesize these extracurricular qualities of the stones. So it was that the world did pass into the Trislan Age, but it did not yet pass into the Second Age of Benevolent Magic.
Alfred Freck traded his best crystal-ball stone, an eighteen-inch diameter colorless gray garnet stone, to Selim for one of the manifestations from the black stone. Selim buffed the crystal-ball stone down to a perfect sphere. (What is hard enough to buff grey garnet with? Red garnet, that's what.) And then Selim had one of the finest prophetic crystal balls ever. And he still had three of the manifestations of the black stone left. It was a good bargain for each of them.
The bird arrived in America hot on the trail of the stolen stone. It zoomed in on the town of Selim. The bird was so large that it had to be an optical illusion. It went to work retrieving the various manifestations into which the stone had been shattered. It was hard to keep out of a house or building. It would take a roof off or a wall out if necessary. It found and swallowed the manifestations, one in the house of Hazlitt, one each in the houses of Straub, Schoenbaum, Watson, O'Toole. While at O'Toole's place, the bird also stole the great O'Toole diamond. Then it found and swallowed the manifestations that belonged to Clarke, Wimbish, Coppel, others.
“I want the Great O'Toole Diamond!” the Empress Catherine wailed at Alfred Freck the next morning on the way to school. The thefts of the manifestations of the stone had really been too weird to report, but Mrs. O'Toole had reported that the big diamond had been st
olen. It had been in the morning paper. “I don't have it. I wasn't the one who stole it. I think a big bird stole it,” Alfred said in confusion.
“If you didn't steal it, you know who did,” the Empress insisted. “Go steal it from the first thief then. You are the best diamond thief in town and I must have the Great O'Toole Diamond. I insist on it!” Never had Catherine been so imperious in her orders. Her face was like stone and her heart was like stone.
“I will see what I can do,” Alfred said. She really shook him.
The bird found and swallowed two hundred and thirty-one more manifestations of the shattered stone. He found them within a radius of fifteen hundred miles. He had swallowed two hundred and thirty-nine of them now, and he should have been satisfied with that. Two hundred and thirty-nine was as high as he could count. But, returning to the big city where he had begun his retrievals, the big bird caught the spoor he had first sensed when he was still in a small and unmodified bird's egg in Arabia. It was the smell of Selim, the original thief. The bird came into the museum, found Selim, and snapped up the three manifestations of the stone that Selim owned. The bird snapped up something also, and then he flew away.
Selim phoned Alfred Freck in an early morning.
“Alfred, Alfred,” he cried over the phone. “The bird ran over its limit. It snapped up the three manifestations that I had. Now you have the only free one left in the world. If we want to find out and duplicate the magic, we must do it from your manifestation of the stone. Do not on any account give it to the big bird.”
“Why and how would I give it to the big bird? Isn't the big bird flying back to Arabia by now? Look in the crystal ball and see where it is.”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 290
