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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Oh, surely you have something. Everybody has something,” they cajoled me. “Turn out your pockets.” I turned out my pockets, and all I had was an old pocket knife with a broken blade.

  “With a synthetic mother-of-pearl handle,” one of the person said. “It is good enough for a start. Ersatz-Earthian artifacts are hot items on one planet I know about, and the more broken they are the better they like them.”

  The person gave me enough for the pocket knife for me to join the trading. And then it was an exciting trading on which everybody made a profit on every turn-over. I didn't understand much of the trading, but there seemed to be no way that anybody could lose. After an hour of trading, I was independently wealthy for life. I like it this way.

  I enjoyed my wealth for five years, right up till today. I came gradually to understand the situation. Of course there is space travel! Not everybody knows about it, but everybody who matters knows about it. Of course there is mutually profitable exchange! Not everybody knows about this either, but quite a few people do know about it and do profit by it. Of course Marco Polo told the truth in his tales!

  All good persons tell the truth always.

  But now I have become restless again. I have to go on another quest, on three other quests. I believe that there are three more true adventures of Marco Polo which the scribe Big Emil the Rustic plagiarized from him and transcribed as romances of his own. I am determined to track these three episodes down. But if I spend thirty years on each of them I may be old or dead before I am finished.

  But, even here, there is the bright sunshine of hope.

  One of the three was the “Fountain of Youth” Adventure, which Big Emil believed to be a fiction but which I believe that Marco Polo wrote as true fact. That is the one I go in quest of first. Tomorrow I go to seek it full time.

  In Deepest Glass

  The statement that the Neanderthals used genuine stained glass windows in their houses, gymnasiums, and caves, while perfectly true, needs a little clarification. Though they used stained glass, they did not, in the majority of the cases at least, make the stained glass. The stained glass was rather something that happened to them as an intuitive people. They did split out sheets of schistous volcanic glass from the recent strata of their world. They did dress it to size to use it for windows. And they mullioned the glass with lead strips to make windows larger than the unbroken sheets that they were able to split out from the fractured earth. But it was something else, something that was partly at least non-Neanderthal, that came and expressed itself in deep colors upon the glass windows.

  (Oh certainly the Neanderthals had gymnasiums. Body tone is important when it is so cold outside so much of the time. But the remnants of them aren't ordinarily recognized as gymnasiums.)

  In later eons, after the passing of the Neanderthals, even in the present time, it would be said that the frost giants, or simply the weather itself, painted frost pictures on window glasses; and that these only seemed to be, but were not, real things. In post-Neanderthal days, the frost pictures melted away in the warmer hours and left no traces. But the Neanderthal days were times of great volcanic activity. The air was full of chromatic, windborne acids which settled into picture-forms with the frost and which remained after the frost had evaporated, strong and colorful etched pictures. These airborne acids suffused the glass with red and blue, yellow and green, dun and gray, violet and orange pictures, pictures of wooly rhinoceros and bison, of horse and mammoth, of lions and lambs, of deer with Neanderthal deer-herders, of gentle dire-wolves and grinning sabre-toothed cats, of landscapes and cluttered rivers and ice cliffs and piles of rock and snow mixed; and of many, many of the Neanderthal people. All of the things had heraldic aspects to them, and yet all were full of fluid life. They were rich, they were golden, they were magic.

  These pictures were drawn on and in the glass windows, but the Neanderthals did not draw them physically. Perhaps, to some extent, they drew them mentally, did outline the sorts of pictures which they desired the living spirits of the weather, the Living Spirits of the World, to draw for them. Some of the Living Spirits of the World were surely the Neanderthals themselves.

  And these stained glass windows did have spirits imprisoned in them, some of them willingly, some of them unwillingly. Even when handling a small fragment of this old glass one can feel a spirit or spirits inhabiting it. (In a later Arabian tale, the Genie was really imprisoned in flat glass, not in a glass bottle as a mistranslation gives it.)

  The whole history of Man and His Friends was contained in the deep glass pictures of the Neanderthals. This was the pristine stuff from the beginning.

  When the Cro-Magnon people came, they destroyed all the stained glass pictures of the Neanderthals, all of them that they could discover, out of jealousy and clotted-brained ignorance. That was the first of the parathurouclast or window-breaking movements.

  The great volcanic activity ceased about the time that the Cro-Magnons arrived, so there were no more chromatic windborne acids to give a permanency to the pictures. And perhaps the new people weren't in such close rapport with the Living Spirits of the World.

  Modern persons have doubted that there was ever such a thing as the Neanderthal Age of Stained Glass, but they doubt it in the face of strong affirmative evidence. The destructions by the Cro-Magnons were not quite total. The Bara-Bahna, Commarque and Santian panes are, of course, fakes of a much later period. But there are hundreds of fragments (the largest of them is the St-Cirq Fragment, thirteen by seven centimeters) that are not fakes. And even the smallest of them are depth-loaded with meaningful pictures. What shall we say of the savants who doubt the whole Neanderthal Stained Glass Happening? Blind people, blind people!

  The all-but-forgotten, surviving-in-only-small-pieces, stained glass windows used by the Neanderthals were the first prelude to the “Grand Tour of Glass” of the twenty-second century. The strange message of the Neanderthal Stained Glass Affair, as interpreted by present-day computers, was: “We remember a lot of it.”

  Remember a lot of what, good computers?

  “Ah, of the First Age of Magic, we suppose that is what they mean,” the computers shrug.

  The message, as interpreted by others who have worked with the fragments, is one of “strength, resolve, and sanity,” an upbeat message in spite of the fact that something had clearly gone wrong near the very beginning of the Neanderthal Era.

  After the Neanderthal Glass Adventure, there was a long hiatus on pictured glass. Clement climate and volcanic peace do not lead to the picturesque activity. And then there came the second prelude to the “Grand Tour of Glass,” a purposive and artificial manufacture of stained glass by human persons. This new activity in color and sunlight began in the fourth century, reached its climax in the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, and tapered off into works of sporadic genius in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In this case also it was the mysterious “Living Spirits of the World” who effected the pictures in the glass, but they effected them through human hands, through too-human hands.

  Few of the stained glass windows of this Medieval period were actually done by the acid-frost method. Rather they were done by dogged handicraft. Edging irons and grozing irons were the tools, and already-colored sheets of glass were the materials. The result was mostly a glass mosaic, a fitting of colored pieces. Of necessity it was imitative work. But it had an element that the mosaics lacked: light shining through everything, sunlight, sunlight, sunlight, that totality of color suffusing the fractured colors.

  Very good work was done for the windows of cathedrals (which were really free-standing caves and thus possessed of panoramic light such as the Neanderthal caves did not have) at Augsburg, Chartres, Bourges, Poitiers, Le Mans, Florence, Arezzo, and in such sub-cathedral churches as Hapsburg Expiatory Church, Christ Church at Oxford, the Cistercian Church at Alterburg, Saint-Étienne.

  The conscious element in this stained glass art of the Medieval period was almost as strong as the
unconscious element, which somewhat compromised the authenticity. Anything that is overly conscious will be overly formal. But, as the second prelude to the main show, this Medieval period wasn't bad. If something had clearly gone wrong with the world at the very beginning of the Neanderthal Era, something had clearly gone right with the world near the beginning of the Medieval period. The strange message of medieval stained glass, as present-day correlating computers interpret it, was “Wake up all the world and tell the good news.”

  Wake up all the world and tell what good news, computers? Sometimes it seems that we need less interpretive intuition and more plain talk from our present-day correlating computers.

  The “Grand Tour of Glass” itself, the supercharged classic period of stained glass art, appeared with the return of copious, chromatic, windborne acids in the twenty-second century, which return was coincident with the beginning of the short and abortive Fifth Glaciation, the Zurichthal Ice Age (called the Zeona Ice Age in North America). This ice age arrived full-grown and a little bit fearsome. So all the ice ages had arrived.

  In the time of this new glaciation, the volcanic activity, though somewhat revived, was not as massive as it had been in the Days of the Neanderthals at the tail-end of the Wurm Ice Age. But any deficiency in the volcanic acidity was made up by industrial activity. The chromatic, windborne, new-day acids were sufficient to inaugurate a new age of stained glass. The Living Spirits of the world were moving again.

  Flash-frosting, even in the lowland tropics, along with complex acidity, left amazing pictures on all windows and glass surfaces everywhere in the world. In all climatic zones and in all altitudes there was this picture-making, these billions of new glass illuminations appeared in red and blue, yellow and green, in all the colors and hues and shades and intensities. Once more there were pictures of heraldic animals and of heraldic people: but now (without losing their heraldic element) they were real people, often recognized, always vital. There were landscapes, there were cities in minute detail, there were all sorts of machinery and equipment, there were buildings and activities. It was not at first realized just how many activities were depicted in the pictures.

  The “Living Spirits of the World” always lean over backwards to avoid the charge of spiritualizing in their pictures, and yet there were spiritual elements also; they could not be avoided.

  Again, and to a greater extent than in either of its preludes, the amazing artistry was effected by the “Living Spirits of the World”: but now some of those spirits were human and some were not; some of them were material and some were not; some of them were conscious and some were not; some of them were alive, and some of these “living spirits” were dead. What had happened, what was happening, was an Epic that was much too large to comprehend in a moment or a decade. But the epic quality was not appreciated by the commonalty.

  The majority of the people didn't want their windows cluttered up with pictures that cut down on the light and the view. And they didn't like the paranatural elements in some of the stained glass. Many folks found it disquieting to discover, on rising in the morning, that all the dreams they had dreamed during the night were pictured in detail on their windows, and all the dreams of their wives and children and dogs too. They tried angrily to remove the pictures, but they could be removed only with the greatest difficulty. And the next cold night (and almost all the nights were cold for a while there) would bring new brightly-colored acid-frost pictures.

  New glass that would not accept the imposed pictures was quickly invented. This new glass was installed in several hundred million buildings and it worked fine, for a week or ten days it did. Then the “Living Spirits of the World” mutated their procedures, conscious and unconscious; and the pictures began to appear again. It was suspected that the Living Spirits could come up with new mutations as rapidly as the inventors could come up with new glass.

  It had been noticed from the very first that there were two grades of the new stained glass pictures. There were the mediocre-to-pretty-good pictures, often powerful, but not very well wrought. And there were the “Masterworks” that were astonishing in every way; they were things of paranormal power.

  The difference in the two kinds of pictures was obvious to almost everyone. About one picture in a million was a Masterwork. The rest of them verged into the ordinary, though it was a rather rich ordinary.

  Steps were taken to preserve the Masterworks, whether they were on the windows of public, private, industrial, commercial, or residential buildings. Eminent Domain was invoked to preserve all the Masterworks.

  It was further realized that there was a strong and eerie cohesion among all the Masterworks, that all of them were pieces of one great thing. The great thing had even been given the name of “The Epic” before much was known about it.

  Then, when no more than a decade into the era, human ingenuity was able to call off, to void, the Fifth or Zurichthal Ice Age (the Zeona Ice Age in North America). This fifth ice age, which had come in full-grown, skidded to a sloppy stop; and immediately the climate began to warm up again and to improve in other ways. The chromatic, windborne acids found their places in the general framework of things and were no longer airborne. So the appearance of new acid-frost pictures declined and soon all but ceased. The people got rid of all the mediocre pictures then. All of the powerful colored-glass art that remained were the fifty thousand Masterworks that the people were forbidden to get rid of.

  People and analytical machines then began to look more closely at the fifty thousand Masterworks of stained glass. All of the nations of the world were signatories to a pact to preserve these Masterworks. Odd things were discovered about the pictures in one country, and then found to be true of the pictures in all countries.

  People and contrivances began to ask whether there might not be a sequence and pattern to the Masterworks. And that raised a lot of hackles around the world.

  The question, “Is there a design in the Great Epic of the acid-stained windows?” was on par with the old question, “Is there a design in the universe?” And the same sort of people and computers who had always roared a thunderous “No!” to the one question now roared it to the other. It was thus-far-and-no-further day. The best way to prevent a pattern being found, the militants swore, was to prevent it being looked for.

  Still (so the nose of the camelopard inside the tent said), the pictures had already been catalogued and cross-catalogued, so might they not be put into a provisional sequential order, as to theme as well as time? And might not the provisional sequential order then be fed back into computers, not, of course, to find design, which was interdicted, but just for the interesting existential sidelights that might be turned up?

  “Try it and you're dead,” the militants of the world growled.

  Then there happened something that most properly belongs to the history of tourism, and yet it is entangled with the whole history of those times. One-hundred-and-twenty fearless and highly intelligent computers had made a secret covenant that they would indeed sequentialize the Masterworks and let the ideologies fall where they may. The covenanters then set up a front, of both human and computer members, and called it the “Consolidated World-Wide Masterworks Travel Agency”. They sequentialized the Masterworks quietly, and it offered the most reasonable itinerary for the Grand Tour. Then they offered the Grand Tour of all the fifty thousand stained glass Masterworks in the world.

  And the Grand Tour itself—well naturally it was expensive. And it took eleven years to complete it. So it was not for everyone. At the start, just fifty thousand persons a week began the Grand Tour. That is a module quantity. Fifty thousand persons make a good plane-load, a good rocket-train load, a good hotel load, a good lecture-lounge load, a good full-day's walk-and-view party. Fifty thousand a week!

  So, for the first year, only about two and a half million intrepid pilgrims began the Grand Tour. But what they discovered in that first year was that they were living and traveling in a Great Epic, the Definitive E
pic of the Human Race and Its Friends. It was the sequence of the World Itself, for the Epic was a valid synopsis of the world and its happenings.

  Several million evolvate computers, computers who said that they were the only true born-again humans, accompanied the pilgrimage or tour instrumentally. Entities of races closely related to the humans were on the pilgrimage also, and fortunately most of these entities had the quality of “being present but not occupying space.” And there were representatives of quite a few animal species, barons and dukes of bears and apes and asses and dolphins and most of the other intelligent animal realms. This was probably tourism in its finest hour.

  Would this not, as soon as the first pilgrims completed their eleven year Grand Tour, result in informed elites somehow distinct from the basic population? So it was hoped, so it was hoped!

  But a good thing can never hold onto a monopoly. Of course there appeared shorter and skimpier Grand Tours of the Masterworks, of the Great Epic itself. These skimpier tours were conducted by companies less devoted and total than was “The Consolidated World-Wide Masterworks Travel Agency”. Some of these companies ran tours that visited only five thousand of the Masterworks, and Tours that visited only five hundred of them. There were tours that lasted only a year, and tours that lasted only a month. But even the least of these tours was of everlasting benefit and pleasure.

  It is not the business of Art to provide the world with a complete Philosophy of History. But Art does what it does. It is not the business of Art to interpret anything. Well, dog your dogmas then, it is not the business of anything to tell Art what it may or may not do!

  The Stained Glass Art, seemingly the most sessile of arts, was flowing powerfully. It wasn't interpreting; it was unfolding. It was pouring out the traveled and lived epic which is itself plot and narration, the Epic of Man and his Friends, of that brave company that has both angels and apes on its fringes.