“Yes, I see it. It's in the Donner's big pasture eating cattle, probably to get strength for its return flight. You know where Donner's big pasture is. You hunt for stones there lots of times.”
“I know where it is.”
“Well, don't go there, not for any reason! The bird is there.”
“Selim, you sound like you're hurting.”
“Yes, the bird took my right arm when it took my last three manifestations of the stone. I suppose I held onto them too tightly.”
“You'd better rub something on the stump to make it stop hurting,” Alfred said. He hung up on Selim then and went outdoors. The Empress Catherine was there though it was still very early in the morning.
“I must have the O'Toole Diamond!” she cried out. “Now, now, now! You know where it is. You know how to get it. The diamond, the diamond, Alfred!”
“What could I give in exchange for it?”
“Give whatever it takes to get it.”
“There is only one thing possible that will get it.”
“Then give it, and get the diamond!” the stoney-hearted Empress ordered.
Alfred Freck went to Donner's big pasture and saw the strange bird catching and swallowing cattle to replenish its strength for its flight home.
“The last manifestation of the stone, the very last of them, for the O'Toole Diamond,” Alfred offered the trade to the bird, and he set the stone down on the ground that was soggy with the blood and offal of cattle.
The bird understood. It regurgitated the O'Toole Diamond, swallowed the last manifestation of the black stone, then chased that down with a bull that made quite a noise about being swallowed.
And Alfred started back home with the great diamond cold as ice in his hand and with defeat cold as ice in his heart. He had blown the chance to find out and duplicate the magic of the Black Stone. He had possibly blown the whole Second Age of Benevolent Magic. He had blown everything.
Alfred Freck was a thin little boy with red hair and colorless gray eyes, a thin little boy who collected stones. And the last stone he collected was the heart of stone of the eleven-year-old Empress Catherine.
Six Leagues From Lop
Millions of persons when reading The Travels of Marco Polo have surely felt that several of the major Travels or Adventures, three or four of them, have been left out. Oh, the texts do not show conspicuous sutures where the material has been removed. Going all the way back, the texts seem inviolate. But Marco was a natural storyteller. Why are three or four of his stories pointless and too short? The traveling itself was from the year 1271 when Marco was sixteen years old to 1295 when he was forty-one years old. Then, three years after his return to his home city of Venice, Marco was taken prisoner in a naval war between Venice and Genoa and he found himself in a prison in Genoa.
For cell-mate Marco had a political prisoner named Rusticiano who was a professional scribe and also a writer of fantastic romances. Rusticiano had writing materials. Marco had his head and heart full of stories, his own travel adventures which would prove to be true wherever they could be checked; but Rusticiano believed them to be tall stories and fictional romances such as he himself sometimes wrote.
In their odd hours for a little less than a year, Marco dictated and Rusticiano wrote. They used a French-Italian pidgin or lingo that was then common to international merchants as well as to mercenary soldiers and sailors. This was the ‘Italian’ that was still used in the Turkish navy until World War One.
The book thus produced was a success and was soon circulating in hundreds of manuscripts. Its first name was Il Milione (million); the exuberance of it could be expressed only by this largest number known to the common people; and Marco Polo acquired the nickname of ‘Marco Millions’ throughout Italy and France and England.
But the ‘missing adventures’ are not to be found in the earliest versions of Il Milione any more than they are in the latest editions of The Adventures of Marco Polo. Nor, for that matter, are they to be found in the known fantastic romances of Rusticiano.
Then I heard rumors of an old manuscript named The Romance of the Stone Balloons written by Emilone Rusticanus, which name might be translated as Big Emil the Rustic. But Emilone was certainly an echo of Il Milione the first title of the Marco Polo book; and Rusticianus was certainly an echo of Rusticiano. If Rusticiano had filched this romance out of Macro's dictating, the pseudonym tied in well.
I began to look for a copy of The Romance of the Stone Balloons. It took me thirty years to find it. Early in my search I was sure that I was on the right track when I found the first sentence of the Stone Balloons (in the fourteenth century, cataloging of manuscripts used often to give the first sentence of a work in addition to the title, because works sometimes had different titles to the different manuscript versions). And the first sentence of The Romance of the Stone Balloons was:
“It was when we came within one day's travel of Lop that we began to see two sorts of people in greater numbers; Sea Captains, and People of the Third Eye.”
But Lop was in The Travels of Marco Polo. Lop was at the end of Turkestan and at the beginning of Cathay and the Great Desert of Cathay. And chapter thirty-nine of book one of the Travels, the chapter that mentions Lop, is one of those narrations which is pointless and too short, one of those narrations which cries out the absence of substantial material.
After a thirty year search I did find a copy of Romance of the Stone Balloons, in a castle on a hill above a small town in Albania. The shoemaker in that town was also the notary; and in addition he rented out various little machines by the hour. From him I rented an Albanian typewriter (which, as you know, has no Q or M) for an hour, carried it up the hill where the Balloon manuscript reposed, made a good type-copy of it, hurried back down the hill with the typewriter, and completed the whole transaction in fifty-eight minutes. The shoemaker had to take my word for it that I was on time; he had just rented his only clock out for a half hour.
Here, translated from the old French-Italian pidgin, is the text of The Romance of The Stone Balloons by Emilione Rusticanus or Big Emil the Rustic.
“It was when we came within one day's travel of Lop that we began to see two sorts of people in greater numbers; Sea Captains, and People of the Third Eye. I myself thought it unusual that there should be so many captains in this neighborhood when Lop is perhaps furthest from any Sea or Ocean of any town in the world. “One of the sea captains explained to me that he was indeed such, but that the sea he sailed was the sea of the air and of the upper air and of the empyrean which is still higher than the upper air. This sea captain was one of the People of the Third Eye, as were at least half of the sea captains on the road that day. ‘I see that you have three dromedaries, twenty-two asses, and nine she-asses loaded with bales of merchandise,’ he said to me. ‘You will not find good market for it in Lop, and you will not want to cross the desert so heavily laden. But come with me tomorrow to our sky-port and you will be able to trade it with great profit to everyone. I myself will surely take parts of it, and other captains will take other parts. We trade for everything. ‘How far from Lop is this sky-port?’ I asked him. ‘Six leagues from Lop, a short day's journey across the Leapers Plain,’ he said. ‘I am the captain of a ship of the sort commonly called ‘stone balloon’, and you might want to go on a short journey with me in my vessel. Whenever we come to port here I like to take several days leisure and go to the dromedary races and other local entertainments. It is so rustic here in these boondocks.’
“We came into the town of Lop at sundown. I unloaded my animals to give them rest, and watered them and gave them hay. The sea captain put little pellets into the hay I gave them. Lop was a busy little trade town but it had the air of being only — ‘Yes, of being only a suburb of a more important place,’ the sea captain said as if he read my feelings, ‘for it is really only a suburb of a space-port.’ ‘How many of these space-ports or sky-ports are there in the world?’ I asked. ‘Only three others on this world,’ the sea
captain said, ‘and two on the moon, one each on Mercury and Venus (stifling places those!), others on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, and very many space-ports on more distant worlds. My own home port is on one of the Trader planets. We can eat supper here in Lop and by that time it will be moonrise and we will go to Sky-Port by moonlight. I have put pellets into the hay your animals are eating and these will revivify them and take their weariness away. You can buy Leapers Shoes here in Lop, two for yourself and four for your riding donkey. These will provide a sort of boyish amusement for you, and I see that you are really still a boy. The ground around Space-Port is saturated with anti-geodic force which leaks from our balloons. This gives a bounciness to those who wear leapers shoes that are made of an alloy that is one part iron and nine parts of the metal that is called ‘chamron’ by the Jews and ‘Al-Aminyoum’ by the Arabs.’ We had supper. Then I bought leapers shoes and put two of them on my own feet and four of them on the feet of my riding donkey. I loaded my animals again, and they were very lively and had not a trace of travel weariness left. We set out by moonlight over the six league road from Lop to Sky-Port.
“As we came near to Sky-Port, I felt the anti-geodic force very strongly. My riding donkey went high into the air at every stride, and its strides were ten times as long as usual. I dismounted then, and I went leaping and striding along the road with each step of mine being twenty times my own length. It is very pleasurable to stride along a ground that is saturated with anti-geodic force. There were huge spheres hovering above the earth ahead of us, spheres that the moonlight shined clear through somehow. ‘Are those great spheres that I see the vessels that are called the stone balloons?’ I asked the sea captain. ‘Yes, they are called the stone balloons.’ the sea captain said. ‘It is an old code name. They are really made of the most sophisticated of metals. And you do not see them, since you do not have the third eye. You see only the shadows and auras of them. But with practice that is nearly as good. Even many of the captains of these balloons are not third eye people and so cannot properly see them. Here is a nice space just below several of the hovering balloons. Unload and trade.’
“I unloaded my bales and traded with various persons (some of them three-eyed, some of them two-eyed) from the balloons. ‘Oh, here's linens from Flanders,’ one of the balloon persons said. ‘I know a world where there is good market for such quaint things.’ And other traders found other bales of my merchandise interesting or quaint. They paid me mostly in gold and jewels, and when all my bales were gone I found myself a thousand times as rich as I had been before, even though all the gold and jewels that I had acquired could now be carried by only half of my animals.
“The sea captain of my first acquaintance then took me for a ride in his balloon which was like a shadow to me from the outside but was bright and completely visible and solid on the inside. ‘It will have to be a short voyage, probably to the moon only,’ I said to the captain, ‘for my father and my uncle will arrive in Lop in the morning and I am supposed to meet them there.’ ‘All the voyages, whether to the moon or to worlds ten million times more distant, take about the same time to complete,’ the sea captain said. ‘When you use anti-geodetic force for propulsion, all places are equally close, all places are really only ‘six leagues from Lop’. Come. It is a great enjoyment if you have not traveled to far places before!’
“We rose in the ‘balloon’ rapidly, and still more rapidly. We seemed to be heading towards the bright moon. Then the bright moon paled as we came into bright sunshine (sunshine at midnight); and the sun in its turn paled as we left it far behind us. After passing many stars we came into the area of another star-sun and watched it grow very bright as we neared it. We selected a mote-of-dust-sized planet of that sun and watched it grow into a world. And we came down on that world. The sea captain said that it was one of the Trader Planets, and he told me its name, but the vocables of its name were more than I could master. We descended from the ‘balloon’ to the sky-port there.
“The marvels of this sky-port on this Trader Planet are more than I can describe. There were giant merchandise fairs. There were buildings more than fifty stages high. There were vehicles that ran along the roads by fractured anti-geodic force. There were theatrical and musical pleasures everywhere. There were eating and drinking and carousing pleasures. The sea captain took me to the money mart, the center of financial speculations and investments. When we got there, there was a recess in the activities. Machines were sweeping the mart clean from the dropped money that had piled up knee-deep on the floors when the people had been too busy with their transactions to pick up what they had dropped. The money was pushed out of the great doors and into an open area where it was piled up like a mountain. The poor people were urged to come and take away all of it that they could carry. ‘It does not matter that they are prodigal people and will spend it foolishly and be poor again within six hours time,’ the sea captain said. ‘In seven hours there will be another clean-out hour, and once more the poor people can come and pick up all the money they want. Nobody needs to be poor for very long on this planet.’
“There was a section of Sky-Port town where there were girls and woman and lads and men who—”
(There followed in the text an interval of exceptionally ruddy pornography. It was not at all in the style of Marco Polo. I believe that it is added gratuitously by that plagiarizing scribe Big Emil the Rustic. Since this pornography would be of no possible interest to anyone, I did not transcribe it. The text continues—)
“There seemed to be no end to the marvels of Sky-Port Town, but there had to be an end to my visit there. I entered the ship captain's balloon again, and the captain took me back to my own world and to the Sky-Port that is ‘Six Leagues from Lop’. When I left the balloon I took my animals, only half of them loaded now (but with what wealth they were loaded!) and made my way back to Lop. I went quickly, aided for the first three leagues of the journey by my leaper shoes on the earth that was saturated by anti-geodic force. I arrived in Lop still quite early in the morning and met my father and uncle there. They were amazed by the wealth that I had acquired. They could hardly believe it when they saw whole dromedary loads of finest diamonds, and other dromedary and ass-loads of other costly jewels and gold. They thought that their eyes deceived them. So we loaded my other animals, and those of my father and uncle also, with provisions and food and emergency water, and started across the Great Desert of Cathay.”
There it is, The Romance of the Stone Balloons, (which were made of highly sophisticated metal and not of stone at all). This is the text recovered after being lost for seven hundred years. I believed that the narration had been plagiarized from Marco Polo by the scribe Big Emil. I believed that, being by Marco, it was a true account and not a romance. So there had been, seven hundred years ago, space flight between earth and many other worlds. It had been based on anti-grav (anti-geodic) force. The traffic had been only partly in the control of gracious three-eyed aliens. There had also been two-eyed humans engaged in it. It was a good thing, and so it had not been open to everyone. And yet it seemed to have been pretty open.
How was it now, seven hundred years later? I determined to find out. I raised what money I could and started off for Lop. I guessed correctly that Lop was a small Gobi Desert oasis presently called Lo-Pu Po by the Chinese. I went there. It was a small place, and I did not immediately see evidence of what I was seeking. I visited the markets and shops. Then, in a dark corner of a dark shop (to which corner, however, my eyes were somehow immediately drawn) I saw what could only be a pair of metallic leapers shoes, covered with heavy cobwebs.
“How much for those, whatever they are?” I asked the old merchant.
“Twenty dollars American,” the merchant said, “and I don't know what they are either.” He brushed the heavy cobwebs off them and took them out of that dark corner and sold them to me. I put them on my feet and went out of that shop in good spirits. My leaping shoes were already telling me which way to go.
> “Tourist, you've been had!” a woman outside the shop told me. “Those aren't ancient leapers shoes. They are cheap iron shoes made no more than two hundred years ago. They are made to sell to gullible tourists. If you look back into the shop now you will see that the merchant has already set another pair in that pseudo-obscure corner and has whistled for his pet spider to come and spin more webs over them. For twenty dollars American you could have got a pair of genuine imitation modern American cowboy boots.”
“I am satisfied,” I said. “The metal shoes are telling me where to go.”
“They will lead you out to Six League Town and they will corrupt you with money there,” the women said.
They did lead me out to Sky-Port. They took me there striding along with longer and longer strides as I came nearer to the port. Oh, it was not a grand place, but there were half a dozen of the big spheres hanging over it (perhaps it was only their shadows that I saw). And there were pleasant-looking people who seemed to be trading and confabbing in a green grove.
But there was a woman in my way there. She looked at me pleasantly enough out of her two pleasant eyes. But she seemed to look balefully from her third eye.
“Lutfen saat kac?” she asked me. What should I answer? What kind of trap was this? Well, when in doubt the best thing is to tell the simple truth.
“Saat yediye bes kala,” I said with as much assurance as I could muster.
Well, what would you have said?
The three-eyed woman wandered off.
“Come trade with us,” a pleasant three-eyed man called from the green grove.
I went to them, and then I had a horrible sinking feeling. I was stony broke. The twenty dollars American I had paid for my leapers shoes was the last money I had in the world. I had nothing to trade, and I told them so.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 291
