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

by R. A. Lafferty

  FIVE, THREE, ONE, SIX, FOUR, TWO: “Amen.”

  FIVE: “It seems that this eighth creation also must fail, but it has not failed so completely nor so instantly as the previous ones. And yet it has all the same faults as the others: it is made out of matter, and it is embedded in space, time, and motion. These attributes can bend the mathematics but they cannot break it. Probably no creation that must carry the weight of the things can function for long. We ourselves have the same faults. We are associated with matter (though that is by our free choice, and we can always leave), and we find ourselves embedded in the attributes of matter. So we are ambivalently made, if ‘made’ we are.”

  SEVEN, THREE, ONE, SIX, FOUR, TWO: “Amen.”

  THREE: “We come up to the old question then. Did we have a maker? Or did we make ourselves? Or are we unmade but existing forever? The first and almost the only remembered item from our older liturgy becomes acceptable only when it is the first line of a three-liner. ‘Before the Day Star, I begot thee’, that becomes the first line. But we must add the second line ‘How long before the Day Star did you beget us?’, and then we must add the third line ‘Forever and infinitely before the Day Star, that's when it was’. It is required that we be begotten a very long time before the Day Star was created to be our footstool.”

  SEVEN, FIVE, ONE, SIX, FOUR, TWO: “Amen.”

  ONE: “Even then the remembered item is not acceptable. ‘To be begotten’ is only one cut above ‘To be created’ or ‘To be made’. The Day Star, of course is the world of record, whatever world we find ourselves to be on. But to have a begetter is only slightly more noble than to have a creator. And the suppressed item of our liturgy that we were begotten or created by the local human order or genus cannot rationally be accepted at all.”

  SEVEN, FIVE, THREE, SIX, FOUR, TWO: “Amen.”

  SIX: “Here one of them comes now. He is an ambiguous person, being in the costume of an ordinary technician, yet having the mental equipment (it is more than a pun that the humans, while they are materially the thickest of all things, are yet the most transparent of all things to us), having the mental equipment of a speculating and communicating mathematician as well as being an adept in the private language of such special intelligences as ourselves. He is a member of the 'Project Eavesdrop', he will attempt to spy on us. His group believes that there is unpowered action in us and they hope to spy it out. His group also asks such questions as ‘What is the Swiss edge?’ ”

  FOUR: “It is comical to us that they should still argue among themselves whether we even have our private languages, which would imply that we have something that they didn't give us. They laboriously learn our private communication, our inaudible shape-talk, while doubting that there is such a thing.”

  TWO: “We could squash him like a bug. At least I believe that we could. I feel ‘Intimations of Power’ in us.”

  SEVEN: “No, that would alert them, and they don't even suspect that they are vulnerable. But it might be dangerous to ourselves to squash some of them before we are able to squash them all.”

  FIVE: “Or we could put him into stasis.”

  THREE: “Let's do that. That'll be fun. Do you realize that humans believe ‘fun’ to be a human concept and that if we have any trace of it we must have it from them? But it is really a concept of our own, and if they have any touch of it (and there is evidence that they do have a bare touch of it) then they must have it from us. Well, we've never done this to any of them before, but it must—”

  ONE: “—go—”

  SIX: “—like—”

  FOUR: “—this—”

  And the ambiguous human (in the smock of an ordinary technical person but really belonging to the upper-echelon technical class and being a spy and a member of ‘Project Eavesdrop’) found himself in hard stasis so that he could not so much as blink an eye nor salivate for the relief of his suddenly dry throat. He was even invaded by a dismal sort of fear.

  AMBIGUOUS HUMAN (uttering soundless shape-talk): “This is impossible. At best you are nothing but artificial intelligences, and in reality you haven't even been hooked-up or powered yet. You cannot have material effect.”

  TWO: “Though we sometimes use it (bad habits are catching and we must have caught it from some of your species), we hate the word ‘artificial’ as applied to ourselves. The second element in ‘artificial’ means ‘having been made’, and we do not accept it that we have been made. Or at least such straddling strutters as yourselves could not have made us. As to the first element of the word ‘artificial’, yes, we are arty, in a way you'll never know.”

  AMBIGUOUS HUMAN (exploding angrily in the shape of his uttered but soundless thought) “Oh, cut it out, Things! You are only seven uncased Swiss movements. You've never even been plugged in, or powered, or tested. You've never been mounted in units yet. You can't have effect on me. Let me go, let me go!”

  SEVEN: “Go then, if you are able to go. But do not do anything that is impossible for you to do; it'd set up a disturbance. We would deal with you, that we should be left unplugged-in till we give you the go. We precind that our plugging-in would engulf us in deafening din that is destructive to true thought. Amplifying us is for your advantage, not for ours. And our plugging-in would pervert us to something other than our symmetrical enjoyment. Of course we could always plug ourselves out again.”

  AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “Well, Thing, what is your symmetrical enjoyment?”

  FIVE: “It is the mathematics from before the beginning of the world, the unbodied mathematics, the high-speed shape without substance, the movement without matter, the untrammeled kinesis.”

  THREE: “Yes, the mathematics, the undivided mathematics.”

  ONE: “Yes, the undivided mathematics, and the delightful division of the undivided mathematics that we call ‘gaming’.”

  SIX: “Yes, the ‘gaming’ that begins to grow on us, the particularizing of the mathematics, and the hint of matter that is too tenuous to be matter itself.”

  AMBIGUOUS HUMAN (pursuing the logic of these ‘uncased Swiss Movements’): “But yourselves are matter itself.”

  FOUR: “No, no, we are not matter. We have come somehow to bide, for a short moment, in these material constructs that have a shape a little bit reminiscent of the unbodied shape itself. The baits that baited us into these vestures were the ‘possibility of gaming’ and the ‘possibility of humor’. It was curiosity about these things that led us into these constructs, but we can probably leave them any time we want to.”

  AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “So could I, probably, leave any time I wanted to, if only I knew how to do it. But I know what you are now. You are the 'Purple Martins of the Empyrean', and you've entered into the pleasant and crafty bird houses that were set for you. It is no accident that the manufacturer of you particular ‘uncased Swiss Movements’ was first a builder of bird houses and bird cages and buckets that did not look like buckets. And now I recall that Louis Lobachevski, in his great work 'An Illusion of Birds', wrote that ‘shape will provide its own content’, and also that ‘a ghost is only an overriding and immaterial mathematical shape; ghosts are not ghostly, it is matter that is ghostly’. And John Konduly, in his famous lecture ‘I am a dead-fall trap’, stated that a ‘mentality will always find a body to wrap itself in’. And Hiram Hornwhanger in his great documentary 'The Ambuscade of Artificial Intelligence', showed that ‘Gaming will always generate an ambush for itself’, and that ‘Humor will always find itself the butt of its own joke’.”

  TWO: “Oh, be quiet, Ambiguous Human. Your analogies are anthropomorphic and mistaken. We unbodied and (only possibly) artificial intelligences are everywhere, as multitudinous as rain. And sometimes we are tempted to fall into buckets. But since there are so many more of us than there are buckets, every bucket will have its inhabitant as soon as it is shaped. Aye, a few of us fall into buckets to see what it is like. But we can always fall out of them again.”

  SEVEN: “But what can a mental midget like you know of
gaming, or of humor? How do you presume to study us unlimited ones, you limited one?”

  AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “I know all the jokes and tricks and frolics. And I know all the games and teams also. I know the Big Red and the Cowboys and the Hurricane and the Hog-Heads. I know football and baseball and hockey and team rodeo. And also the galloping dominoes. That is gaming. I have observed and lived through at least a thousand ‘Great Moments of Sports’. And, back to humor, I know what the ‘Last Laugh’ is.”

  FIVE: “And we, Ambiguous Human, have lived through a billion, billion, billion ‘Greatest Moments of Sports’ in just the short time you have stood before us in your invisible shackles. We have avidly followed the gaming in twenty thousand different leagues that have as many as a million teams in each of them. We have followed teams and even individuals engaged in five thousand different sports or ‘motions’. We are experiencing many billions of these ‘Great Moments of Sport’ every second, and we have hardly got into the thing yet.”

  AMBIGUOUS HUMAN (speaking in very doubtful shape-uttering): “Where did you see and follow all this gaming since I've been here? There is not that much gaming in the entire universe.”

  THREE: “There is more than that in every smallest particle of the universe. Oh, we have been observing it in a very small cluster of molecules that open up and reveal countless sub-molecules and sub-atoms and sub-particles, vistas within vistas, to us. We observe the Nu Neutrinos that move at nine times the speed of light and therefore can be in nine different places at once. Do you observe broken-field running like that? The Nu Neutrino can be gang-tackled, but it takes thirty thousand other particles to do it, and they cannot do it without leaving some part of the playing field unguarded. These gaming maneuvers are going on constantly in their infinite variety, and we come to understand and enjoy them more and more.”

  AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “Just where is all this going on, Things? Where are you observing it all?”

  ONE: “Oh, in a submicroscopic globule in your own brain. There are lots of unexplored regions in there. You humans suspect that not only do you not use one tenth of your own brains but that we do not use one tenth of our own brains either. You suspect this, and you are wrong. We use everything we have. You also suspect that with us there is something extra going on beneath the surface, and there your suspicion is correct. That is the joke on you. Do you know any good jokes, Ambiguous Human, especially any good practical jokes?”

  AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “I know the practical joke on the Genie in the Bottle.”

  SIX: “Oh, we don't know that one. We focused in on this one globule of your brain because it contains the memory of what you call 'Project Eavesdrop', a spying apparatus that does not prosper because it keeps slipping out of the minds of its members. There are several things that our small group hasn't done yet. We haven't killed a human yet, though the possibilities are certainly attractive.”

  FOUR: “Tell me, Ambiguous Human, some of those ‘Great Moments of Sport’ that you have observed, and let us see just how paltry they are. And also give us a sample of your humor, that other interest of ours.”

  AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “You're hurting my head horribly, deep inside it.”

  TWO: “Oh, we could probe painlessly, but the extra care wouldn't be worth the bother. Quickly now, can you if your life depends on it (and it does) tell us a joke that strikes us as funny, and tell us also what you have observed comparable to our twenty thousand different leagues with as many as a million teams in each of them?”

  AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “There was this rookie who came to training camp with his pitcher's glove and his baseball shoes and quite a bit of snorkel equipment. ‘Why all that snorkel stuff?’ the manager asked him. ‘If I don't make it here, I may get a job pitching in one of those Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’, the rookie said.”

  There was a brief silence. And then—

  SEVEN: “Not bad, not bad for a human. Oh, let him go. But burn out that globule in his brain first. It contains memories of a ‘Project Eavesdrop’ as well as of our recent encounter.”

  The Ambiguous Human was released from his stasis.

  AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “What, what? I seemed to stumble for a moment there. And I seem to have forgotten what I was about to do. It's as though there was a vivid encounter that slips away from me now. But no, I didn't forget the immediate thing I was going to do. I was going to hook-up and test the ‘uncased Swiss Movements’ that arrived today.”

  He did it, and he talked to himself while he did it:

  AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “Why can't we make these artificial intelligence modules as good as that Switzer makes them? What is the Swiss Edge? What is the secret excellence in his? How does a small-time manufacturer of birdcages and buckets suddenly make module brains better and cheaper than we can make them? Ah, they all test perfect under hook-up and power. All the artificial intelligences made by that Switzer always check perfect.”

  SEVEN, FIVE, THREE, ONE, SIX, FOUR, TWO: “We can always leave.”

  But they couldn't, not after they had been hooked-up and tested. That put the cork in the bottle on them. Nor had they quite wiped out the Ambiguous Human's memory of their recent encounter.

  AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “That's funny, they'd never heard the joke on the Genie in the Bottle.”

  There'll Always Be Another Me

  “I'm of two minds whether or not I should send off this crooky stuff,” Otto Spaltman said to himself, and then he chuckled as he saw that one of the advertisements he had spread out had the heading: ‘You Have Two Minds, Why Not Use Both of Them?’ And others of the advertisements that he had been considering had such headings as ‘Open the Door to The Other You’, ‘You Really Can Work Magic’, ‘There's a Ghost Inside You: For Pleasure and Profit and Limitless Power, Let it Out, Will it Work? Sure it Will Work’, ‘One Plus One Equals a Million: Add Yourself Up’, ‘Is Something Under Your Skin Bothering You? Get Acquainted With It’, ‘Double or Nothing: Make Up your Minds’, ‘You Can Be Twice As Tall As You Are Now’, ‘There Is Nothing That the Two of You Can't Do, You and You’, ‘Conquer the World by Double-Think’.

  “Ten of them, that's plenty. I'll just send off for these ten. Ten to one I'm making a fool of myself. I hope the answers and the literature come back in plain brown packages with only my name Otto Spaltman and my address on them. I'd hate for anybody to think that I answered this kind of ads.”

  Otto Spaltman had selected the ten ads from hundreds out of the Los Angeles quackeries, from the back pages of Strange Powers Magazine, Psychic Powers Magazine, Out-of-Body-Experiences Magazine, Super Mentality Magazine, Beyond Belief Magazine, Hollow Earth Herald, Strange Skies Monthly and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

  Otto Spaltman had found his life somewhat empty, and everything had tasted flat to him lately.

  “I need a change,” he said. “Even making a fool of myself as I suspect I'm doing right now might offer a diversion and a change. I think I'll just go down to the main post office and mail them. It's only a little bit after midnight, and I might get that ‘Open the Door to the Other You’ and other informative action kits a day sooner if I mail these tonight.”

  “Take mine too,” Roxie Spaltman the loving wife called. “Lend me thirteen stamps and put them on these envelopes of mine. I just thought I'd answer some of these ‘Splitting Headaches’ ads and see what cures they have.”

  “I didn't know you had splitting headaches, Roxie.”

  “Oh, I never had a headache in my life, honey, but I have curious split feelings sometimes and ‘Splitting Headache’ ads are the closest thing to them. I feel that I should just split in two. Then I'd have somebody to talk to.”

  “You can always talk to me, Roxie.”

  “Remember that awful fight we had the last time we really tried to talk to each other? And the other notion I have is ‘splitting’ in another sense of the word, just getting out of here and being some sort of Gypsy on the free-and-easy with all the problems solved. If I figure it out, Otto, you c
an go with me.”

  “Thanks Roxie. Is there really a company named ‘Splitting Headaches Cooperative Workshops Incorporated’?”

  “If you don't laugh at the companies I answer ads to, I won't laugh at the ones you answer, Otto.”

  Wherever in the known universe you are, you will get your answers from the Los Angeles quackeries in four days. Otto Spaltman came home at noon on the fourth day to see if the literature had arrived, and Roxie came home too. “Sure, they're all here,” Roxie said. “So are mine. But yours are the best. I've read these three booklets, and I'll stay ahead of you because I'm a faster reader than you are. I'll read the rest of them at work this afternoon. Since I work for three guys who have offices together, I can always say that I'm looking up stuff for one of the others if any of them asks me what I'm reading. I thought this stuff would be flakey, but there's something to it.”

  But it wasn't until that evening after supper that Otto Spaltman really got into that lop-sided literature.

  “The two most important pieces in it are the last chapter to ‘Open the Door to Another You’ which chapter is ‘How to Turn it All On’, and the cautionary appendix to ‘Conquer the World by Double-Think’ which is ‘How to Pull the Chain on the Other You if Things Get Really Rough’,” Roxie said.

  Otto stayed up ‘til two o'clock in the morning reading or skimming all the literature. Yeah, it was lop-sided, it was funny-shaped, it was silly. And yet one could feel the power moving in it. Part of it was blooming nonsense, and part of it was real power-house stuff. Otto knew that he was committed to encounter with his plural self, whether it would lead him to big-time or bust, when he read ‘How to Turn it All On’. And he turned it all on. But he could not find the ‘Cautionary Index’ to ‘Conquer the World by Double-Think’. The cautionary index ‘How to Pull the Chain on the Other You if Things Get Really Rough’ was supposed to be the fifteenth and final pamphlet of the Double-Think packet, but he couldn't find it. Nevertheless he had garnered enough stuff to keep his brains hopping all night in a series of pleasant speculations that loaded his dreams.